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The Dark Precursor:

Deleuze and Artistic Research

The Dark
Precursor:
Deleuze and Artistic Research

edited by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici

Volume I
The Dark Precursor in Sound and Writing

Leuven University Press

 Table of Contents

Volume I: The Dark Precursor in Sound and Writing

9 Preface
Paulo de Assis

Part 1 Sound

27 The Obscure Precursor, French Modernism,

and the Musics of the World
Edward Campbell

36 The Executing Machine: Deleuze, Boulez, and the Politics of Desire

Martin Scherzinger

56 Deleuze’s Fold in the Performing Practice of Aaron Cassidy’s

The Pleats of Matter
Diego Castro-Magas

67 Variables, Diagrams, Process

Pascale Criton

76 Performing Music, Performing the Figure:

Deleuze and Painting
Lois Fitch

85 Machining the Voice through the Continuous Variation

Paolo Galli

105 Templates for Technique in Mantel and Lachenmann:

Between Transcendence and Immanence
Keir GoGwilt

114 Towards a Figural Paradigm in Music:

Capture of Forces and Logic of Sensation in Géométries de l’abîme
(LeBlanc), In Vivo (Cendo), and The Restoration of Objects
(McCormack)
Jimmie LeBlanc

5
 Table of Contents

128 L’image-temps:
Conceptual Foundations of My Compositional Approach
Nicolas Marty

137 Circumstantial Scores, Graphic Scores, Extended Scores:

The Work as “Ecopraxic” Rediagrammatisation
Frédéric Mathevet

145 Perform Now!

The Ethics of Musical Improvisation
Vincent Meelberg

152 Thinking Sound through the Notion of the Time-Image:

Deleuze’s Cinema Studies as a Model for Problematising Sound
in Artistic Practice
Gabriel Paiuk

159 Re-Notations:
Flattening Hierarchies and Transforming Functions
Einar Torfi Einarsson

167 Alone/Together:
Simulacral “A-presentation” in and into Practice-as-Research
in Jazz
Steve Tromans and Mike Fletcher

174 A Journey of Refrains, Vibes, and Ambiences:

Félix Guattari in Terms of the Techno Party Scene
Toshiya Ueno, aka Toshiya the Tribal

6
 Table of Contents

Part 2 Writing and Staging

193 Corpus Delicti #2 //

Untimely Precursors Lecture Performance*
Arno Böhler and Susanne Valerie

214 Deleuze’s Expressionism as an Ontology for Theatre

Zornitsa Dimitrova

222 Space and Sensation:

Zoé Degani’s Art of Pluralising Signs Onstage
Lindsay Gianoukas

242 Journey into the Unknown:

Romeo Castellucci’s Theatre of Signs
Oleg Lebedev

252 From Schizoproduction to Non-standard Artistic Research

Tero Nauha

261 Deleuze and Perversion

Catarina Pombo Nabais

272 Deleuze, Simondon, and Beckett:

From Being to Becoming
Audronė Žukauskaitė

7
 Preface
Paulo de Assis
Orpheus Institute, Ghent

There is always a dark precursor that no one sees, and then

the lightning bolt that illuminates, and there is the world.
Gilles Deleuze (L’Abécédaire, Letter Z)1

The experimental thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—and also the
most recent resonances of their work—has become increasingly relevant to the
field of artistic research. It acts as a key reference for many artist-researchers,
who engage with knowledge production both in academic and non-academic
fields of practice. At the same time, the extent and depth of Deleuze’s and/
or Guattari’s influence on the emerging field of “artistic research” is largely
uncharted, nor has their philosophy been evaluated from the perspective of
artists who work at the borders of philosophy.
Art plays a crucial role in the philosophy of Deleuze. He dedicated a sub-
stantial part of his oeuvre to literature, theatre, painting, cinema, and music.
Importantly, he understood art as a mode of thinking, irreducible to and imbri-
cated with philosophy and science. For Deleuze, philosophy and science are
also creative practices, and art—like philosophy and science—is also research
in the sense of continued experimentation. Moreover, independently of his
writings on the arts, and independently of what he concretely said about par-
ticular artworks, Deleuze created philosophical concepts that are open to dif-
ferent kinds of appropriations by artists and artist-researchers.
The Dark Precursor: International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic
Research (DARE 2015) was the first international conference entirely dedi-
cated to the relation between artistic research and Deleuzian or post-Deleu-
zian philosophies; it included both artistic presentations and scholarly papers
that investigated this relation.2
Choosing as its title the concept of “dark precursor,” the conference reflected
the duality and openness inherent in artistic research, as the Deleuzian notion
of the dark precursor concerns the question of how communication between
heterogeneous systems of couplings and resonance occurs without being pre-
determined. In relation to artistic research we ask, how can we compose these
resonances, how can we create new couplings that are not accidental but rigor­
ous and at the same time indeterminate? How can we create in the midst of

1 Deleuze and Parnet (1988–89), cf. Stivale (2000; 2008, 20); see also footnote 3.
2 Organised by the Orpheus Institute, the conference took place from 9 to 11 November 2015, in three
different venues within the city centre of Ghent: the Orpheus Institute, De Bijloke Muziekcentrum, and
the Sphinx cinema.

9
 Paulo de Assis

a primordial difference? In line with its theme of the dark precursor, DARE
2015 exponentially offered presentations that exceeded simple interpretations
and representations of either Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy or an artis-
tic practice at hand. Beyond restrictive modes of interpretation or enclosed
hermeneutic approaches, the conference fostered the creative act as the most
profound and illuminating human gesture, as a threatening thunderbolt pro-
ductively exploding between different forces, intensities, and assemblages.

The dark precursor—the concept

The notion of the dark precursor3 is highly poetic, constituting one of Deleuze’s
most expressive inventions, a personnage conceptuel that resists a definition, that
articulates the fundamental disparity of any given intensive system, that con-
nects heterogeneous fields of forces, and that has the transductive power of
giving shape and structure to several other Deleuzian concepts. Assemblage,
body without organs, fold, haecceity, multiplicity, refrain, rhizome, singularity,
stratum, or territory, to name just a few, are concepts that imply some kind of
already constituted relation(s) between heterogeneous parts, even if in perman­
ent becoming and transformation. On the contrary, the dark precursor can
never be thought of as “already constituted,” it is the transductive modulation
between different potentials and intensities—it is not a set of relations but the
sparking relation itself. In this sense, it seems to precede all other concepts. It
functions ontogenetically as the operator that enables other concepts to come into
processes of becoming in the first place. Every agencement, singularity, or haecce-
ity has its igniting dark precursor(s). At the same time, the dark precursor estab-
lishes a dynamic system of relations that is “grounded” only in the repetition of
difference, which, as Paul Patton (1994, xi) writes, “precisely amounts to a non-
ground or groundlessness.” Relating differences of intensity to one another, the
dark precursor is the agent, the force, the activator, the operator of a necessary
communication between them. Without the continuous tremblings produced
by infinite dark precursors, no energy would flow between different series and
nothing would be perceptible or apprehensible in the world. But, “what is this
agent, this force which ensures communication?” (Deleuze 1994, 119).
Gilles Deleuze invented the concept of the dark precursor in 1967–68, while
working on Difference and Repetition (1968), his primary thesis for his Doctorat d’État.
The concept’s first public “appearance” happened at a meeting of the French
Society of Philosophy on 28 January 1967, and the relevant passage is as follows:

3 The French wording consistently used by Deleuze (Deleuze 1967, 1968; Deleuze and Parnet 1988–89)
is “précurseur sombre,” which has been translated into English in three different ways. In 1994, for the
American translation of Difference and Repetition (Deleuze 1994), Paul Patton used “the dark precursor,”
which became the norm. In 2000, Charles J. Stivale, in his transcription and translation of L’Abécédaire
opted for “a somber precursor” (Stivale 2000). Finally, in 2004, Michael Taormina, the translator of “The
Method of Dramatization” in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974 (Deleuze 2004), decided for “the
obscure precursor.” Both during the DARE 2015 conference and in this publication we kept “the dark
precursor” throughout. The only exception is Edward Campbell’s chapter, which deals with the impact
of colonial and postcolonial cultures on French music. To avoid any potentially negative connotations of
the term “dark,” Campbell (in consultation with James Williams) opted for Stivale’s “obscure precursor.”

10
 Preface

Nevertheless, since intensity is difference, differences of intensity must enter

into communication. Something like a “difference operator” is required, to relate
difference to difference. This role is filled by what is called an obscure precursor. A
lightning bolt flashes between different intensities, but it is preceded by an obscure
precursor, invisible, imperceptible, which determines in advance the inverted
path as in negative relief, because this path is first the agent of communication
between series of differences. If it is true that every system is an intensive field of
individuation constructed on a series of heterogeneous or disparate boundaries,
then when the series come into communication thanks to the action of the obscure
precursor, this communication induces certain phenomena: coupling between
series, internal resonance within the system, and inevitable movement in the form of
an amplitude that goes beyond the most basic series themselves. It is under these
conditions that a system fills up with qualities and develops in extension. Because a
quality is always a sign or an event that rises from the depths, that flashes between
different intensities, and that lasts as long as it takes for its constitutive difference
to be nullified. And most importantly, these conditions taken together determine
spatio-temporal dynamisms, which themselves are responsible for generating
qualities and extensions. (Deleuze 2004, 97)

Deleuze’s presentation—published in the Bulletin de la Société Française de

Philosophie as “La Méthode de Dramatisation” (Deleuze 1967) and translated
as “The Method of Dramatization” (Deleuze 2004)—summarises some of the
main themes of Difference and Repetition (particularly chapters four and five). As
is well known, one of this book’s central arguments is the replacement of “rep-
resentation” by the expression, or radical actualisation of pre-individual forces
and intensities, where both are understood in terms of “different/ciation.”
The dark precursor appears as the crucial operator of such different/ciating
processes, and the heading of that particular section of the book is “The dark
precursor and the ‘differenciator’” (Deleuze 1994, vii). Deleuze’s construc-
tion of the concept, its specific agencement, seems to be strongly indebted to
Rosny’s “difference of potentials” (cf. Rosny 1922), to Simondon’s “dispara-
tion” ([1964] 1995, 206), and to Leibniz’s idea of “fulguration” (Monadology §47,
see Strickland 2014). As Anne Sauvagnargues writes: “[Fulgurations are] the
effect of a communication between disparate intensities, which resonate their
differences by producing a second degree difference, the appearing intensity”
(Sauvagnargues 2003, 167, my translation). Through such operations, insensi-
tive difference starts producing sensitive fulgurations. Intensive fields of individ-
uation emerge, not in a clear and distinct manner, but in a distinct-obscure
mode. Regarding this “obscurity,” Deleuze (2004, 94) mentions Leibniz en
passant, implicitly referring back to Leibniz’s Mediationes de cognitione, veritate
et ideis [Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas] from 1684, where the dis-
tinction between “obscure” and “clear” modes of knowledge is discussed. It
might also relate to the Latin fuscum subnigrum that described the back colour
of the sky against which the lightning of a thunderstorm exploded. It was not
so much a complete “darkness” as a complex mixture of all colours and satur­
ations thereof. Finally, Deleuze (2004) describes the dark precursor kinetically,
as “a path” (99) that runs in inverted direction (to the actual lightning), and
sculpturally, “as in negative relief ” (97) (en creux), suggesting a depth, an exca-
vation, an incision, a rupture, a dive into other dimensions, a micro-fissure, an

11
 Paulo de Assis

openness to other compossible worlds. All these themes are further developed
and extended in Difference and Repetition, but the concept of the dark precursor
remains the same as described in “The Method of Dramatization.”
Absent from his texts after Difference and Repetition, the dark precursor power-
fully reappears twenty years later, in 1988, in the final three minutes of Deleuze’s
eight-hour series of interviews with Claire Parnet, know as L’Abécédaire (Deleuze
and Parnet 1988–89). Talking about the origins of the world, Deleuze claims that
the origin of the universe is not the big bang but the dark precursor, “that’s how
the world was born” (Deleuze and Parnet 1988–89, DVD 3: 2:23:00). Trying to
recall a “vaguely scientific” discipline (Rosny? science-fiction? meteorology?),
Deleuze brings back the dark precursor, a concept that he acknowledges as hav-
ing had a powerful impact in two of his books (most probably Logic of Sense and
Difference and Repetition). In this last appearance, the dark precursor is presented
in the simplest terms, as that which brings disparate singularities or different
potentials into relationship: “Someone explained that between two potentials
occurs a phenomenon that was defined by the idea of a ‘somber precursor.’ This
somber precursor places different potentials into relation, and once the path
of the somber precursor takes place, the potentials enter into a state of reac-
tion from which emerges the visible event. So, there is the somber precursor
and then a lightning bolt, and that’s how the world was born” (Deleuze 2000,
translation modified).4

The Dark Precursor: Volumes 1 and 2

The present publication is conceptualised as an extension, as a continuation,
of DARE 2015, now in the form of a book, bringing together selected, revised,
and expanded versions of presentations made at the conference. The publica-
tion is divided into two volumes and organised into five main categories. Sound
(Volume 1) contains papers by composers, performers, and musicologists expos-
ing or reflecting upon creative and performative practices. Writing and Staging
(Volume 1) maps diverse approaches to writing and to post-dramatic staging of
texts. Image (Volume 2) collects presentations on visual arts, including cinema,
painting, sculpture, and comics. Space (Volume 2) presents papers on architec-
ture and urbanism, and Ethics and Politics (Volume 2) includes chapters on the
politics of art, on emerging modes of subjectivity, on the relation between art
and society, and on the possible role of artistic research in such debates. These
contributions range from schizoanalysis to “boredom,” from neurodiversity to
reflections on aleatoric music, from abstract epistemologies of artistic research
to the utmost humanitarian tragedies of our time.
Taken together, the volumes offer a kaleidoscopic view of the conference’s
main topic, exposing the diversity and richness of the possible interferences
between artistic research and the wider thought of Gilles Deleuze and his world.

4 My only change in the translation regards the French word trajet, which was modified from “journey” to
“path,” keeping the original Deleuzian formulation from 1968.

12
 Preface

Overview of the chapters

In what follows, an overview of the different chapters is presented, providing a
quick map for navigating the two volumes, and indicating the main topics and
arguments presented by each author.

Sound (Volume 1)
Edward Campbell offers a postcolonial reflection on colonial modes of reverse
functioning of the obscure precursor: his central proposal is that a range of
engagements linking France, its former colonies, and other geographically dis-
tant lands are the site of an obscure precursor that places the musics of east and
west, north and south, in surprising communication. Martin Scherzinger inves-
tigates the relation between Pierre Boulez’s writings from the early 1960s and
their philosophical appropriation by Deleuze and Guattari in the late 1970s,
almost twenty years later. Scherzinger aims to demonstrate how the philoso-
phers’ use of Boulezian aesthetics is ultimately prophetic of dominant modal-
ities of techno-political praxis today. Guitarist Diego Castro-Magas presents a
text that enacts the voice of a performer, going through a detailed description
of the performing gestures, and almost requiring an enactment of the guitar-
ist’s movements by the reader. According to Castro-Magas, the aesthetics and
parametric polyphony of Aaron Cassidy’s music calls upon the expressivity of
reassembling parameters, which leads Castro-Magas to suggest the invention
of a new concept, that of “muscular origami.”
Pascale Criton, the French composer and musicologist who advised Deleuze
on music during his seminars at Nanterre (1974–87), stresses the importance
of that intense experience for her own development of what Deleuze meant
by “building a plane of consistency.” Deleuze paid particular attention to ways
of “contracting relations” and creating a floating state: gathering independent
lines, constituting a restless “nebula” agitated with local contractions, minute
tensions that were then extracted and displaced. This kind of reflection on the
plane of consistency, in this case on the plane of composition, is conducted
in relation to Criton’s composition Chaoscaccia, a work she composed while
running a collective reading group on Guattari’s Chaosmosis (1992), which she
organised in 2012–13.
Lois Fitch writes on Deleuze and painting, exploring the tension between
“figure” and “figurative” as a means to illuminate certain areas of musical
practice, both compositional and performative. Composer Paolo Galli ana­
lyses his own works and those of Luigi Nono by using the linguistic tools of
Roman Jakobson, which he brings in relation to Deleuze and Guattari. Keir
GoGwilt—a violinist looking at the broader political and aesthetic conse-
quences of compositional and performative practices—presents a critique of
Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of the planes of transcendence and immanence
through an investigation of Helmut Lachenmann’s Pression for solo cello and
Gerhard Mantel’s Cello Technique: Principles and Forms of Movement, both written
in 1972.
Composer Jimmie LeBlanc adapts Deleuze’s ideas on painting, particularly
on the relation between “figure” and “figural” to the field of music. What he

13
 Paulo de Assis

labels as “the figural paradigm” has informed his own piece Géométries de l’abîme
(2014), and is here applied to analyse In Vivo (2007–10) by Raphaël Cendo and
The Restoration of Objects (2008) by Timothy McCormack. Nicolas Marty pre-
sents three pieces that he composed applying the Deleuzian cinematic notions
of movement-image and time-image to music. Marty argues for a distinctive
reading of musical compositions in terms of being directionally oriented in
time (movement-image), or as operating a suspension of time (time-image),
blurring musical perception into hybrid modes of negotiating the relationship
between sense, significance, and sensation. Visual and sound artist Frédéric
Mathevet offers a sketch for a theory around circumstantial, graphic, and
extended scores in relation to the Deleuzian notion of “diagram.”
Music philosopher and jazz improviser Vincent Meelberg links Deleuze’s
ethics to Bruno Latour’s actor–network theory and argues for musical improv-
isation as an affective and disruptive practice, giving examples from his own
collaborative improvisation practice with his trio, Molloy. Composer Gabriel
Paiuk offers a paper from the perspective of someone listening to Luigi Nono’s
music. He describes a personal experience he had as a “listener” while attend-
ing a performance of Nono’s No hay caminos . . . a Andrei Tarkowskij (1987), where
he was deeply surprised by a unique moment where his attention was displaced
from its listening focus. Paiuk presents a musical reflection on Deleuze’s dis-
tinct regimes of the image, transposing these enunciations to sound, which is
understood here as a manifold instance, susceptible of acquiring diverse sta-
tuses, exactly like images in films. Composer Einar Torfi Einarsson—whose
work explores the use of musical compositional tools for composing a music
that is not sonic—presents here his own graphic renotations of musical scores,
which appear as radical transfigurations, especially when looked at through
their underexplored nonmusical potentials. Jazz improvisers Steve Tromans
and Mike Fletcher present the famous jazz standard Alone Together (composed
by Schwartz and Dietz in 1932) in relation to a Deleuzian concept of simulac­
rum, which both authors utilise in modelling jazz practitioners’ approaches to
making music with the standard repertoire. Finally, Toshiya Ueno, aka Toshiya
the Tribal, concludes this section on music referring to his own practice as a DJ
in Tokyo. His writing style and furious rhizomatic links to a wide field of refer-
ences and authors makes his chapter a sort of DJ-writing in itself.

Writing and Staging (Volume 1)

Viennese “philosophers onstage” Arno Böhler and Susanne Valerie offer an
unexpected style of writing for their chapter on Nietzsche, Deleuze, Foucault,
and Spinoza: the chapter is the script to their performance Corpus Delicti #2 //
Untimely Precursors, which they performed at the conference. Writing becomes
itself an experimental gesture. Zornitsa Dimitrova addresses ontological ques-
tions related to postdramatic plays by authors such as Sarah Kane, Martin
Crimp, and Caryl Churchill, proposing an “expressionist” ontology for post-
dramatic theatre, looking for its adjacent poetics, and delving into its onto-
logical grounding through a Deleuzian reading of Spinoza. Lindsay Gianoukas
presents a series of works, procedures, operations, and creations realised by

14
 Preface

the Brazilian artist and sceneographer Zoé Degani; meanwhile Oleg Lebedev,
in a paper devoted to Romeo Castellucci, analyses how, and through which sce-
nic devices, Castellucci confronts spectators not only with the power of theatre
but also with its profound darkness. Exposed to violent attacks on the senses,
the spectator is forced to see beyond the image and to think the unthinkable,
pointing towards “an indefinite third time.” In a chapter on performance with a
strong political background, Tero Nauha refers to Guattari’s schizoanalysis and
to Laruelle’s non-philosophy in order to operate a passage from schizoanalysis
towards the critique of production in artistic practices.
Catarina Pombo Nabais revisits the difference between sadism and maso-
chism as explained by Deleuze in Coldness and Cruelty, and advances new insights
for further understanding the way Deleuze theorises perversion, stressing that
it was in that essay that Deleuze, for the first time, gave a clinical function to
artistic creation—taking a writer as an example. Finally Audronė Žukauskaitė
discusses Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming-imperceptible, showing,
first, how this notion is deeply inspired by Simondon’s transduction and pro-
cesses of individuation, and, second, how this very notion is at work in selected
texts by Samuel Beckett.

Image (Volume 2)
Éric Alliez’s chapter is an extended variation on the “Avant-propos” and on the
first chapter of his book Défaire l’image: De l’art contemporain (Alliez and Bonne
2013). What is at stake in this paper is not so much an attempt at “producing a
philosophy of contemporary art, [but much more] of sliding in between art and
philosophy to introduce an oscillation, a supplementary pulsation, between a
philosophy that is contemporary with contemporary art and an art that is con-
temporary with contemporary philosophy.” While the motif of the contempor­
ary is presented here as determined in relation to a time that sets modernity
into becoming, the notion of the “diagrammatic” is what allows for “an undo-
ing of the image of the aesthetic regime of art.” For Alliez, diagrams may bear
the proper names of artists; but they designate operations and effects rather
than “persons and subjects.” As a method for the “remontage” of contemporary
art, this involves a pragmatics indissociable from the politics of experimenta-
tion brought into play by specific “signs-forces” that attack the “strata” so as to
make something unprecedented take flight—and to make pass through it the
aesthetic form of art, which it undoes by forcing it.
Describing Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s famous Ghent Altarpiece (a very large and
complex fifteenth-century early Flemish polyptych work), Anne Sauvagnargues
discusses digital art or, better, digital culture, a whole new civilizational situation
whereby all forms of art are or have been digitised, where the borders between art
and technology became indiscernible, and where images are redefined in terms
of variable relationships between sensory-motricities and technical devices.
Jūratė Baranova presents the Lithuanian multidisciplinary artist Jurga
Ivanauskaitė (1961–2007)—a writer, poet, essayist, playwright, and visual art-
ist—in relation to precise readings of Deleuze and Foucault, particularly focus-
ing on the notion of diagram. Next, in a chapter with cinematographic refer-

15
 Paulo de Assis

ences to Sergei Eisenstein, Kenji Mizoguchi, Andrzej Munk, Jean Renoir, and
above all Jean-Luc Godard, Zsuzsa Baross argues for an image that is never one
image alone: “an image that merits the name recalls other images. It is an act
of memory, not of an absent past, but of absent images,” an act that creates
yet, another image—the third image. Anna Barseghian and Stefan Kristensen
present their video installation Spectrography (2013), which problematises the
Armenian genocide, thematising the transmission of collective traumas and the
constitution of collective ghosts. Lucia D’Errico introduces her graphic work
that was displayed during the conference, and which appears here throughout
the book in black-and-white reproductions of its twenty plates. Taken together,
and as a series, they function like “a ghostly walk, the pathway traced by a mov-
ing figure that has already vanished; or a thread of smoke, or a snail track”—
failure and inconsistency as the knowledge of art.
In the following chapter—analysing Gregg Biermann’s digital appropriation
and deformation of Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947) and Alfred
Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954)—Elena Del Río addresses the phenomenon
of cinema’s digital variations as an intricate folding of analogue and digital
operations into each other, and she brings this topic into close relation with
Leibniz’s concept of the fold as the privileged figure of Baroque aesthetics.
Lilija Duoblienė—referring to the multimedia project Silverdust by Andrius
Šarapovas—questions Deleuze’s idea of the art machine that performs using
unformed sound: how do “raw sounds” come into composition, how do they
create a milieu that transforms the role of the artist into an artisan-artist, and
finally how do they open the plane of composition to the dark precursor? For
her participation during the conference, Verina Gfader opted for a triple-com-
ponent-based mode of presentation: the original lecture, the image lecture, and
the presentation itself at the conference, each of which inflected one another
and related to plasmaticness (Eisenstein), the key concept she addresses in this
paper. Surpassing text, affirming modesty and ignorance, and avoiding an over-
load of linguistics, Gfader refuses logocentrism and stresses a structural sense
of elasticity, poetry, and something potentially polyformic and poly­morphic.
Cartoonist John Miers attempts to establish some points of compatibility
between two depictive practices: that of Francis Bacon as described by Gilles
Deleuze in The Logic of Sensation and that of cartoonists, particularly referring
to Thierry Groensteen’s concept of “gridding” and to the Deleuzian concepts
“figure” and “diagram.” Adreis Echzehn and Elfie Miklautz present their audio-
video production al niente—a dissolution, a work that is part of the multidisci-
plinary Austrian project “Other Spaces—Knowledge through Art,” which aims
to be “an outcome of thinking in images and sounds,” thus directly addressing
Deleuze’s assertion that moving images and sounds are ways of thinking.
Graphic artist Marc Ngui offers four drawings “from A Thousand Plateaus,”
four examples of his long-lasting graphical reading of A Thousand Plateaus,
paragraph by paragraph, that triggers specific visual forms and signs. The
drawings chosen by the artist for this book, are presented along with the quo-
tation from the section “1914: One or Several Wolves” of which they are the
reading. Andreia Oliveira and Felix Rebolledo consider the image within both

16
 Preface

the natural and the technological milieu, the image as containing human and
non-human components, as part of a hybrid, expanded reality. They look for a
concept of the image that goes beyond the anthropocentric scheme and takes
into account the process-based, mutable, and systemic thinking of a hybrid and
expanded world. Multiple references, particularly to Gilbert Simondon, Jean-
Luc Nancy, Bruno Latour, and Roy Ascott, provide precise insights and lines of
thought for a new image of “image.”
Italian goldsmith Federica Pallaver presents her jewellery project “Matter-
flow” and situates it within a strong critique of the hylomorphic scheme, claim-
ing modulation as the most productive operation when working with metal.
Working with fulgurite, Pallaver directly relates to our conference topic—the
dark precursor—as fulgurite is a glassy assemblage of various materials pro-
duced by the discharge of lighting in the soil. Her practice-based argumenta-
tion uses Simondon’s ontogenesis and the notions of modulation and transduc-
tion as important pillars for her conceptual positioning. Mhairi Vari installed
thousands of elastic bands in the basement of the Orpheus Institute, which
offered a complex of interconnected open-plan rooms originally described as
“a recreation room for bored researchers.” In her text accompanying the instal-
lation photographs, Vari describes her work as “a fluid diagrammatic—‘a shift-
ing map’—of the performative act that constituted its construction.”
Elisabet Yanagisawa, who presented her sculptures along with her paper,
offers a close reading of Deleuze’s concept of the fold, making explicit its links
to both Leibniz and Spinoza. She claims that this concept can be exceptionally
productive for artistic research, as it deals with how form and contents inter-
twine in a physical model, and how the concrete and the abstract interrelate on
the plane of consistency.

Space (Volume 2)
Manola Antonioli explains the notion of “war machines,” theorised by Deleuze
and Guattari in the “Treatise on Nomadology” from A Thousand Plateaus, and
provides an overview of her edited book Machines de guerre urbaines (2015).
Through close readings of Deleuze, Agamben, and Benjamin, Ronny Hardliz
investigates the role and power of “indifference” in contemporary architec-
tural, artistic, and social practices. He takes “indifference” as a symptom of
the neo-liberal condition, and tries to understand it in relation to the archi-
tectural “by means of lived critical philosophical and artistic inquiry [by which]
it is possible to make use of indifference through an appropriation of indif-
ference to humankind’s ends.” Inspired by Gibson’s ecological perception,
Andrej Radman makes a strong plea for an intensive and relational—that is,
ecological—approach to architecture, understanding ecologies in the plural:
environmental, social, and psychical.

Ethics and Politics (Volume 2)

Jae Emerling suggests new spaces for artistic research, which appears to be
strongly anchored in the present while remaining suspended between a
past-present and the many possible futurities suggested in the here and now.

17
 Paulo de Assis

Emerling explains and expands his own concept of “transmissibility,” a concept

that has the potential to serve as a method for artistic research that is useful
to both cultural practitioners and historians. Two mains aspects of this con-
cept are problematicity as style, and materiality as immanence. For Emerling,
artistic research requires a “long preparation,” being linked to processes of
deframing of cultural representations, and of composing other modes of culture
within the present. Artistic research defames the present (it undoes the actual
discourse), and it composes new lines, new agencies, relations, and becom-
ings. Ian Buchanan situates Deleuze and Guattari’s styles of thought within
the wider context of their work on culture and society, and he explores their
hypothesis that we live in a “schizo society.” He investigates the implications
thereof in terms of thinking and making art in our current time. Referring also
to Heidegger’s experiences of “waiting,” and to Fredric Jameson’s reflections
on “boredom,” Buchanan particularly analyses contemporary airports and
shopping malls as exemplary places of smooth experiences that are the final
product of increasingly striated travel- and shopping-machines.
In the next chapter, which explores the concepts of “becoming,” “rhizom-
atics,” and “dramatisation,” Rahma Khazam claims that artistic research has
a specific weight within the scholarly and scientific spaces of research, being
even able to call into question the legitimacy of academic and scientific know­
ledge itself—a thesis that is presented in relation to recent artworks by Esther
Shalev-Gerz, Yutaka Makino, and Bethan Huws.
Erin Manning offers an extended plea for neurodiverse modes of existence,
which must be created, and composed across difference in ways that remain
mobile, in the act. For Manning “co-composition across the spectrum is ne­­
cessary, as much between the precarity of the shape of enthusiasm at its two
poles as on the spectrum of our collective difference.” Manning’s chapter reads
like a manifesto, combating indifference and fostering activism as an essential
human gesture. Writer and novelist Luis de Miranda presents “Creal” (created-­
real), a concept he invented to refer to a “qualified . . . non-anthropocentric
multi-universal of the kind proposed by modern process ontologies.” Inspired
by Deleuze and Guattari, but also by Bergson, Lacan, and Whitehead, the
Creal is a “real” understood as a “chaosmic” creative stream—it designates an
immanent, ever-present, ever-absent dark precursor. Janae Sholtz argues that
between art and philosophy a special becoming-thought can be engendered,
and she claims that this provocation of thought requires a precursory activity,
to develop a sensitivity to immanence by and through the intensification of the
interval of the affect itself. What kind of activities, affects, and encounters can
open a space whereby this sensitivity arises? To illustrate this question Sholtz
focuses on the performative practices of John Cage, in particular his explor­
ations of silence, on the Fluxus exploration of indeterminacy—particularly
in Philip Corner’s Piano Activities (1962)—and on Dick Higgins’s The Thousand
Symphonies (1968). Finally, in a quasi-staged dialogue between two different
texts and discourses, Mick Wilson problematises a certain appropriation of
Deleuzian devices within the rhetorical field of artistic research (of which this
very conference could be an example), with particular reference to the rein-

18
 Preface

statement of “Art,” the renewed attention to the specificity of the aesthetic, and
an associated metaphorics of exceptionalism, revolt, resistance, refusal, and
flight. In addition to the Deleuze and Guattari citations, several other textual
sources are substantially used, two in particular: the poetry of Edward Kamau
Brathwaite, specifically the section “Atumpan” from his Masks of 1968; and
the media reporting of the sinking of a boat and the drowning of hundreds of
refugees and migrants off the Sicilian island of Lampedusa on 3 October 2013.

Acknowledgments
This publication as well as DARE 2015 would not have been possible without
the help and collaboration of several persons and institutions. My first, warm-
est gratitude goes entirely to the conference coordinator and co-editor of this
volume, Paolo Giudici. The way he managed the whole conference, the com-
munication with the delegates, and with the contributors to this book is by all
means extraordinary and exemplary. Without him the DARE conference would
probably not have happened. Next, I thank Heloisa Amaral for her steady dia-
logue and intelligent communication with the conference venue De Bijloke
Muziekcentrum, enabling a very productive collaboration between two insti-
tutions from the same city. From my institution, the Orpheus Institute, I am
deeply thankful to its director Peter Dejans, who steadily and consequently
supported both the conference and this publication, as well as to its permanent
staff, especially to Heike Vermeire and Kathleen Snyers, both of whom contrib-
uted significantly to the smooth organisation of the conference and to the pub-
lication process of this book. A special thanks goes also to Lucia D’Errico, for
her generous commitment to the conference, and for the beautifully designed
conference booklet. For the coordination of the audio and video documenta-
tion, as well as for his continuous multimedia support during the conference,
my gratitude goes to Juan Parra Cancino. Further, I wish to thank the members
of the conference’s advisory board: Arno Böhler, Cristoph Brunner, Laura Cull,
Mika Elo, Julian Klein, David Savat, Michael Schwab, and Kamini Vellodi. Their
comments and substantiated critiques made the selection process rigorous
and effective. Many thanks also to the many collaborators who actively helped
us during the conference: Gilles Anquez, Giulia Baso, Valentin Gloor, Tiziano
Manca, Gamse Kanatlak, and Kaatje Vermeire. In De Bijloke Muziekcentrum,
DARE 2015 found not only an exquisite venue but also a highly professional
and truly engaged collaborator in the person of its curator for contemporary
music, Maarten Quanten. In the Sphinx Cinema we had a great venue for the
video screenings and a very responsive manager, Wendy Vercauteren.
As for this publication, I am extremely grateful to the editorial board
of the Orpheus Institute, particularly in the person of its editor-in-chief
William Brooks for his full support for this project, and to Edward Crooks,
our in­­defatigable and highly sophisticated copy-editor, who always suggested
pertinent solutions to the most complicated editorial decisions. Without him
this book would not have been possible.
Ghent, 18 April 2017

19
 Paulo de Assis

References
Alliez, Éric, and Jean-Claude Bonne. 2013. Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007, 3 DVDs.
Défaire l’image: De l’art contemporain. Paris: Patton, Paul. 1994. Translator’s Preface to
Les Presses du réel. Deleuze 1994, xi–xiii.
Antonioli, Manola, ed. 2015. Machines de Rosny, J. H. (aîné). 1922. Les sciences et le
guerre urbaines. Paris: Loco. pluralisme. Paris: Alcan.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1967. “La Méthode de Sauvagnargues, Anne. 2003. “Fulgurer.” In
Dramatisation.” Bulletin de la Société Le Vocabulaire de Gilles Deleuze, edited
Française de Philosophie, 61 (3): 89–118. by Roberto Sasso and Arnaud Villani,
Translated by Michael Taormina as 163–70. Las Cahiers de Noesis 3. Paris:
Deleuze 2004. Vrin.
———. 1968. Différence et répétition. Paris: Simondon, Gilbert. (1964) 1995.
Presses universitaires de France. L’individuation à la lumière des notions de
Translated by Paul Patton as Deleuze forme et d’information. Grenoble: Millon.
1994. First published 1964 in L’individu et sa
———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. genèse physico-biologique: L’individuation à la
Translated by Paul Patton. New York: lumière des notions de forme et d’information
Columbia University Press. First (Paris: Presses universitaires de France).
published as Deleuze 1968. Stivale, Charles J. 2000. “Part III—N through
———. 2004. “The Method of Z.” In L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, avec
Dramatization.” In Desert Islands and Claire Parnet <Gilles Deleuze’s ABC Primer,
Other Texts, 1953–1974, edited by David with Claire Parnet>: Overview prepared by
Lapoujade, translated by Michael Charles J. Stivale. Accessed 17 April 2017.
Taormina, 94–116. Los Angeles: http://www.langlab.wayne.edu/CStivale/
Semiotext(e). Chapter first published as D-G/ABC3.html.
Deleuze 1967. Book first published 2002 ———. 2008. Gilles Deleuze’s ABCs: The Folds
as L’île déserte et autres textes, 1953–1974 of Friendship. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
(Paris: Minuit). University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 1988–89. Strickland, Lloyd. 2014. Leibniz’s
Gilles Deleuze—From A to Z, with Claire Monadology: A New Translation and Guide.
Parnet [L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze]. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Directed by Pierre-André Boutang. Leibniz’s text written 1714.
Translated by Charles J. Stivale. Los

20
Part 1
Sound
 The Obscure Precursor,
French Modernism, and the
Musics of the World
Edward Campbell
University of Aberdeen

Introduction
Given the overwhelmingly negative resonances of terms such as Henry Stanley’s
“dark continent” and Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” it is crucial that any
consideration of the impact of colonial and postcolonial cultures on French
music after 1889 in terms of the Deleuzian concept of the “précurseur sombre”
denies itself the customary English translation of Deleuze’s term as the “dark
precursor.” To avoid the potentially negative connotations of the term, I opt to
use as an alternative the “obscure precursor” throughout this chapter.1
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze (1994, 145) states that the obscure precur-
sor which enables “communication between difference as such, and to make
the different communicate with difference” is nevertheless “not a friend” and
that it is “a forced and broken connection which traverses the fragments of
a dissolved self as it does the borders of a fractured I.” Later in the book, he
adds that “systems of simulacra affirm divergence and decentring” and that
“the only unity, the only convergence of all the series, is an informal chaos in
which they are all included” (ibid., 278). As Pascale Criton (2012, my transla-
tions) notes, Deleuze’s interest concerns the harnessing of “material forces
that are not pre-established.” Consequently, he theorises literature and cinema
in sub-representational terms, in a “‘distinct and obscure’ region which leads
to a struggle to free material-forces, affects and percepts,” something which is
no less the case with music and the meeting of musical systems and traditions.
For Criton, composers likewise face this “distinct-obscure” region, and she
considers the nature of music’s confrontation with the “undifferenciated” and
the “diagram of spatio-temporal determinations” necessary for the liberation
of its material-forces.
Where East and West confront one another musically, multiple series, seem-
ingly operating at a representational level, are put in relation with one another;
but beyond this, pre-individual, undifferenciated, sub-representational mu­sic­-
al forces emerge. In this view, the great musical traditions and systems of the
world, for example those of Africa, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, or the West,
while independent, distinctive, and recognisable in themselves, are neverthe-

1 I am grateful to James Williams who suggested this translation. It is used also by Michael Taormina for
Deleuze’s Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974 (Deleuze 2004).

27
 Edward Campbell

less formed from more molecular components: srutis, svaras, modes, instru-
mental timbres, and so on. Consequently, the putting in relation of any of
these systems, understood as series, and operated by the Deleuzian obscure
precursor, can result in new assemblages ranging from molecular meetings
of material forces to more recognisable fusions in which key components are
patently identifiable. Clearly we are speaking of deterritorialisations, becom-
ings, and sites of exchange; and, as Criton notes (2012, my translation), Deleuze
and Guattari “make the prematerial plane essential for music, inseparable
from a plane of life or an ‘impersonal’ [naturant] plane that is productive of
new arrangements.” As Deleuze states (2004, 98), it is frequently the case that
“dynamisms which are qualified in a certain way in one domain, are then taken
up in an entirely different mode in another domain”, and Criton comments
(2005, 62, my translation) that the overlap “between disparate series implies
the play of components of passage, of agents or ‘obscure precursors’: ‘three
dramatisations of different orders echo one another . . . it is imagination which
must grasp the process of actualisation from the point of view of these echoes
or reprises’ (Deleuze 1994, 220).”
The central proposal of this chapter is that a range of engagements, which
link France, its former colonies, and other geographically distant lands, is the
site of an obscure precursor that places the musics of East and West, North
and South, in surprising communication. They have confronted one another
in ways that confounded the expectations of the originators of these activities
and events and that changed the field of musical power relations in unforeseen
ways. It seems that the French, like Friedrich Engels, seriously underestimated
the capacity of the world’s colonised peoples and their cultures “to colonize
the culture that was used to colonize them” (Kiberd 1992, lxxii).
This obscure precursor has operated in a number of ways, resulting in the
rapprochement, interpenetration, and establishment of kinship relations
between the previously disparate musics of East and West, North and South. To
take only some key examples, this obscure precursor operates first through the
series of universal and colonial exhibitions held in Paris between 1878 and 1931,
in which the French Empire preened itself in displaying its colonial power and
influence before the world. It has worked second through the development of
French ethnology and ethnomusicology from around 1929, as French ethnolo­
gists and ethnomusicologists began to explore, record, and codify the lands,
peoples, cultures, and musics in their vast empire, with surprising and unex-
pected effects for the culture and music of France itself. It operates finally in
the work of a range of literary writers whose trajectories were shaped largely
by the fact of the French empire and colonialism, as well as by their creative
encounters with rich cultures beyond the reach of French governance.

Exhibitions, ethnology, and literature

While the nineteenth century is littered with French musical works drawing on
various aspects of the exotic, a new stage in the relationship between cultures
was heralded with the Exposition Universelle of 1889 in Paris. In addition to

28
The Obscure Precursor, French Modernism, and the Musics of the World

featuring the most diverse array of music ever heard, it marked the centenary
of the French Revolution, while unashamedly promoting the expansion of the
white West, the superiority of Western culture, and the possibility of a global
culture. The sounds of the Javanese gamelan and of Vietnamese theatre musi-
cians had not previously been heard by the majority of Europeans; and listen-
ers, confronted with authentic Asian musical experiences, were challenged to
go beyond their exotic Western imaginings.
Exposure to exotic music led some composers to rethink traditional Western
concepts of melody, harmony, and rhythm. Claude Debussy spent a great deal
of time at the Javanese kampong, fascinated by the sounds of the angklung
and the polyphonic and percussive brilliance of the gamelan, his experiences
enabling him to integrate aspects of other musics within his symbolist-based
fascination for sonority. As Jann Pasler (2009) and others have noted, the exoti­
cism that was encountered gave further impetus to that distinctly French pur-
suit of sonority and, more broadly, to the adventures of the early modernists
(590). Ironically, exposure to Javanese and Vietnamese music proved to be more
fruitful for innovative composers than any of the official French music that was
touted as emblematic of Western progress (593), a result that was completely
unanticipated by the organisers (550–51).
In a similar way, the Exposition Coloniale of 1931 was intended to display
France’s vast and diverse colonial resources. Unlike in 1889, however, the
1931 exhibition was denounced strongly by anti-colonialists, who requested
that it should be boycotted. The French Communist Party condemned it, the
Socialists expressed concern, the Parisian surrealists circulated a text entitled
“Don’t visit the Colonial Exhibition,” and a counter-exhibition was organised
(Aldrich 1996, 265). This conflict notwithstanding, the impact of the diverse
cultures on display was very strong on composers André Jolivet and Olivier
Messiaen. Messiaen recalls the powerful effect of the Balinese gamelan, which
he first encountered there (Hill and Simeone 2005, 137); and, for both com-
posers, the exhibition was significant in developing their interest in a range
of non-Western musics, which they could now hear for themselves and which
they approached no longer as exotic but as the cultural equal of Western music.
Messiaen’s fascination with Asian music was longstanding, and the influence
of the gamelan is most apparent in pieces such as the Trois petites liturgies (1944)
and Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum (1964). Beyond the gamelan, he was
interested in Indian music, Hindu rhythms, and Asian conceptions of time and
timbre; and he was equally fascinated by Japan, which he first visited in 1962,
his Sept Haïkaï (1962) integrating aspects of gagaku, Nô theatre, and bunraku
(Hill and Simeone 2005, 248).
The development of ethnology and ethnomusicology in France is a sec-
ond important factor for the increasing significance of non-Western musics
in French art music. The most important musical figure here is undoubtedly
André Schaeffner (1895–1980), who studied with Marcel Mauss, founded the
department of musical ethnology at the Musée de l’Homme, and made six eth-
nological trips to West Africa between 1931 and 1954, visiting Mali, Guinea, and
Côte d’Ivoire (Rouget and Lesure 1982, 6–7; Paulme-Schaeffner 1982, 365). In

29
 Edward Campbell

Schaeffner, European modernism and African musics are appreciated equally,

and his interest in the relationship between Debussy and Victor Segalen (1878–
1919), as well as his own later relationship and correspondence with Pierre
Boulez, gives him a rather unique position in this exploration.
Schaeffner was part of the celebrated Dakar–Djibouti mission of 1931–33,
spending time in Dogon country, to which he would return in 1935 (Gérard
2015, 63), observing “rites, musical instruments and musical repertoires” and
collecting 210 instruments on the Dakar–Djibouti mission alone. While the
sound recordings he made during these visits became an important source, as
Brice Gérard (2015) notes, they are problematised by the colonial context in
which they were made, as well as the uses to which they were put (78), since
transcriptions and recordings were made without the active involvement of
the indigenous peoples and performing musicians and since the activity was
undertaken with a decontextualised “ethic of preservation” to the fore (81).
The third site of this obscure precursor pertains to the great number of
writers whose work simultaneously undermined the empire and colonial
thinking while enabling the interpenetration of systems of thought. Vincent
Debaene (2010) considers the phenomenon whereby a number of the most
important French ethnographers on their return to France produced both
scientific studies of their findings and literary accounts. Debaene studies the
intriguing relation between anthropology and literature in the work of Marcel
Griaule, Marcel Mauss, Michel Leiris, Georges Bataille, Claude Lévi-Strauss,
and Roland Barthes, and further engagement with Africa and Asia is also found
in the writings of André Malraux and Henri Michaux. With the dissolution of
the French empire and the end of the colonial period, the work of postcolo-
nial writers, starting with Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, is of the utmost
importance.
Debussy’s relationship with writer and traveller Victor Segalen is a signifi­­­cant
moment in this opening-up of the musics of the world. The dossier of their
shared documents, letters, and articles testifies to the significance of their
contact. Out of step with the colonialism of his time, Segalen’s experiences of
Polynesia and China, his reflections on diversity, and his idiosyncratic notion
of exoticism focus on “the instability of contact between different cultures and
represents a unique response to the decline of diversity triggered by colonial-
ism and Westernization” (Forsdick 2011).
In a similar way, the journals of Paul Claudel, from the period of his ambas-
sadorship in Japan (1921–27), include a number of striking descriptions of per-
formances of Nô theatre and the gagaku ensemble; and, among his published
writings, the collections Connaissance de L’Est2 and L’Oiseau noir dans le soleil
levant3 contain his reflections and the poetic result of his time in China and
Japan. For Pierre Boulez, who met Claudel in 1948, “it was certain that Nô had
been for him the most beautiful theatrical representation he had ever seen”

2
Claudel’s collection of prose poems Connaissance de L’Est was published in various reviews between 1895
and 1905. While a partial edition was produced in 1900, the complete edition was published in 1907.
3
Claudel’s essay collection L’Oiseau noir dans le soleil was first published in 1927.

30
The Obscure Precursor, French Modernism, and the Musics of the World

(Steinegger 2011, my translation). Boulez himself retained a fascination with

Nô theatre and the gagaku ensemble throughout his career, and appreciative
references are sprinkled throughout his writings. This is equally the case for
the Indonesian gamelan and certain African musics, and he was close to par-
ticipating in an ethnological expedition to Cambodia in 1947, an event that fell
through because of the war in Indochina.
Schaeffner’s influence on Boulez is evident from their correspondence
(1954–70), and the composer recalls the older man’s knowledge of African civ-
ilisations and music and of instruments from all ages (Boulez and Schaeffner
1998, 10). Schaeffner stimulated and supported Boulez’s interest in non-
European music, allowing him to hear many recordings from his ethnomusicolo-
gical expeditions. He had an undoubted influence on Boulez’s knowledge and
choice of African, Latin American, and Asiatic instruments, and Le Marteau sans
maître (1955) and Pli selon pli (1960) manifest this newly infused sound world.
Beyond this, the influence of Asia and of Africa are present in a number of
other ways in Boulez, in his interest in timbre, heterophony, and Asian tempo-
rality (Boulez 1986, 421–22; Gable 1985–86, 112).
Finally, the influx of non-European music within French art music is evident in
the work of a number of younger French composers including Hugues Dufourt,
for example in his Erewhon (1972–76), a four-movement work for six percus-
sionists and conductor. From 1971 onwards, Les Percussions de Strasbourg had
been assembling an encyclopedic collection of percussion instruments from
every continent, and it was looking for a repertoire. Dufourt contested the cen-
trality of European music and, in Erewhon, he wished to “assemble every pos-
sible percussion instrument originating from Africa or South America (skin)
and Asia (metallophones)” (Castanet 1995, 56, my translation). The symbolic
value was to place “systems of sound production arising from completely dif-
ferent civilisations into one melting pot.” While it is undoubtedly the case that
all these instruments were used in abstraction from their origins and their
habitual playing methods and styles, “Dufourt imagined new ludic modes and
invented an unexpected universe based on play of resonances” (ibid., 56–57,
my translation).

Conclusions
While the events that have been recounted occurred for the most part within
a colonial situation, the working of an obscure precursor determined that the
outcomes were radically different from those that would have been expected.
Despite the fact that the exhibitions, universal and colonial, were nationalis-
tic, exploitative, racist, and without explicit liberatory intent, what resulted
from them was transformative. Given that participants from Java and Vietnam
were unable to speak on their own behalf, they nevertheless spoke through
their culture, music, dance, and rituals. Having declared themselves in this way
in the context of colonial Paris, the question arises whether what happened
with Debussy, Jolivet, and Messiaen at the exhibitions in 1889, 1900, and 1931
were respectful encounters, unscrupulous appropriations, or something more

31
 Edward Campbell

ambivalent. The ethnological work, undertaken in an orientalising spirit,

where “knowledge” was captured, recorded, and brought back to the heart
of the empire, had unexpected effects on composers like Boulez who were
reshaping the sound of Western art music. While Schaeffner’s African subjects
were not allowed to speak for themselves, their culture nevertheless exerted
its impact on that of the empire in ways that were no doubt surprising for the
indigenous French, though this aspect of the music is often obscured behind
discussions of technical manipulations. Again, the writings of white Europeans
such as Segalen, Claudel, Artaud, Malraux, Michaux, and others, while falling
far short of the anti-colonial or postcolonial critique we are familiar with today,
nevertheless had the effect of placing other cultures in a situation of prom­
inence where they came over time to be respected and valued as the equal of
those in Europe.
Despite all this, these encounters are in some way compromised; and, as
compromised events, “The Shame and the Glory,” Deleuze’s essay on T. E.
Lawrence, perhaps offers some promising pointers. Deleuze (1997, 117) rec-
ognises within Lawrence “a private desert that drives him to the Arabian
deserts, among the Arabs, and that coincides on many points with their own
perceptions and conceptions, but that retains an unmasterable difference that
inserts them into a completely different and secret Figure.” Although he speaks
Arabic and adopts Arab dress and lifestyle, this is not a question of imitation,
and Lawrence “never renounces his difference, which he already experiences
as a betrayal”—indeed, a double betrayal, since he betrays Britain as much as
Arabia, amounting to “a cold and concerted destruction of the ego, carried to
its limit” whereby the external destruction for which he is responsible is mir-
rored within himself (ibid.).
For Deleuze (1997, 120), it is the relationship between shame and glory, with
his idiosyncratic and oxymoronic haughtiness, that enables Lawrence “to deci-
pher the secret of character.” In this reading, shame first manifests itself in the
betrayal of the Arabs, where Lawrence continues to guarantee British prom-
ises he knows will never be honoured. He feels shame in inciting dreams of
national freedom among the Arabs, which, in the circumstances, reduces him
to the status of a confidence trickster; hence he says “I must take up again my
mantle of fraud” (ibid.). What offers some kind of perverse compensation is his
simultaneous betrayal of his own side through his involvement in the training
of fighters who he hopes will be capable of compelling the British to honour
their resolutions. For Deleuze (1997, 122), “just as glory is already filled with
shame, perhaps shame has a glorious outcome. Glory is so compromised by
shame that servitude becomes glorious—but only on the condition that it is
taken on voluntarily. There is always glory to extract from shame.”
Lawrence’s pulling together of shame and glory sets out a potential basis
for an encounter with French modernism understood not only as the progres-
sive development of earlier modernist innovations but equally as the result of
openness to the musics of the world. The question remains, however, as to how
we can understand the relationship of musical modernism, with its multiple
borrowings and transformations. Though artefacts, once appropriated by colo-

32
The Obscure Precursor, French Modernism, and the Musics of the World

nial adventurers, can, at least theoretically, be returned to their place of origin,

what can be done when the borrowing is something as immaterial as music and
where the originators of the appropriated musics have had no personal input?
Most often, there has been no period of apprenticeship, no time of study, no
transmission of expert technical knowledge or sensitivity to the cultural con-
texts or meanings of such musics.
Kofi Agawu’s study of African music offers a number of pointers that tran-
scend the African context. He notes that musicologists and music theorists
have generally approached African music with “Western eyes and ears” (Agawu
2003, xiv). While the disjunction between African music as practised and as
represented is unavoidable, he asks how its effects can be minimised (xv–xvi). In
musical modernism, as we have encountered it, where does African, Chinese,
Indonesian, or Japanese thinking begin and end in relation to Western thought?
(xvi). What can we learn from postcolonial theory and the unmasking of power­
fully constructed knowledge systems? (xvii ). What new insight can postcolo-
nial theory offer as we re-examine past hybrids in more relational and ethical
modes? (xviii). To what extent was the art and music performed in the universal
exhibitions, and transcribed and recorded in ethnographic field trips, already
affected, interpreted or contaminated by colonial forces and practices? (xix).
There is also the mostly one-sided direction of travel in relation to musical
modernism to take into account.
In the essay “He Stuttered,” Deleuze (1997), thinking among others of Kafka
and Beckett, notes that “great authors . . . do not mix two languages together.
. . . What they do, rather, is invent a minor use of the major language within which
they express themselves entirely; they minorize this language, much as in music,
where the minor mode refers to dynamic combinations in perpetual disequi-
librium” (109). The great author, he continues, “is a foreigner in his own lan-
guage. . . . He makes the language itself scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur,”
just as “Lawrence made English stumble in order to extract from it the music
and visions of Arabia” (110).
It’s worth remembering that neither Debussy, Messiaen, nor Boulez were
institutional figures when they first integrated elements from other musics
within their compositions. Their music at that time was undoubtedly minor,
whatever its subsequent fortune. Debussy was not yet Claude Debussy, musicien
français, in 1889; Messiaen was ploughing his own solitary furrow in the mid-
1940s; and the Boulez of Le Marteau sans maître and Pli selon pli was anything but
an institutional figure in France.
Hamid Dabashi’s essays “Can Non-Europeans Think?” and “Can Europeans
Read?” (2015), as well as Walter Mignolo’s “Yes, We Can” (2015), provide a
serious challenge to the musicologist who would wish to theorise the place
of non-Western music in the development of Western modernism: how not
only to trace theoretical and practical influence but also to produce a critique
that does not treat other musics simply as fodder to be exploited by decadent
Western musicians and theorists.

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 Edward Campbell

The borrowings and elaborations found in Debussy, Jolivet, Messiaen, and

Boulez, as key exemplars of a much more widespread phenomenon, are ambiva­
lent to the extent that the structures of colonialism are embedded in the fac-
tors enabling the making of their works. In Adorno’s terminology, colonialism
exists within the works as sedimented content, and to this extent they are truth-
ful expressions of their age. While this is an uncomfortable thought, what else
could we expect? Despite this, Deleuze’s obscure precursor enables us to rec-
ognise within the ambiguity, that—unjust structures, questionable and com-
promised attitudes notwithstanding—an event occurred, the ground shifted,
and music changed. To accept the works, we have to accept and welcome
the stuttering, the strangeness, the shame, and the glory implicated within
them.

References
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Aldrich, Robert. 1996. Greater France: A universitaires de France).
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Correspondance: 1954–1970. Edited by Angeles: Semiotext(e). First published
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Castanet, Pierre-Albert. 1995. Hugues Dufourt: 1974 (Paris: Minuit).
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Criton, Pascale. 2005. “L’invitation.” In Journeys between Cultures by Charles
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———. 2012. “Bords à bords: vers une oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/
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mshparisnord.org/filigrane/index. Connections: An Interview with Pierre
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Debaene, Vincent. 2010. L’adieu au voyage: Paris: L’Harmattan.
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Anthropology between Science and Literature Kiberd, Declan. 1992. Introduction to
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The Obscure Precursor, French Modernism, and the Musics of the World

Mignolo, Walter. 2015. “Yes, We Can.” Steinegger, Catherine. 2011. “Pierre Boulez
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de Musicologie 68 (1–2): 3–15.

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 The Executing Machine
Deleuze, Boulez, and the
Politics of Desire
Martin Scherzinger
New York University

The question is not: is it true? But: does it work?

Brian Massumi (1987, xv)

Musical anti-capitalism, Boulez’s synthesiser

It is a curiosity of historical reception that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s
two-volume theoretical work Capitalism and Schizophrenia written in the 1970s
should have become a central referent decades later for theorists of a differ-
ent era—the era of digital and post-digital networks.1 Authored at a time when
struggles against social and economic exploitation became imaginatively asso-
ciated with those against sexual and psychic repression, Deleuze and Guattari
formulated an argument that abandoned the dialectical analytics of nine-
teenth-century figures such as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud (no less than their
twentieth-century counterparts, Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan) in favour of an
anti-dialectical thought, which they termed schizoanalysis or rhizomatics. Theirs
was a politics of resistance that brought class struggle into contact with libidi-
nal energies: “The connection of desire to reality,” proclaimed Foucault ([1977]
1983, xiii–xiv) in his preface to the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
fittingly subtitled Anti-Oedipus, “possesses revolutionary force.” Deleuze and
Guattari’s philosophy was an attempt to synthesise what were formerly regarded
as independent spheres and circuits of productive activity into interactive
and interruptive flows of “desiring-machines”—a conception to displace and
replace the Freudian id. “The Desiring-Machines”—the title of the first chapter
of the first volume (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983)—tracks opportunistic
“couplings and connections” of “desiring-production” (ibid., 1): “an ongoing
process of becoming that is the becoming of reality” (ibid., 35). For Deleuze
and Guattari, desire was an emancipatory category; it had the capacity to trans-
form reality.

1 I would like to thank Paulo de Assis, Edward Crooks, Peter Dejans, and all the scholars, artists, and
interlocutors at the Orpheus Institute for their engagement during my time as a visiting researcher at
the institute in 2015. This chapter would not have been possible without their considerable input.

36
 The Executing Machine

It is a further curiosity that the figure and function of music—notably high

modernist music of the Cold War—should have played such a prominent role
in the philosophers’ map for a new politics of desire. For example, the stylistics
of modernist music, in particular that of French composer Pierre Boulez, served
as an important conduit for the conception of time in the second volume of
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, subtitled A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze met Boulez
in 1977 after the composer returned to Paris following his five years as music
director of the New York Philharmonic. A year later, Deleuze participated in an
event organised by Boulez at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/
Musique (IRCAM) along with Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. Deleuze’s
position paper (“Making Inaudible Forces Audible”) considered the notion of
“pulsed” and “nonpulsed” time, and demonstrated how the composer’s music
renders audible these duelling temporalities (Deleuze 2007a). In 1986, Deleuze
then contributed a philosophical reflection on musical time, primarily draw-
ing on Boulez’s writings on Wagner (notably the essay “Time Re-explored”),
which was published in Boulez’s sixtieth-birthday anthology (“Occupy without
Counting: Boulez, Proust, and Time”) (Deleuze 2007b). The most sustained
engagement with Boulez’s ideas, however, appears in A Thousand Plateaus (first
published 1980) (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Here, Deleuze, in collaboration
with Guattari, creatively adopted serial musical structures as a philosophical
trope for temporalised concepts of identity that cut across sedimented taxo-
nomic strata. Although the philosophers engage the music of a diverse array of
composers (from Robert Schumann to Luciano Berio), the primary philosoph-
ical terms employed were largely borrowed from Boulez’s technical writings on
music written nearly twenty years earlier.
It is possible to identify four prominent instances in which Boulez’s early
ideas about musical time and space take up residency in A Thousand Plateaus.
These include the philosophers’ discussion of (1) the concept of the “divid-
ual” (a liminal concept of agency suspended between the radical autonomy
of the “individual” and the unified homogeneity of the “collective”); (2) the
philosophical figure of the “synthesiser” (a model for combining elements
and modules that resists “dialectical” thought); (3) the workings of “deterri-
torialisation” (a notion of “diagonal becoming” that eschews points of origin
and completion); and (4) the twin concepts of the “smooth” and the “striated”
(distinct modes of production that occupy contrasting temporalities). On the
“diagonal” aspect of deterritorialisation, for example, Deleuze and Guattari
drew on Boulez’s discussion, first, of how modernism abolished the distinction
between music’s “vertical” and “horizontal” aspects of pitch; and second, of
how modernism opened into new non-metric temporalities. The philosophers’
arguments refer obliquely to the compositional techniques of Anton Webern
(notably his distributions of pitch fields), on the one hand, and Olivier Messiaen
(notably his manipulations of duration), on the other. But it is Boulez’s peculiar
modernist reading of these composers’ respective innovations (in his discus-
sion of polyphony in Penser la Musique Aujourd’hui [Boulez 1971]) that takes on
genuine argumentative relevance for a philosophical conception of time. The
terms capturing the distinction between smooth and striated space and time

37
 Martin Scherzinger

are likewise borrowed from Boulez’s chapter in Penser la Musique Aujourd’hui.

For Boulez, smooth time is filled “without counting”; striated time is filled “by
counting” (Boulez 1971, 94). In a personal discussion with Boulez, the composer
explained to me that the concept refers primarily to a kind of music temporal-
ity modelled on the unique sustain and decay of specific instrumental timbres
(Boulez, pers. comm., December 2010). For Deleuze and Guattari, in contrast,
smooth time paradoxically opens to the heterogeneity of limitless connec-
tion and thus mutation. Far from registering a technical relationship between
sounding instrumentalists, the philosophers’ thereby advance Boulez’s “non-
pulsed time” for a “floating music” as an exemplary instance of schizoanalysis/
rhizomatics (the realism in serialism?) (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 267).
Of the four primary instances of Boulez’s thought taken up by Deleuze and
Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, the philosophical figure of the synthesiser is per-
haps the most coherently translated from the region of music theory to that of
philosophy. The synthesiser figure has less to do with the actual contemporan­
eous instrument (which, by the 1980s had become central to the evolution of
new fashions and stylistics in popular music) than it has to do with Boulez’s
imaginat­ive reflections on new musical frontiers almost two decades earlier.
Boulez’s essay “. . . Auprès et au loin,” for example, refers to the synthesis-
er-to-come as a kind of “hyperinstrument”—an instrument comprising “elec-
tronic sinusoidal sounds” that has the capacity to integrate traditionally distinct
timbre-palettes into “conjugations of existent instruments” (Boulez 1968, 197).
Boulez’s imagined synthesiser became an imagined musical thought in Deleuze
and Guattari’s account of it; a theoretical mode of assembling “modules,
source elements, and elements for treating sound (oscillators, generators,
and transformers), by arranging microintervals”—in short, groundwork for a
project displacing Kant’s outmoded mechanism for distinguishing-and-then-
integrating analytic levels, known as the synthetic apriori (Deleuze and Guattari
1987, 343).
Deleuze and Guattari’s descriptions of the synthesiser gradually metamor-
phose from musical instrument to a productive methodological orientation for
philosophy itself throughout A Thousand Plateaus. The synthesiser, for example,
“places all of the parameters in continuous variation, gradually making ‘funda-
mentally heterogeneous elements end up turning into each other in some way.’
The moment this conjunction occurs there is a common matter. It is only at this
point that one reaches the abstract machine, or the diagram of the assemblage”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 109). Elsewhere, they describe how the synthesiser
“unites disparate elements in the material, and transposes the parameters from
one formula to another” (343). When thinking is animated by metamorphoses
of this sort, the philosophers argue, it resembles a rhizome: “the rhizome con-
nects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to
traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and
even nonsign states” (21). The rhizome is a kind of musical synthesiser—a pro-
liferating machine—intermingling a variety of practices, materials, and forms
(both signifying and non-signifying) into qualitatively new constellations. This
kind of thinking on the model of the musical synthesiser distances itself from

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the dialectics of “form and matter,” embracing instead the synthesis of “the
molecular and the cosmic, material and force” (343), a rhizome-like thought
process that cuts across traditional demarcations for conceptual inquiry. Thus,
we find in A Thousand Plateaus a conceptually destratified plane of consistency—
whereby heterogeneous elements of an analytic scenario are conceived on a
continuum. In other words, taxonomic distinctions are freed of their hierarchic
aprioristic ontological selections, and rewired to plug into the same machinic
assemblage: “Philosophy is no longer synthetic judgment; it is like a thought syn-
thesizer functioning to make thought travel, make it mobile, make it a force of
the Cosmos (in the same way as one makes sound travel)” (343).
Although he addressed himself to music alone, Boulez understood new elec-
tronic media, such as the synthesiser, as an avenue for liberating sound from
the technology of the score that had hitherto enjoyed a monopoly on musical
sound (re)production. The electro-acoustic machine was an important ele-
ment of Boulez’s technological imagination. In “Directions in Recent Music,”
for instance, Boulez (1968, 213) raises the question, “if . . . we want to intro-
duce a notion of total freedom of the rhythm, what can we do but address our-
selves to the machine?” As with the dual concepts of “smooth” and “striated”
time, Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 73) expand the synthesising sound machine
into a philosophically abstract machine: “The abstract machine exists envel-
oped in each stratum, whose Ecumenon or unity of composition it defines,
and developed on the plane of consistency, whose destratification it performs
(the Planomenon).” Deleuze and Guattari elaborate their analysis of “planes of
consistency” to include not only the sonorous material of Boulez but the build-
ing material for contemporary skyscrapers—“increasingly rich and consist-
ent material [like ‘reinforced concrete’] the better to tap increasingly intense
forces” (ibid., 329). This is the synthesising hermeneutics of abstract desiring
machines.

Consequences of Capitalism and Schizophrenia:

assemblage and affect
It is a noteworthy mutation of thought to consider what was once an imagi-
native description of a future musical instrument in the mind of a modernist
composer as a catalyst for a philosophical conception that maps plateaus of
political production itself. It is particularly striking that Deleuze and Guattari’s
relatively narrow focus on musical modernism of the Cold War period (Boulez
in particular) should thereby produce a philosophical platform whose theoret-
ical consequences have registered so capaciously in the post-Cold War period—
the age of networked computation, on the one hand, and an epoch increas-
ingly conscious of the anthropocene, on the other. What is striking about this
transformation of twentieth-century musical thought into a model for political
production today is that the latter paradoxically omits certain politically rele-
vant aspects of the former. In other words, by freely proliferating and synthe-
sising distinct analytic categories—drawing post-serialism toward rhizome,
musical intervals toward philosophical intermezzi, music’s smooth time and

39
 Martin Scherzinger

space toward planes of consistency, and so on—Deleuze and Guattari set adrift
their grasp of politics from Boulez’s more dialectically-inflected dodecaphonic
thinking.
The consequences of an anti-dialectical politics today can be mapped in
terms of two neo-Deleuzian concepts that now seem to dominate the human-
ities—from political philosophy to literary studies—namely, the concepts of
(1) assemblage and (2) affect. First, assemblage theory, most prominently asso-
ciated with the new realist philosophy of Manuel DeLanda (2016), emerges
from Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism—a brand of realism resistive to
the Freudian/Lacanian subject, on the one hand (hence, Anti-Oedipus), and, on
the other, resistive to the notion that either the natural world (science) or the
social one (governmentality) are adequately grasped by systematic structures
or formal laws. Instead, realists—without lapsing into theocentrism—regard
the world as radically independent of human thought. Far from the postmod-
ern idea that the world is to some extent an emanation of thought, or some-
how imbricated in and co-constituted by it, DeLanda advances the posthuman
assemblage as a central analytic referent. The assemblage covers entities of the
real world, ranging from natural ones (rocks, humans, diseases, weather) to
social ones (corporations, wars, concerts, nation states), without committing
to their aprioristic distinction. Assemblages are irreducible; they cannot be
further analysed into abstract or ultimate layers of reality. Elaborating upon
Deleuze and Guattari’s planes of consistency, Delanda advances a flat ontology;
one that blurs the lines of traditional taxonomies. In this account of realism,
the atoms of quantum physics have no more claim to reality than do sporting
events, say, or the movements of the market. Instead, these diverse phenomena
coexist in asynchronous parallel worlds—a thousand plateaus!—interacting only
in ways that are Argus-eyed and multi-capillaried. Relations between plateaus
are mediated less by causes than they are by catalysts. There are neither overarch-
ing laws nor predetermined structures, even if there is a degree of interaction
and collision between worlds.
What distinguishes assemblage theory from theories associated with the
linguistic turn of the mid-twentieth century is the dislocation of the human
subject as the central ontological referent. This dislocation is different from
the decentring of subjectivity we find in post-structuralism (notably decon-
struction). For the realists, the subject is not regarded as a condensation of lan-
guage and power (as in Foucault and Derrida), but as a transient (ever evolving,
multi-layered) crystallisation of larger and longer processes (as in Deleuze and
Guattari). “In a Deleuzian ontology,” writes DeLanda (2002, 9–10), “a species
(or any other natural kind) is not defined by its essential traits but rather by
the morphogenetic process that gave rise to it.” As it is with species, things too are
not radically distinct. The turn to this kind of realism-without-essentialism is
reflected in the concerns of a wider philosophical milieu today. For Graham
Harman (2002), the objects of his object-oriented ontology, for instance, are both
withdrawn (specific, definable) and interacting in a Deleuzian multiplicity—a
constant flux of environmental encounters. Things—rather than linguistic-his-
torical signifiers—determine realities in dynamic processes of pulsion (asymp-

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 The Executing Machine

totic vectors, or “attractors [that] are never actualized,” in the words of DeLanda
[2002, 29]). Likewise, for Bruno Latour (2005), actor networks proliferate on
hybrid planes of immanence in a way that suspends the traditional human
agent as a central referent. In actor–network theory, for example, human and
non-human actants coexist in simultaneous, often discontinuous, temporal
networks. The macro-temporalities of gradual ecological transformation, say,
coincide with the micro-temporalities of algorithmically driven decisions in
high-frequency trading on Wall Street or editing cluebots on Wikipedia. These
new realities exacerbate temporal poly-cycles. As in actor networks, encoun-
ters between things and processes in assemblages are less law-governed than
they are “chance encounters” in the context of “capacities.” This is the social
science of mess, as John Law (2010) might say. Sugar intake, for example, does
not cause diabetes, even if it is a catalyst for it. In other words, sugar intake has
the capacity to result in diabetes, but the relation is neither consistent, on the
one hand, nor completely erratic, on the other. Assemblage theory maps the
constituent aleatoricism of the multiple and refractory relations between onto-
logical plateaus.
The advantage of thinking transformation (social, natural, industrial, eco-
logical, etc.) on the model of the assemblage lies in the emphasis it places on
dynamic production/construction (instead of deconstruction). If traditional
subjects, laws, forms, and systems are sterile sedimentations artificially grafted
onto dynamic process of pre-individuated virtuality, then assemblage theory,
with its emphasis on capacities, could become productive. In contrast, quotid-
ian human life is lived as if incrementally ordered, disciplined, and rule-gov-
erned; it perpetually suspends belief in outliers—phenomena that fail to line
up with this order of things—in service of routine functionality. For example,
educational institutions, sanitation systems, prisons, electric grids, musical
instruments, and medical interventions all work, even if their effects are often
inadequate, violent, or incomplete. For the new realists, to intervene in this
environment is not to de- and re-vise overarching laws or determinative cogni-
tive maps but to strategically constellate partial systems as catalysts of change.
Assemblage theory, as a theory of productive constellation, encourages the
quest for what hackers call the “klurge”—knotted, imperfect, but highly func-
tional systems of operation. The capacity for the self-organising assemblage/
constellation/klurge thrives on fluidity (over fixity), exchangeability (over
organicism), and poly-functionality (over systematicity). It is a kind of dynamic
systems theory for material functions.
The second prominent concept to emerge from the musicalised philoso-
phy of Deleuze and Guattari is the concept of affect. In contrast to assemblage
theory, affect theory tends not to disperse analytic constellations but rather to
localise its analytics to the human subject as a principal site of investigation.
Drawing on both cognitive psychology and neuroscience, for example, Brian
Massumi articulates an aspect of non-linguistic communication—perhaps
even non-communication—attendant specifically to human psychic/physio-
logical subjectivity, which he calls affect. Massumi simultaneously repurposes
the protocols of neuroscience and cognitive psychology to philosophical ends,

41
 Martin Scherzinger

deftly bringing insights and results from the former fields into alignment with
the libidinal intensity of “desiring-production” found in Deleuze and Guattari
([1977] 1983, 1, 35). The subject, in Deleuze and Guattari, has the capacity to
affect or be affected by constellations no less than other functional systems of
operation.
At first glance, the focus on affect (localised more or less in the subject)
appears diametrically opposed to the focus on assemblage (delocalised constel-
lations of a rhizomic sort), but the shared allegiance to Deleuze and Guattari
reveals the deep affinity between these philosophical positions. For example,
while it may be physiologically localised to some extent, affect (in Massumi’s
lexicon) actually gauges a displacement of the subject in a manner that recapit-
ulates the displacement of formal systems into assemblages (in DeLanda’s
lexicon). In much the same way that DeLanda’s assemblage comprises not sys-
tematic but aleatoric interactions within a functional constellation, Massumi’s
affect does not emerge in the context of “logically connected” sensory recep-
tion, but rather “according to a logic that does not admit the excluded middle”
(Massumi 2002, 24). By invoking the principle of syllogistic non-contradiction,
Massumi thereby distances the workings of affect from the protocols of math-
ematics; contradiction is reconfigured as a “productive paradox” (ibid. 38). At
the same time, Massumi does not relinquish the idea that agonistic “parallel
operations” are nonetheless linked in some way.
Using a cognitive psychology experiment headed by Hertha Strum as an
example, Massumi (2002) argues that the subject is “physiologically split” (24).
The experiment involves the various mismatches between the self-reporting,
on the one hand, and the bodily responses, on the other, of children reacting
to a short film. On the one hand, we find conventional meanings associated
with intersubjective contexts—the level of content and convention. On the
other hand, we find nonconscious, autonomic reactions—the level of sheer
effect and intensity. Massumi shows how the relation between these two levels
is indeterminate and yet inextricably linked: “intensity . . . vaguely but insist-
ently connects what is normally indexed as separate” (24). He thereby invokes
the aleatoric thematics associated with assemblage theory in the context of his
theory of affect. The “chance operations” of assemblage theory are allied with
the “autonomization of relation” in affect theory (36). Affect is multi-tracked—
“the simultaneous participation of the virtual in the actual and the actual in the
virtual” (35). In short, affect is a kind of pre-conceptual intensity imbricated in
this “two-sidedness:” it is autonomous (35).
Massumi (2002) argues that because affect emerges in a “feedback” loop
between what Deleuze and Guattari call the virtual and the actual, it is a poten-
tially disruptive and progressive category as well. By partaking of the virtual—
radically open, by definition—affect also eludes capture by the (hegemonic)
taxonomies of the actual. It is therefore in a recalcitrant relation to narrative; it
suspends and disrupts the selective hierarchies of narrative (26). The inadequacy
of symbolic systems—linguistic, logical, narratological, ideological—is best
understood in relation to the difference between structure and event. Structure,
for Massumi, is inert—“nothing ever happens”—for it is ensnared in “invariant

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generative rules” (27). Structure disavows event. In contrast, affect is “unassimi-

lable”; it disassembles rules into paradox. Just as assemblage theory emphasises
the value of dynamic production, we find in the lateral, unexpected, asignify-
ing potential of affect an opening of empiricism into ethical experimentation.
For Massumi, affect unleashes potential; it is where idealism and empiricism
become productive—“a midwifery of invention” (33). As in Deleuze and Guattari,
desire is thereby set adrift from the systematic modes of higher organisation,
and registers instead a site of dynamic emergence. In Massumi’s words: “The
implied ethics of the project is the value attached—without foundation, with
desire only—to the multiplication of powers of existence, to ever-divergent
regimes of action and expression” (34).

Deleuze defended against his devotees

This chapter has so far sketched the curious way musical thought (primarily
exemplified by the modernism of Pierre Boulez) inflects philosophical thought
about non-musical phenomena in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. The sec-
ond section of the chapter then reflected briefly on the impact of this curiously
musicalised body of work on recent political philosophy. In particular, the previ-
ous section shows how the concepts of assemblage and affect take up residency
in the writings of DeLanda and Massumi respectively. It is perhaps non-coin-
cidental then that Deleuze and Guattari, in a kind of reverse feedback, have
exerted considerable influence on various writings about music in more recent
times. David Toop’s prophetic Ocean of Sound (1995), for example, is anchored
in tropes from Deleuze and Guattari. For Toop, musical production is marked
by flows of desire, energy, intensity, and sensation that unsettle the rigidities of
forms and genres. Reflecting the aesthetics of global electronic remix culture
of the 1990s, for example, Toop detects in sonic affect an opening into produc-
tive flows, flux, and flexibility. Musical production in this period proceeds by
way of leitmotifs, samples, beats, fluctuations, and intensity, a dream-like logic
of onwardness and endlessness instead of the narrative logic of previous eras.
Similarly, Steve Goodman (Kode 9) deploys concepts derived from Deleuze
and Guattari (planes of immanence, destratification, rhizome, schizoanalysis,
etc.) to elaborate a generalised ontology of vibrational force (Goodman 2010).
Goodman is particularly interested in the militarisation of affective interpel-
lation—the actualisation of virtual planes of amplitude and frequency—in
diverse contexts (ranging from long-range acoustic devices to camouflage
sound). As resistance, Goodman advances new modes for mobilising bodies in
rhythm, or what he calls bass materialism, which he associates with dubstep and
other crowd-based popular musics. Finally, in Infinite Music: Imagining the Next
Millennium of Human Music-Making (2011), Adam Harper elaborates a theory
of music as a kind of inherently Heraclitan flow. With Deleuze’s Difference and
Repetition (1994) as a central referent, Harper argues that musical repetition, in
particular, is a kind of difference-producing machine. He writes, “All music can
be thought of as perpetual difference of information”; and even, “repetition
thus equates to difference” (Harper 2011, 156, 157). Harper supports his argu-

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 Martin Scherzinger

ment about the virtual field of musical possibility with examples from dubstep,
hyperdub, and grime music.
How productive is the allegiance to this kind of Deleuzian thought in this
context? And why are affect and assemblage invoked at this moment in Western
academic history? Why does the model of Deleuze loom large in an era when
sexual revolutions are no longer productive anti-capitalist forces; an era in
which libidinal energies and affective intensities are arguably weaponised
against economic justice? Could it be that the philosophical turn to Deleuze
and Guattari does less to undermine than to underwrite a new era of capital-
ism? Already in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari ([1977] 1983, 35) are acutely
aware of the dangers attendant to desiring-production—“an ongoing process
of becoming that is the becoming of reality.” In fact, the philosophers recog-
nise that the processes of deterritorialisation are synonymous with those of
capitalism itself, and that it is the state that attempts to contain them: “The
more the capitalist machine deterritorializes, decoding and axiomatizing flows
in order to extract surplus value from them, the more its ancillary apparatuses,
such as government bureaucracies and the forces of law and order, do their
utmost to reterritorialize, absorbing in the process a larger and larger share of
surplus value” (ibid., 34–35). Of the proximity of productive becoming to cap­
italist deterritorialisation (by way of erratic renewal and endless cycles of pro-
duction-destruction) however, the devotees of Deleuze and Guattari above are
notably silent.
On the other hand, these moments of self-reflection in Deleuze and Guattari
are mostly not central to their overarching argument. As a result, desiring-pro-
duction is generally inflected with emancipatory capacity. Strikingly, the figure
of desiring-production in Anti-Oedipus practically reads like a thick description
of contemporary networked habiti, which produce affect as a binding tech-
nique, layering and interconnecting millions of digital communicative plat-
forms and devices. “A connection with another machine is always established,
along a transverse path, so that one machine interrupts the current of the other
or ‘sees’ its own current interrupted … Producing is always something ‘grafted
onto’ the product; and for that reason desiring-production is production of
production, just as every machine is a machine connected to another machine”
(Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 6).
For Deleuze and Guattari ([1977] 1983), desire is not to be identified with
“expression” but with “production” (6). Is Deleuze and Guattari’s “schizo-
phrenic” not precisely the code-shifting contemporary online producer, set
adrift from standardised body techniques of the past, plugged into a multi-
plicity of flow-producing machines? “It might be said that the schizophrenic
passes from one code to the other, that he deliberately scrambles all the codes, by
quickly shifting from one to another, according to the questions asked him,
never giving the same explanation from one day to the next, never invoking
the same genealogy never recording the same event in the same way” (15). Do
the proliferated digital traces of constantly shifting activity not testify to the
value of Deleuze and Guattari’s analytics today—the “heterogeneous chains”

44
 The Executing Machine

of desiring-production (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 39)? And could it

not be argued that there is a connection between this new context of desir-
ing-production and the anti-exploitative non-proprietary ethos of volunteer
production online—in the form of mash-ups, remixes, wikis, uploads, tweets,
petitions, massive collaborative projects (ranging from the tightly-scripted pro-
tocols of Wikipedia, say, to the erratic subculture-building and feral activism on
8chan)? Is it not the case that new efficiencies in digital distribution and search
functionality, combined with globally oriented peer-to-peer connectivity, have
ushered in an era of widespread collaborative volunteerism, hosted by what
could be construed—from the perspective of its productive functioning—as decen-
tralised, disintermediated, and arguably even democratic digital architectures?
It is tempting to extend the scope and reach of these Deleuzo-Guattarian
themes even further to map a contemporary digital culture that almost literal-
ises the postmodern rhetoric of the 1960s: free culture, the death of the author,
communalism, irreducible intertextuality, and, above all, reception construed
as productive act (or prosumption). Is this the newly proliferated production
characterised by interruptions and interactions of machinic flows? Is the sub-
jectivation process under these conditions not the opposite of what was feared
by many philosophers and theorists of the past century? Following Deleuze
and Guattari, one may conclude that the subject of contemporary networked
habiti is no longer the standardised pseudo-individual of Theodor W. Adorno’s
post-competitive capitalism (Adorno and Horkheimer [1972] 1997); neither
is it any longer Louis Althusser’s (1971) cautious and compromised subject of
interpellation, nor even the subject of Foucault’s discipline (1977). Updated to
our times, one might further conclude that the contemporary subject is not in
fact the distracted, weak ego imagined by Sherry Turkle (2008); nor is it the cus-
tomised one imagined by Nicholas Carr (2010), who describes how viewpoints
become Balkanised when they are hitched to ever-narrowing vectors of search.
Indeed, is not the opposite the case? Do we not find in contemporary subject­
ivation a kind of ballooning of desire, unsanctioned by traditional modes of social-
isation? Do we not find here the emergence of a kind of inflated self, whose
every obsession and fixation, every fetish and dream, paranoid or perverse the-
ory, is technically externalised? Is the instant availability of proliferated audio-
visual forms and content—from Saddam Hussein’s dead body to the Nazi
salute, from any song you ever heard to fake stories about Hillary Clinton’s
association with a paedophile ring—not the annulment of the ego itself ? In
Deleuzian terms, one may speak here of the rapacious self, shattering older net-
works of collectivity and endlessly forging new ones, capriciously ballooning
and contracting identities in proliferating rhizomes of production and cycles
of erratic self-renewal. Are these the desiring-machines—the peculiar contem-
porary actualisations of the virtual—that literalise the Anti-Oedipus itself ?

45
 Martin Scherzinger

The executing machine: coiled dressage or dark

precursor?
With this model of production/subjectivation in mind, Massumi’s use of
Deleuze and Guattari is arguably at once too nominalist/ontological and too
potentialist/vitalist. First, the ontological thrust of Massumi’s argument can be
detected in its heavy reliance on evidence from neuroscientific work on emo-
tion. Ruth Leys (2011) detects a cultural “turn to affect,” which extends beyond
Massumi to humanities-oriented fields in general. The geographer Nigel
Thrift, for example, believes that political decisions are contingent upon a set
of “inhuman or pre-subjective forces” (ibid., 435). Eric Shouse, a cultural critic,
argues that messages have a dimension of “nonconscious affective resonance”
that is the match of any meaning (ibid., 435). Leys illustrates how the claim that
affective intensities and reflexes occur independently of intention and mean-
ing is wholly compatible with the psychological and neuroscientific construal
of basic emotions as “rapid, phylogenetically old, automatic responses” (ibid.,
437). These reflexes, or biological “tripwires,” are often genetically inscribed,
or cognitively hardwired, producing (often lightning-quick) effects before the
intervention of conscious intentional thought (ibid., 438).
The paradoxical point for Leys (2011, 442) is that where neuroscientists
and cognitive psychologists posit these reflexes as basic givens, Deleuze and
Guattari, along with Massumi, posit them as a “formless, unstructured, non-
signifying force.” In fact, as if to echo Nietzsche’s distinction between will and
emotion in his essay “On Words and Music” ([1978] 1980), Massumi (2002, 28)
resists the very “sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience” that
characterises emotion as a subjective content. In contrast, affect is regarded as
asignifying intensity. The paradoxical reason such a radically open conception
of affect actually recapitulates the innate emotions posited by Silvan Tomkins,
Paul Ekman, Antonio Damasio, and others—emotions “subserved by neural
circuits in the brain, such as the subcortical group of neurons known as the
amygdalae”—is that in both cases they are rooted in the body, but below the
threshold of consciousness (Leys 2011, 438). In other words, the embodied
prepersonal intensities of Massumi’s paradigm are construed by these scien-
tists as absolutes—irreducible, reflexive, and archetypal. Basic emotion, like
affect itself, functions independently of intention, signification, and meaning.
Despite the non-deterministic emancipatory character of Massumi’s affect, as
against the totalising determinism of those of Damasio and others, both para­-
digms equivalently demonstrate determined incuriosity toward interpreting
the meaning and limit of their guiding terms. In fact, both positions engage acts of
non-naming, albeit for opposite reasons. The act of non-naming is allied to the
act of total naming. The radical specificity of the irreducible neuroscientific
archetype eludes the problematics of the signifier just as much as does the
radical potentiality of affect. Instead, Massumi construes affect as simply inad-
equate to the terms aimed to describe it; signifiers are wholly suspended in
service of drastic pre-personal presence. This is the surrogate ontologism of
affect theory.

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 The Executing Machine

Massumi’s emancipatory theory of affect thereby not only borrows evidence

from the neurosciences of emotion but recapitulates their radically detempo-
ralised theories of body, paradoxically in service of a philosophy of “virtual per-
spectives fading out in all directions to infinity” (Massumi 2002, 43). For exam-
ple, Massumi’s riff on Benjamin Libet’s experiment in the 1990s emphasises
the uneven responsiveness of the body and the brain to stimulation by cortical
electrodes (28–34). Massumi reaches the conclusion that intensity is incipience:
“For the present is lost with the missing half second, passing too quickly to be
perceived, too quickly, actually, to have happened” (30). What is the truth that
lies in the preconscious? Could it be that, far from eluding all signification, the
reflexive stimulation partakes of submerged habituation and body technique?
If we attach the ethical value of the project to “desire only—to the multipli-
cation of powers of existence, to ever-divergent regimes of action and expres-
sion,” do we not miss the role played by the training of the body, the cultivation
of the senses, the immersion of the body in textures of social networks, techni-
cal interfaces, economic systems, and so on (34)?
In a televised broadcast in March 2007 in Baghdad, the then UN secretary gen-
eral Ban Ki-moon—holding a press conference with Iraqi prime minister Nuri
al-Maliki—suddenly, and quite unbidden, hunkered down under the podium.
A rocket had just landed fifty meters away, setting off an explosion. Al-Maliki,
in striking contrast to Ban, did not flinch throughout the event. Indeed, while
the shell-shocked Ban was taking cover, the prime minister blithely completed
his sentence about how Iraq was gradually returning to a state of stability.
What accounts for the difference? The divergent qualities of reaction to the
sonic blast—however autonomic in their momentary unfolding—differed on
account of their dissimilar hermeneutic scan of the degree of danger involved
in the moment. The senses, it appears, had evolved differently; more precisely,
the senses had been cultivated under unlike social, geographical, and technical
conditions. Their respective reflexes differently scanned the same soundscape.
Although the reactions were clearly a mode of pre-conceptual intensity, it is an
aspect of prior experience that, on the one hand, launched Ban into the drastic
catapult of a potentially short life, and, on the other, left al-Maliki unphased.
Massumi (2002, 30) acknowledges that intensity is asocial but not pre-
social—“it includes social elements but mixes them with elements belonging to
other levels of functioning and combines them according to different logic.”
This genuflection toward the social is too abbreviated to weigh upon the con-
tent of his analytics, even if it betrays a desire to have it both ways. Indeed,
Massumi mostly exaggerates the differentness of the “different logic” that osten-
sibly blends “levels of functioning” (ibid.). In other words, even if the “differ-
ent logic” legitimately involves irreducibly unnameable, non-social elements,
is it not rather the experiential ones—socio-technical, geo-cultural, and so
on—that afford opportunities for redirection? Radicalising the openness of a
“different logic,” in contrast, loses sight of this capacity, and in a complicated
rhetorical move, paradoxically recapitulates the fixity of its inhuman hard-
wiring. If this were not the case, then by what means is the “different logic”
available for scrutiny? In the wayward potentiality of incipience as such, do

47
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we not miss the important social capacity for intervention that is, at least in
part, the condition for the possibility of the preconscious reflex? In other words,
for a philosophy interested in embodiments of social transformation, is it not
crucial to engage the foreknowledge that guides the variable reflexes of the body?
What body training—dressage—lies in wait (as if in a compressed coil) in the
half second before the second half ? Is this coiled dressage not, in fact, the dark
precursor of the preconscious?
In the context of ubiquitous biotechnification and artificial intelligence
today, it behoves us to consider carefully the contents of autonomic sensory
habiti in relation to their capacity for adaptation. To the extent that neuroscien-
tific and cognitive models routinely inform this research tradition, the human-
ities play a part in critically reflecting on their social, historical, cultural, geo-
graphical, political, and economic underwriting. The information provided by
these research traditions to forge new amalgams between body and machine
frequently posit atemporalised theories of the body. The point is that a phil-
osophical position that insists on the radically nonsignifying openness of the
body cannot summon sufficient evidence to accept, resist, or even redirect the
disembodied rationalist terms massaged into the algorithmic model of experi-
ence to come.
Stakeholders abound. The military-industrial complex, for example, is pay-
ing increasing attention to human affect, in this nonconscious sense. A new
generation of militarised prosthetics, for example, seeks to mobilise comput-
ing in conjunction with electrochemistry at the cellular level. Here the quest
is to improve reaction times in the handling of ballistic weapons in contexts
of combat. These technologies deploy human thought alone—recorded and
graphed by an electroencephalogram (EEG), and then formatted according
to encoded characteristics of brainwaves—to circumvent the neurological
feedback between hands and brain. The extracted brainwave patterns are
transformed into various domain signals (frequency, etc.) to facilitate a series
of calculations and characterisations, which in turn are digitally encoded for
analysis. In other words, brainwave signal analysis is recruited for technologies
whose task it is to accelerate the instinctive galvanic response time for human
agents in high-stakes military contexts of decision-making.
These calibrated microseconds constitute what I call the nanochronemics of
human embodiment in an age of networked computation. Instead of giving free
reign to the meticulous and declarative language construction of software—a
language of anti-literature—the humanities could theorise the experimental
modalities mapping neural circuits in the brain (down to the cortical lobes
and amygdalae neurons) to demonstrate the precise ways engineers and scien-
tists institute ontological commitments about the body in the terms of criteria
absolutised by the industrial demands of specific technologies. As computing
is increasingly brought into the body, can one afford to set affect adrift of all
signifying? The answer is: No. For all its promise as desiring-production of an
abstract machine, the retreat into radically embodied openness is, in fact, ren-
dered a poor leveraging platform for productive intervention. Whether we
like it or not, affect will be programmed by those for whom it will not remain

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“autonomous,” in Massumi’s sense. In other words, left unsupervised in an

inarticulate “different logic,” our affective arousal stands to be colonised by all
manner of militarised adaptation, just as our interactive instincts stand to be
colonised by all manner of industrial interpellation. After all, the automated
instructions in the software program will trigger sequences unabated in human
subjects. This is the feedback production of the executing machine.

Pornofication of the capitalist library

This previous section described the surrogate ontologism of Massumi’s reading
of Deleuze and Guattari. But what of Massumi’s exaggerated potentialism/vital-
ism? What if we assume Massumi is correct, and somehow find in the non-sig-
nifying intensity of affect a space for resisting the brain-doubling of neurosci-
ence, the brainwashing of fixed-message propaganda, the brain-acceleration of
software engineering? How then does the radically open productive potential of
affect described by Massumi tally with the critical impulse he detects therein? In
other words, what if Massumi is correct about the radical potentiality of affect:
that in its autonomia we detect a swerve into a radically unguessed-at future, a
relinquishing of structure for event, and so on? Spontaneity, incipience, poten-
tiality, reflexivity, event, intensity: Can this kind of construal of the productive
libido be regarded as a progressive category today? Or does the subject of cap-
ital already—of increasing necessity enjoined toward erratic potential—reflect a
new reservoir of libidinal surplus for expropriation?
There is a scene in Gary Ross’s iconic film The Hunger Games (2012), a sci-
ence-fiction thriller based on the novel by Suzanne Collins, in which the pro-
tagonist Katniss Everdeen displays her talents before an audience of gossiping,
indulged, and powerful adjudicators in the Capitol (of a society sharply strat-
ified into districts). Katniss, a skilled sharpshooter from the poorest district,
has volunteered herself as a contestant for the deadly annual Hunger Games,
a high-stakes game show enforced by the nation of Panem as retribution for
a past rebellion. The scene is grounded in a series of surprises. First, against
the odds (well understood by the cinema audience at this point in the film),
Katniss, under the gaze of her judges, actually misses the centre of the target.
Perhaps nerves interfered with her reaction time. Perhaps the interpellations
of performance disrupted the innocent ease with which she honed her skill
set. In contrast, of course, her failed shot appears as wholly predictable to her
onscreen aristocratic audience, who laugh and jeer in ridicule and contempt.
Taken aback by her own misfire, Katniss lines up the target in the crosshairs
once more. This time, true to form, she strikes the bull’s eye. However, there is
an unexpected problem. The judges, at this point wholly absorbed in dismissive
distraction, are no longer looking; they fail, once again, to bear witness to the
protagonist’s extraordinary skill. The second surprise comes next. Perplexed by
her unreactive audience, Katniss lines up her target a third time; and, in a feat
of clarity and determination, she fires another perfect shot. But this time she
has taken aim not at the official competition target but at the apple wedged in
the mouth of the roast pig on the table encircled by the judges of the Capitol.

49
 Martin Scherzinger

The apple is deftly dislodged from the dead pig’s mouth. There is a thwack and
then there is silence. The aristocrats, dumbstruck, stare down in shock.
The massive box-office success of The Hunger Games—the largest-grossing
film released outside a summer or holiday period—is often attributed to its
resonance with millennial anguish in the context of a technologically auto-
mated, post-recession period. The film’s themes are paradoxically marked,
on the one hand, by a ubiquitous entertainment apparatus riveted to specta-
cle and, on the other, by new realities of structured economic inequality. The
gladiatorial deathmatches—hunger games—align these paradoxical themes
by broadcasting for consumption the very struggle for survival. In the standard
interpretation of her, Katniss represents a kind of indignant resistance to the
rigged institutions of government and employment, struggling for what is fair
and just. In short, Katniss embodies the kind of rebellion of a moral outsider
ensnared in the brutal rules of an immoral dystopia. This official script, how-
ever, fails to register the texture of the signifying associations implicit to her
characterisation. Katniss, unofficially but perhaps more precisely, represents
not the outsider at all, but the paradoxical heroic insider in the era of ubiquitous
computation. What is fascinating about the scene painted above is that her
wealthy adjudicators from the Capitol do not, it turns out, recoil in alarm at her
menacing act of rebellion. They do not punish her. The intensity of their horror
instead registers—in a filmically extended split second—sheer delight. This is
pure affect—“a state of suspense, potentially of disruption” (Massumi 2002,
26)—that signals a swerve toward the virtual. In other words, the moment
embodies a swerve from official signification (an act of dangerous rebellion) to
asignifying intensity (a performance of embodied spectacle) (ibid.). One may
even say that the reaction of the aristocrats is physiologically split.
The paradox of affect is that it is said to be simultaneously autonomic (it “can-
not but be experienced” [Massumi 2002, 33]; it “cannot but be perceived” [36],
etc.) and radically incipient (it is “an unleashing of potential” [33]); it “escapes
confinement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction,
it is” (35). This raises a question: What aspect of affect does this moment in the
film prominently signal? Does it signal the potential of affect to “veer off in
another direction,” to register delight in danger (40)? Does it thereby register a
mode of embodiment that opens “empiricism into ethical experimentation”
(33)? Or does it, on the other hand, register “a nonconscious, never-to-be-
conscious” remainder, the production of a kind of autonomic presence (25)?
Massumi of course allies the agonic relation of these parallel levels of affect.
Official signification simply persists—at odds—with embodied intensity.
But what if the autonomic reaction of the adjudicators is less nonconscious
than it is unconscious? In other words, what if Katniss’s risky manoeuvre actu-
ally signals the deeper unwritten rules of the game in contemporary society?
Katniss thinks outside the box. She innovatively breaks official rules. In this
way, she acts the part of the master-entrepreneur in a hyper-connected world.
Katniss, it turns out, eventually both wins the brutal competition to the death
and simultaneously stakes out the ethical high ground. In fact, by forging an
unholy conceptual alliance between love and ethics, on the one hand, and sav-

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 The Executing Machine

agery and contest, on the other, the movie phantasmically suggests that it is
her very loyalty, love, and strong ethical standing that somehow delivers her to
victory in the deadly game. This is victorious savagery cloaked as ethics; heaven
made in hell. She seizes the moment in the age of the moment—“every second is
the ultimate zeitgeist” says Josh Ostrovsky, the Internet sensation known as the
“Fat Jew” (in Ronson 2015)—with a perfect sense of timing. In a fleeting flash
of insight, she performs a gamble that officially challenges institutional author-
ity, but unofficially, and more importantly, obeys the “post-Fordist” injunction
toward innovation and entrepreneurialism (Virno 2007). She rewrites the
rules—blending “fundamentally heterogeneous elements”—to produce the
obligatory “new”: the obedient innovation (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 109).
Katniss is the true subject of contemporary capitalism—the visionary that sees
in the pig’s apple a bull’s eye.
I narrate this scene from a recent box-office hit in some detail to illustrate
that affective production has no inherent link to progressive politics. In fact, in
the context of contemporary cultures of computing and consumption, desub-
limated energies are a condition for the possibility of data capture and harvest.
In other words, the capitalist surveillance economy requires specific subjects
for its efficient functioning. Digital interfaces and architectures are designed
to enjoin externalisations of personalised desire. Desire is put in the service of
rich (personalised, customised) data sets for search engines, content provid-
ers, and (more recently) service providers. This is the goal of the third-party
trackers, the surveillance networks, and the ubiquitous spyware that instantly
connects every visit to almost every site to several third-party servers. (While
Google and Facebook don’t directly sell user information [yet], sites frequently
offer reader information to data brokers like Experian and Acxiom). This is the
age of the Internet as dragnet. The online user has metamorphosed into a pro-
ducer—surplus labour.
One may speak here of a kind of digital Taylorism, or what I call enforced
deterritorialisation—a mandatory subjectivity to perfect the digital Taylorism of
contemporary work (Scherzinger 2010). The subject of capitalism in the devel-
oped nations of the twenty-first century is no longer simply disciplined by state
apparatuses. The adjustments and attunements of human bodies to the stand-
ardised interfaces of the industrial production line has morphed into its antith-
esis. Today, we find the adjustment of the machine—that is, the self-learning
adaptability of the increasingly wearable microcomputer—to the erratic pro-
ductions of the body. No longer materialising the objectified psyche in tech-
nological form, this is a case of technologising the psyche by externalising the
id. Spyware no longer bears the marks of a Foucauldian panopticon. Rather, it
has morphed into an inside-out panopticon! It is no longer the case that the con-
temporary subject experiences the possibility of being watched, and therefore
comports its behaviour accordingly. Rather, the contemporary subject knows
it is being watched and is nonetheless enjoined to act, adopt, and produce in
an un-comported manner. This can be characterised as a new form of digital
entrapment—the instrumentalisation of our non-instrumental capacities—in a
sustained, but stealthy, attempt to financialise desiring production.

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 Martin Scherzinger

Data doubles are best built of destandardised data—personalised cookies,

banners, scripts, and clicks that lie both inside and outside the symbolic box
(custom, convention, decorum). The world’s data double is both memetic
and secret, neurotic and orgiastic, civilised and uncivilised, true and fake. The
Internet—at once the de facto information library of today and a “giant weird
orgy” (in the words of Josh Ostrovsky [in Ronson 2015])—connects platforms,
devices, and networks in what can be described as the algorithmic clustering of
affect—the pornofication of the library.
Could it be that a technological condition characterised by a fantasy universe
of affects and decontextualised subjects, enables affective habiti forged by naked
spectacle, charismatic personality, and outright mythology? Could it be that the
reign of the affective register plays a role in crowding out any notion of polit-
ical reality? In other words, could it be that the era of big data—assemblages
interlinked by affects—is at once the condition for the possibility of a gener-
alised post-truth? Perhaps the desiring-machine, no longer desirable today, has
become the true picture. Once more, the epigram: The question is not: is it true?
But: does it work?

Afterword: the hammer without a master

This essay has suggested that the recent turns to affect and assemblage owe a
curious, but considerable, debt to the musical thinking found in the philoso-
phy of Deleuze and Guattari. Globs of thought found in the music of Boulez,
Cage, and others are transformed via the writings of Deleuze and Guattari
into a pragmatics of incipient capacities and desiring production. This hidden
genealogy betrays a strange repurposing of music in service of politics. This is
a fascinating fate for a brand of music-theoretical reflection once grounded
in modernism. I have further argued that the politics that emerge from this
transplanted body of theory may do less to undercut than to underwrite the
ideological demands of contemporary capitalism. At first glance, this politi-
cal weakness may appear constitutively linked to its origin in music. As a final
thought, however, I want to suggest that, paradoxically, the weakness emerges
from a less than rigorous deployment of the musical ideas upon which the
philosophy draws in the first place.
Could it be that we find in the figure of John Cage, for example, an approx-
imation of the philosophical status of the rhizome? After all, Cage is consid-
ered a forerunner of rhizomic transformation in the thought of Deleuze and
Guattari: “It is undoubtedly John Cage who first and most perfectly deployed
this fixed sound plane, which affirms a process against all structure and genesis,
a floating time against pulsed time or tempo, experimentation against any kind
of interpretation, and in which silence as sonorous rest also marks the absolute
state of movement” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 267). Deleuze and Guattari
hereby equate the aleatoricism found in Cage’s work with a music of radical
becoming. By planning its own chance encounters, this music falls outside the
coordinates of all hegemonic stratification. Citing Cage, Deleuze and Guattari

52
 The Executing Machine

write “it is of the nature of the plan(e) that it fail” (ibid., 269). It is precisely
Cage’s detachment from “organization” and “development” that produces a
musical scene of “nonvoluntary transmutation”—a “strange machine . . . of . . .
contagion-proliferation-involution”; a rhizome (ibid.). Perhaps.
On the other hand, Deleuze and Guattari emphasise the aspect of becoming
(development, transmutation) and non-intentionality (failed plan, nonvolun-
tary) and downplay the constitutively linked aspect of the plan in Cage’s work.
This disavowal is particularly acute in the context of Boulez’s conception of
serialism. In Boulez, we find a two-tiered dialectical dimension that cannot
be reconciled with the rhizome-like “multiplicities or aggregates of inten-
sities” found in the transplanted thought of Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 15).
Although the dodecaphonic work must project itself toward the “unforesee-
able,” the “unexampled,” the “unperceived,” and so on, it is not achieved by
the opportunism of deterritorialisation (Boulez 1968, 172, 174). It is true that
Boulez opposes the “free play” of serialism from the “bookkeeping” of the
twelve-tone system—with its emphasis on combinatorial properties, and so on
(172, 181). Instead of this obligatory patterning of notes, Boulez emphasises the
antithesis: “There is no creation except in the unforeseeable becoming neces-
sity” (183). On the one hand, this is music that deploys the series against its own
inertial tendencies: a kind of calculated shifting of goalposts to produce arrays
that elude simple decoding. To this extent, therefore, the music’s temporal and
spatial coordinates can be said to recapitulate a kind of machinic generation of
unpredictability, like a rhizome.
On the other hand, where deterritorialisation “burgeons into a rhizome” in
Deleuze and Guattari, Boulez’s proliferating production is constitutively linked
to an elusive algorithm. Uncertainty and opacity are maximised in Boulez by a
hidden hand. In fact, the distribution of serial arrays requires, as a condition for
its possibility, this fundamental non-human actant. As I have argued elsewhere:
“Boulez’s quasi-mathematical multiplications (by definition unhearable) are
the condition for the possibility of post-serial ‘rhizomic’ flight. These serial
structures involve two-tiered modalities of construction: on the one hand,
the generative multiplication processes and, on the other, the unpredictable
fields of finely proliferated networks proffered thereby; the pre-emptive, and
highly centralized, algorithmic engine on the one hand, and the beautifully dis-
persed, but incoherent, arrays on the other; the inner workings versus the outer
appearances: in sum, the technical structure of magic” (Scherzinger 2010, 124).
In contrast, for Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 15), the rhizome is set adrift from
the “hegemony of the signifier.” Indeed, for these philosophers, politics recap-
itulates the beauty of unfettered proliferation: “Nothing is beautiful or lov-
ing or political aside from underground stems and aerial roots, adventitious
growths and rhizomes” (ibid.). In the philosophers’ view, the multiplicity pro-
duced by any structure always amounts to a reduction of combinations; in the
composer’s contrasting view, the laws of combination are multiplied precisely
by the mobile serial structure (ibid., 6). In short, where Boulez’s transformational
operations depend on it, Deleuze and Guattari’s lines of flight are detethered
from the territory of the algorithm—the hammer without a master.

53
 Martin Scherzinger

Could it be that Deleuze and Guattari’s disavowal of the two-tiered forma-

tion of the compositional works upon which they draw is less resistant than
it is consistent with the ideological demands of late capitalism? The music
elaborates a constitutive dialectic between chaos and control, randomness
and authority—“for the insiders, an algorithm, a plan; for the outsiders, a rhi-
zome, blind fate”—while the philosophical reception of Deleuze and Guattari
betrays assemblages-without-plan and affects-without-technique (Scherzinger
2010, 186). The music’s two-fold (techno-political) production is paradoxically
flattened in the context of the political concepts twice-derived there from. In
the process, the dialectics of subjectivity are diluted and annulled. Oedipus is
cut down to size!
As if from opposite directions, affect and assemblage make the same fatal-
istic swerve away from human signification and experience. Broadly speaking,
affect theory brings a microscopic gaze to subjective human experience while
assemblage theory brings a telescopic gaze away from human experience. Both
encounter the posthuman—the first, by way of the autonomic and the noncon-
scious; the second, by way of the hybrid and the rhizome. Is the true desire of
their apparently antithetical stances to finally downplay, or even eradicate, the
traditional human referent of political analysis? The anthropocene is cut down
to size! With this same end in mind, the dual turning toward affect and assem-
blage keeps intact an appearance of productive antithesis. The former directs
(or better diverts) attention toward the singular in its irreducible ultra-singu-
larity, while the latter diverts attention toward the multiple in its ever-elusive
excess. What results is a blocked dialectic—the nonconscious rhizome—that is
resistant to all intentionality and planning. In the wake of the human we are
left with a new ecology of affects and assemblages beyond repair.

References
Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Weinstock. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
(1972) 1997. Dialectic of Enlightenment. First published 1966 as Relevés d’apprenti
Translated by John Cumming. (Paris: Seuil).
London: Verso. First published 1944 as ———. 1971. Boulez on Music Today.
Philosophische Fragmente (New York: Social Translated by Susan Bradshaw and
Studies Association); revised as Dialektik Richard Rodney Bennett. Cambridge,
der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente MA: Harvard University Press. First
(Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1947). This published 1963 as Penser la musique
translation first published 1972 (New aujourd’hui (Paris: Denoël/Gontheir).
York: Herder and Herder). Carr, Nicholas. 2010. The Shallows: What the
Althusser, Louis. 1971. “Ideology and Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York:
Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes W. W. Norton.
towards an Investigation).” In Lenin and DeLanda, Manuel. 2002. Intensive Science and
Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Virtual Philosophy. London: Continuum.
Ben Brewster, 127–86. New York: Monthly ———. 2016. Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh:
Review Press. First published 1969 as Edinburgh University Press.
Lénine et la philosophie (Paris: Maspero). Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and
Boulez, Pierre. 1968. Notes of an Apprenticeship. Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New
Texts collected and presented by York: Columbia University Press. First
Paule Thévenin. Translated by Herbert published 1968 as Différence et répétition

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(Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social:
———. 2007a. “Making Inaudible Forces An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory.
Audible.” In Deleuze 2007c, 156–60. First Oxford: Oxford University Press.
presented 1978 as “Rendre audibles des Law, John. 2010. After Method: Mess in Social
forces non audible” (at IRCAM). Science Research. London: Routledge.
———. 2007b. “Occupy without Counting: Leys, Ruth. 2011. “The Return to Affect: A
Boulez, Proust, and Time.” In Deleuze Critique.” Critical Inquiry 37: 434–72.
2007c, 292–99. First published 1986 as Massumi, Brian. 1987. “Translator’s
“Boulez, Proust et les temps: ‘Occuper Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy.” In
sans compter,’” in Eclats/Boulez, edited by Deleuze and Guattari 1987, ix–xv.
Claude Samuel (Paris: Centre Georges ———. 2002. Parables for the Virtual:
Pompidou), 98–100. Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC:
———. 2007c. Two Regimes of Madness: Duke University Press.
Texts and Interviews 1975–1995. Edited by Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1978) 1980. “On
David Lapoujade. Translated by Ames Music and Words.” Translated by Walter
Hodges and Mike Taormina. New York: Kaufmann. In Between Romanticism and
Semiotext(e). First published 2003 as Modernism: Four Studies in the Music of
Deux régimes de fous: Textes et entretiens, the Later Nineteenth Century, by Carl
1975–1995 (Paris: Minuit). Dahlhaus, 103–20. Berkeley: University of
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1977) California Press. Translation of Nietzsche
1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and fragment first published 1978 (Denver
Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Quarterly 13 [1]: 16–30).
Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Ronson, Jon. 2015. “Josh Ostrovsky: ‘The
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Internet is Like a Giant Weird Orgy.’”
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et schizophrénie 1: L’anti-Œdipe (Paris: June 2017. https://theguardian.com/
Minuit). Translation first published 1977 technology/2015/nov/07/josh-ostrovsky-
(New York: Viking Press). fat-jew-jon-ronson-instagram.
———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism Ross, Gary, dir. 2012. The Hunger Games.
and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Hollywood, CA: Color Force; Santa
Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Monica, CA: Lionsgate.
Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Scherzinger, Martin. 2010. “Enforced
Mille plateaux (Paris: Minuit). Deterritorialization; or the Trouble with
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: Musical Politics.” In Sounding the Virtual:
The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Music,
Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage. First edited by Brian Hulse and Nick Nesbitt,
published 1975 as Surveiller et punir: 103–28. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.
Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard). Toop, David. 1995. Ocean of Sound: Aether
———. (1977) 1983. Preface to Deleuze and Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds.
Guattari (1977) 1983, xi–xiv. London: Serpent’s Tail.
Goodman, Steve. 2010. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Turkle, Sherry. 2008. “Always-on/Always-on-
Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, You: The Tethered Self.” In Handbook of
MA: MIT Press. Mobile Communication Studies, edited by
Harman, Graham. 2002. Tool Being: Heidegger James E. Katz, 121–37. Cambridge, MA:
and the Metaphysics of Objects. Peru, IL: MIT Press.
Open Court. Virno, Paolo. 2007. “Post-Fordist
Harper, Adam. 2011. Infinite Music: Imagining Semblance.” Translated by Max
the Next Millennium of Human Music- Henninger. SubStance 112 (36 [1]): 42–46.
Making. London: Zero Books.

55
 Deleuze’s Fold in the
Performing Practice of
Aaron Cassidy’s
The Pleats of Matter
Diego Castro-Magas
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

to Daryl Buckley

Aaron Cassidy’s The Pleats of Matter (from now on TPM), for solo electric guitar
with three outputs and electronic processing, takes its title from the first chap-
ter of Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993). According to Cassidy
(2007), TPM “is a work that explores the nature of folds, bends, and pleats, and
their concomitant implications of surplus, enveloping, collapsing, and obfus-
cation. It is a work in which overflowing trajectories of material and process
collide, overlap, collapse, and slide, where strata melt and rupture and deform,
and where form and shape are only the final by-product of lines folding into
one another, of shapes subsumed by other shapes, of forms twisted within
other forms.”
TPM, begun in 2005 and completed in 2007, is dedicated to the Australian
guitarist Daryl Buckley, with whom I took guitar lessons in 2014 as part of a
University of Huddersfield–financed project. An injury prevented Buckley
from premiering the piece, which was finally performed for the first time, ten
years after Cassidy began composing it, when I gave its premiere on 20 February
2015 at the Electric Spring Festival at the University of Huddersfield. The pro-
gramme note for the piece reads:

The guitar itself, or at least the physical, sound-producing manipulation of the

instrument, is a folding: the interaction between finger and string and fret, the
bending and wrapping of strings with the nut and bridge and tuning pegs, the
folding and slackening from the tremolo bar . . . In this work, these folds are all made
independent, not so much layered as merely simultaneous and entangled. The two
hands traverse the fretboard independently, freed from their conventional roles and
geographies. Either hand might at any moment be plucking, strumming, depressing
a string, scraping, sliding, or bending, and moreover, these actions are as likely to
appear behind or above an already-depressed fret as below. Joining this interface
between finger and fret and string are the actions of the tremolo bar (or “whammy”
bar), itself bent and folded by both hands and the occasional elbow, two footpedals
that bend and shape and twist pitch and timbre, and a further array of amplification
and processing modifications on two additional electronic strands. (Cassidy 2007)

56
 Deleuze’s Fold

The score displays an extended tablature notation of several parameters, which

indicates precise physical actions for each hand (notated on a separate six-line
staff indicating the six strings of the instrument), a tremolo bar (to be played
by both hands and the right elbow), and two external pedals (one processing
effects, the other a pitch pedal). The notation is entirely prescriptive, focusing
upon sound-producing actions: plucking, depressing, striking, and scraping the
strings with both hands, displayed in combination with glissando, bends, trills,
tremolos, and vibrato (and several sound-modifying actions from the tremolo
bar and pedals). All possible combinations of these layers—carefully mapped
out—imbue each gesture and prescribed movement with a set of musical data
defining its musical identity “in such a way that the gestural action is itself already
a musical object” (Cassidy speaking in Cassidy and Castro-Magas 2015, 03:29).

Gestural types
The two opening bars—see figure 1.3.1—display several of the gestural types
in TPM. One of the main actions is the finger percussion attack, which not­
ably differs from conventional guitar tapping technique. The right hand in the
two opening bars displays a few versions for this kind of attack, in combination
with glissandos and trills (see the right-hand stave in figure 1.3.1). Here, the first
attack displays an already strong musical identity, and not from guitar playing
techniques but from piano techniques: it is a piano staccato. As discussed with
the composer, this gestural type operates exactly like a piano staccato on the
physical level—that is, the dynamic direction affects the distance of prepara-
tion (the louder the attack, the longer the distance). However, sonically, it nota-
bly differs, as the open string resonates in the guitar once the finger is lifted
after the attack (unlike on a piano), as can be heard in video example 1.3.1a, in
which only the right hand is played.

Figure 1.3.1.

57

Figure 1.3.1. Aaron Cassidy, The Pleats of Matter, bars 1–2.

 Diego Castro-Magas

The left-hand stave in figure 1.3.1 introduces finger-depressing actions (which

feature the avoidance of the percussive component), with occasional plucking
actions behind the depressing finger (notated with arrows); see video example
1.3.1b. The tremolo-bar stave asks the right elbow to perform in coordination
with finger actions, as shown in video example 1.3.1c) —here, the combination
of right-hand and tremolo-bar staves makes up the right-arm action, for which
muscular coordination is much more complex than its conventional use in the
instrument. Finally, as a reassembly of the above-mentioned parameters, video
example 1.3.1d puts them all together, adding the entrance of effects in the sec-
ond bar at the bottom staff.

Figure 1.3.2.

Figure 1.3.2 shows a passage in bars 13–14, in which the right hand displays
more gestural types derived from finger percussion, such as tremolandos on
separate strings (also performed with plucked strings, the last time behind the
left hand). The left hand displays some actions of depressing fingers and trills
and, also, a case of polyphony on one single string (highlighted in the rectan-
gle): one finger performs a glissando from fret 11 to 16 while another finger
plays three staccato attacks, behind the glissando finger, on fret 10 (see video
example 1.3.2). This example of two-part polyphony on a single string, however,
is not the most extreme case.

58

Figure 1.3.2. Aaron Cassidy, The Pleats of Matter, bars 13–14.

 Deleuze’s Fold

Figure 1.3.3.

The highlighted passage within the rectangle in figure 1.3.3 shows the most
extreme case of polyphony on a single string, in which the actions on the fifth
string display a three-part polyphony (i.e. above, behind, and between two
depressing fingers). However, it remains more a “polyphony of actions” rather
than a polyphony of sounds, since the tempo and effects processing distort the
sonic results; see video example 1.3.3.

Figure 1.3.4.

Another kind of gesture type that comes out from the tablature notation is that
of sound-facilitating gestures. As an example, the joint rotations in bar 118: the
right hand performs a series of wrist rotations prompted by the material (note

59

Figure 1.3.3. Aaron Cassidy, The Pleats of Matter, bars 28–29.

Figure 1.3.4. Aaron Cassidy, The Pleats of Matter, bars 118–19.
 Diego Castro-Magas

the arrows in figure 1.3.4; see video example 1.3.4a). In the same passage, the
left hand, in addition, plays above the fretboard (video example 1.3.4b). Putting
together both hands, the result is the overall passage in video example 1.3.4c.
As for sound-modifying gestures, besides the action of the foot pedals the
possibilities derived from the use of the tremolo bar are fully explored in
Cassidy’s electric guitar writing. In addition to the use of the elbow (as seen
in figure 1.3.1 and video example 1.3.1c), the alternation of right- and left-hand
actions on the tremolo bar adds a new, choreographical dimension, as shown in
figure 1.3.5 (video example 1.3.5).

Figure 1.3.5.

In another example of its use, the tremolo bar can act as a textural background,
over which brief interjections of gestural units overlap, as seen in figure 1.3.6
(video example 1.3.6).

Figure 1.3.6.

60

Figure 1.3.5. Aaron Cassidy, The Pleats of Matter, bars 50–52.

Figure 1.3.6. Aaron Cassidy, The Pleats of Matter, bars 101–2.
 Deleuze’s Fold

Physicality
In an interview in October 2012, Daryl Buckley asked Cassidy about his pri-
oritisation of movement and about what Buckley terms Cassidy’s “‘nega-
tive’ approach to sound”—that is, the degree of indeterminacy of the sonic
results—“it emerged that Cassidy’s mother (who was his first music teacher)
trained him in piano and in Dalcroze’s method of eurhythmics,” a method that
teaches concepts of musical structure and expression to children by means
of movement: “From an early age, movement for Cassidy did not constitute a
separate response to sound, but was cognitively merged with the sonic events.
Movement was sound and vice versa. Cassidy has freely acknowledged that his
subsequent compositional focus on a gestural language bears the marks of this
early learning synthesis” (Buckley 2015, 21).
Body movement is thus central in Cassidy’s music, as a generator of energy by
itself, as he indicates in the interview with Buckley:

So for example, if I had something really simple like a maximal say UP–DOWN
. . . and we took the guitar fingerboard; if I have the entire space that is available
that movement generates one particular kind of energy, but when I think about
that movement in a small space, in a constricted space. It’s an energy. And so the
gesture is different if it happens at the top of the fingerboard or the bottom of the
fingerboard because of how it relates to the center of the body, changing those
energies. (Buckley 2015, 23)

There are several examples of this dispersion of energies, as approached

through physicality. Hands crossing, many times, can be seen as operating in
that way: disturbing the performer’s sensation of a centre of gravity and dis-
persing his or her energies. For example, in figure 1.3.7 (video example 1.3.7)
the highlighted rectangles show how occasionally the right hand crosses to play
at “fingerboard position,” destabilising the guitarist’s centre of gravity.

Figure 1.3.7.

In a similar vein, figure 1.3.8 displays a fragment in which the “dispersion/decen-

tralization” principle is in play to an even larger extent: the passage remains in a

61

Figure 1.3.7. Aaron Cassidy, The Pleats of Matter, bars 41–42.

 Diego Castro-Magas

crossed-hand position, with both hands in rather extreme positions. The frets
available for the right hand range from frets 4 to 8, while the left-hand actions
occur between frets 15 and 18. Also, both hands are confined to some particular
and limited kinds of gesture types. The right hand performs “finger percussion
tremoli” and “glissandi” only, whereas the left hand performs a range of pitch
bends, plucked strings, and, to a lesser extent, percussion attacks. In addition,
the right hand avoids the two upper strings, while the left hand avoids the two
central strings. See video example 1.3.8.

Figure 1.3.8.

All these limitations define the expressivity of these physical actions as marked
by the abstract delimitation of fret space (and its consequent dispersion of
energies) and not necessarily as sounds. As Cassidy puts it: “these are notes not
as ‘sounds’ but rather as ‘folds’” (Cassidy speaking in Cassidy and Castro-Magas
2015, 07:19). Here, the performer’s body—as folded by notation—is the place
for processes of delimitation and collision of energies and forces, making up
Cassidy’s own definition of musical “material” for TPM: “In other words, ‘mate-
rial’ is very rarely present as such, or at least, musical material is never present
as an object, as a defined and delimited event or entity. Instead, material is the
result of forces, flows and energies—movements of fingers, strings, elbows, and
feet—that push against boundary spaces on the instrument that are themselves
in flux. The collisions and tensions between these ‘movement spaces’ and topo-
graphical ‘boundary spaces’ force a folding” (Cassidy speaking in Cassidy and
Castro-Magas 2015, 04:13).

Sound, electronics, and separation

In The Fold, Deleuze (1993, 3) claims that the Baroque is an operative function
endlessly producing folds, folds that go to an infinity that is composed of two
stages: pleats of matter and folds in the soul. Those are represented in the allegory
of the Baroque home (figure 1.3.9).

62

Figure 1.3.8. Aaron Cassidy, The Pleats of Matter, bar 86.

 Deleuze’s Fold

Figure 1.3.9.

These two levels are connected by springs or ropes that move when matter trig-
gers vibrations at the lower extreme of the ropes through the windows (the five
senses) “at the lower level.” As Deleuze (1993, 4) states: “Leibniz constructs a
great Baroque montage that moves between the lower floor, pierced with win-
dows, and the upper floor, blind and closed, but on the other hand resonat-
ing as if it were a musical salon translating the visible movements below into
sounds up above.”
In TPM, Cassidy’s approach to sound and physicality (or their separation)
can be regarded as analogous with the two levels of the Baroque house. The
highly prescriptive notation of physical motions contrasts with the actual sonic
indeterminacy, which Cassidy puts forward as “a series of gaps—or indeed
folds—that separate prescribed actions from their potential sounding results”
through the electronic processing (Cassidy speaking in Cassidy and Castro-
Magas 2015, 14:23). It could be argued that this separation is indeed the rea-
son why TPM was written for electric guitar. The instrument displays a massive
chasm between sound-producing actions and sounding results, coming from
the various layers of electronic manipulation that the common performing
practice of this instrument portrays as its essence.
The electronic processing in video examples 1.3.1 to 1.3.8 was not designed by
the composer—these examples are meant to exemplify the physical aspects of
TPM—thus I used a multi-effects pedal Boss M-8 with effects choosen more or
less randomly. The sonic distance from “unplugged” to electronic processing
can be seen in the following video examples. Video examples 1.3.9a–c show the
same opening bars, from 1 to 11 (shown in figure 1.3.10). Video examples 1.3.9a–b
(recorded in a lesson with Daryl Buckley in Manchester, September 2014) illus-
trate my initial steps on the work on the first (borrowed) instrument I used in
learning the work, playing the aforementioned bars first unplugged and then
using the electromagnetic pickup. Video example 1.3.9c shows a rehearsal with
the composer at the University of Huddersfield, two weeks before the premiere
in February 2015 at the Electric Spring Festival, using full electronic processing
using MAX-MSP interface. The MAX patches contain elements of randomness
and unpredictability, marking the sonic indeterminacy of the work.

63

Figure 1.3.9. “The Baroque Home (an allegory)” in Deleuze’s The Fold, in which the upper
floor is “a closed, private room, decorated with a ‘drapery diversified by folds,’” whereas
on the lower floor there are “common rooms, with ‘several small openings:’ the five sens-
es” (Deleuze 1993, 5).
 Diego Castro-Magas

Figure 1.3.10.

64

Figure 1.3.10. Aaron Cassidy, The Pleats of Matter, bars 1–11.

 Deleuze’s Fold

Fold and performing practice

Violinist Mieko Kanno, who has discussed the challenges of prescriptive nota-
tion, writes on the performing issues of The Crutch of Memory, Cassidy’s piece
for “indeterminate solo string instrument”: “The work draws the performer’s
attention to a delicate balance between the parameters in the process of put-
ting-together like an ensemble of musicians, and to a continuous shift and
fluctuation of expressive power between them” (Kanno 2007, 252). In TPM,
Cassidy’s approach calls upon the expressivity of not only the process of re-as-
sembling parameters but also the dichotomy of the inside and the outside of
performance. In other words, in TPM—from a performer’s perspective—fold is
to physical as pleat is to sound. The physical–sonic separation results in a per-
forming paradigm in which musical expression comes out mainly from instru-
mental choreography, not exclusively from sound. Therefore, the physical
points towards the inside (fold) whereas sound to the outside (pleat).
As in the Baroque house, the upper floor of which is blind and closed, the
performer’s relationship to physicality in TPM is somehow deaf, as she or
he has to rely almost exclusively on muscular memory—as forced by the
unpredictability and sonic indeterminacy of electronic processing. Deleuze
claims the monad as “the autonomy of the inside” (1993, 28)—in parallel, in
TPM the performer’s focus is on the inside of muscular coordination. A descrip-
tion of a common sound-producing gesture from inside is likely to exemplify it:
playing two notes separated by a shift is commonly perceived, from outside,
as two actions. However, as seen from the inside of muscular coordination, it
implies four actions: (1) playing the first note; (2) relaxation; (3) the shift itself;
and (4) playing the second note. Rhythmically, it implies an unheard triplet
between the two notes, as seen in figure 1.3.11. Therefore, instead of learning
acoustic images, the performer is likely to perform muscular images.

Figure 1.3.11.

TPM’s notational paradigm—as highly prescribed as it is—evokes Deleuzian

elasticity of the bodies. Deleuze states, paraphrasing Leibniz: “A flexible or an
elastic body still has cohering parts that form a fold, such that they are not sep-
arated into parts of parts but are rather divided to infinity in smaller and smaller
folds that always retain a certain cohesion. Thus a continuous labyrinth is not

65

Figure 1.3.11. A sound-producing gesture (a left-hand shift between two notes) seen from
inside.
 Diego Castro-Magas

a line dissolving into independent points, as flowing sand might dissolve into
grains, but resembles a sheet of paper divided into infinite folds or separated
into bending movements, each one determined by the consistent or conspir-
ing surroundings” (Deleuze 1993, 6). Deleuze (1993, 6) refers to origami as “the
model for the sciences of matter.” From this perspective, TPM’s score operates
as a sort of multidimensional origami template, mapping the performer’s body
in highly individuated muscular terms. Therefore, its learning process and per-
forming practice become the exploration of a template, which is folded in time,
in a continuous line between fold (physical) and pleat (sound), determined by
their surroundings (electronics).
A full performance of the work can be seen in video example 1.3.12, as
recorded in October 2016 at the University of Huddersfield during my PhD
recital.

References
Buckley, Daryl. 2015. “From Body Schema Media Proceedings. Accessed 2 August 2016.
to Score: Creating Spatial Grammars in https://www.researchcatalogue.net/
Contemporary Electric Guitar Practice.” view/237688/237689.
PhD thesis, RMIT University, Melbourne. Deleuze, Gilles. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and
Cassidy, Aaron. 2007. The Pleats of Matter. the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley.
Electronic manuscript supplied by the Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
composer. Press. First published 1988 as Le Pli:
Cassidy, Aaron, and Diego Castro-Magas. Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris: Minuit).
2015. “The Pleats of Matter / The Kanno, Mieko. 2007. “Prescriptive Notation:
Matter of Pleats.” In The Dark Precursor: Limits and Challenges.” Contemporary
International Conference on Deleuze and Music Review 26 (2): 231–54.
Artistic Research, Ghent: Open-Access Rich-

66
 Variables,
Diagrams, Process
Pascale Criton
composer, Art&Fact

How may Deleuze’s way of thinking stimulate theoretical and pragmatic issues
pertaining to experimental musical practices? Deleuze, together with Guattari,
invites us to create processes that modify relationships, hierarchies, categories.
They further a subjectivating process and, I would say, relationships between
heterogeneous layers. However, I must acknowledge that, as a composer, my
intention is not to apply any philosophical concept in music. As Deleuze empha-
sises on several occasions, art doesn’t need philosophy and philosophy doesn’t
work on art, but some tasks are similar in both art and philosophy: encounters
may occur at the level of impersonal signs or at the level of affects that motiv-
ate us to act, to give shape and consistency to what might become ideas in our
proper fields. In this article, I will point out some aspects of Deleuze’s thought
that I consider relevant to music and present these two domains in relation to
each other. Certain matters held in common, such as an open space–time plane
for instance, resonate with my research and intensify a process based on experi­
mentation. This is the case when considering the role of variables, processes,
and diagrammatic patterns in working with the idea of consistency.
For many years—since the beginning of the 1980s—I have been mainly inter-
ested in sound variability and dynamical micro-variations of acoustic processes.
I often use scordatura, modifying the tuning of instruments such as piano, violin,
cello, or guitar, tuning them according to regular, irregular, or variable tempera­
ments. I am particularly interested in micrological aspects that raise questions
about our perceptions and brains. In particular, these concern the perception
of signs or signals: the features of sound, like those of lights and colours, are
an expression of a constant becoming through slight, tenuous, intensive, and
temporal differences. These differences can be situated in a single, contiguous
field of molecular frequencies or in heterogeneous connected dimensions, as
I also develop them in devices and architectural contexts. Among these differ-
ent environments (milieux), I take into account the possibilities of variation
offered by sound tools, whether these involve software, synthesis, micro­
intervallic systems, or “extended” instrumental techniques; all provide an
access into the acoustic variability of sound. In this article, I will focus on molec-
ular potentialities and expose a few aspects of the relations between variables,
diagrams, and process, particularly in Chaoscaccia (Criton and Walker 2013a), a
work for cello tuned in sixteenths of a tone.

67
 Pascale Criton

Consistency and individuation

I met Deleuze in the 1970s, just when he was seeking an understanding of
chromaticism in music, which was a formidable coincidence, as I was myself
particularly interested in microintervals and chromaticism (Criton 2005). The
seminars I attended from 1974 through 1987 allowed me to contribute to the
development of what Deleuze termed a “plane of consistency,” in relation to
the concepts of individuation, differentiation, and subjectivation, and how
these concepts resonate with a molecularisation of sound in music. At the level
of method, Deleuze used to pay particular attention to ways of “contracting
relations” and creating a floating state: gathering independent lines, consti-
tuting a restless nebula agitated with local contractions, with minute tensions
then extracted, displaced. Far from using a fixed frame, various levels of atten-
tion marked the process of thought—which from my point of view is not unlike
familiar movements in music composition. The idea is in between, a zigzag
between selection and reconnection, and the emerging problem concerns an
orientation in thinking or a differentiating process. There are conditions to bring
about consistency and enable active processuality, to allow the growth of con-
cepts and states of things beneath representation, beneath logos. There are oper-
ations for achieving the establishment of a theatre of properties and events: “a
fuzzy aggregate, a synthesis of disparate elements, is defined only by a degree of consistency
that makes it possible to distinguish the disparate elements constituting that aggregate”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 344, italics in original).
To briefly recall how such an intensive field of individuation operates within
disparate heterogeneous series and acquires specifications, let us recall the
model of the egg, often given as a point of reference as an intensive spatium yet
to acquire extension, prior to the organism’s extension or the body’s organisa-
tion. Deleuze describes how dynamic principles of reciprocity determine an
intensive individuating experience according to a complementary double move-
ment of organisation and qualifying: the differential forces will be integrated by
“taking divergent paths, splitting into dualisms, and following lines of differen-
tiation without which everything would remain in the dispersion of an unreal-
ized cause” (Deleuze 1988, 37–38). The relationships between series bring con-
sistency under the action of a differentiating process that consists of phenomena
of couplings between series, of internal resonance in the system, and of forced
movement as a magnitude beyond the basic series itself: “Dynamism thus com-
prises its own power of determining space and time, since it immediately incar-
nates the differential relations, the singularities and the progressivities imma-
nent in the Idea” (Deleuze 1994, 218).
As Deleuze expresses it in “What is the Creative Act?” (Deleuze 2007c), to
have ideas is to create space–times, whether these concern arts or philosophy.
The emerging nature of an intensive matrix is experienced on non-commu-
nicating edges, without an a priori structure: a disparate synthesis—like the
refrain, for instance—characterises the extraction of differences and expressive
materials. As opposed to a quantitative or qualitative difference between exist-
ing objects, the intensive difference is the result of a creative process. Difference is

68
 Variables, Diagrams, Process

an operator in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought; far from being a given state, it
is an emergent and productive operation (Criton 2015b).
The concepts of consistency and of an intensive spatium prior to effectuations
make sense when applied to music that concern, on one hand, the distribu-
tion of functions within an open space–time and, on the other, the produc-
tion of differences and their emergence in a thought or system of expression.
We can recognise here the two interconnected poles of a plane of consistency
(which can also be considered as a potential degree zero or an [in]consistency
plane!) and an organising plane (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 266). This latter
plane is not “audible” in itself, and like Proust or Balzac, who “describe . . . their
work’s plane of organisation or development, as though in a metalanguage”
(ibid.), musicians such as Stockhausen or Xenakis describe the sound forms of
their works as being “outside-time” (see Xenakis 1994, 68). These aspects of
Deleuze’s thought establish an operating ground for consistency operations
and individuations, stirring up “conditions for thinking” space–times, sound
molecularisation, and transversal processes (Criton 2015a). As Deleuze later
asserted, the task common to both music and philosophy is conceiving mater­
ials in relation with new forces, pointing out his interest for the “without iden-
tity” and previously unheard individuations of music (Deleuze 2007a, 297).

Acoustic multiplicity and composition with variables

Let us see how some preliminary conditions, on the musical side, might work
in a consistency process. Considering sound—whether produced by instru-
ments, bodies, machines, or natural elements—we are confronted by the
interrelation of many components and variables that cross each other. Sound
analysis and sound synthesis modelling has taught us that sound is complex:
sound has no materiality in itself; it is an ensemble of constraints and determi-
nations in constant evolution, a complex and dynamic multiplicity. Sound sig-
nals are conditioned by forces, energy, materials, and structures, each of which
generate a profile, together with the environment in which the signal is issued
and propagates: exterior, interior, following more or less densely, smooth or
porous surfaces by which it is reflected or absorbed. The materiality of sounds
events—that is to say their condition of existence as physical beings—com-
prises unstable and dynamic behaviours.
From the point of view of acoustic multiplicity—applied across a wide variety
of points—to compose music is to develop relations between the variables of
sound and to shape a musical space–time. What I call “composing with varia-
bles” is, then, to give consistency to relations between selected variables and to
conceive musical techniques without pre-established hierarchies. It includes
spatial and temporal data from the entire chain of determinations that han-
dle the production of a sound signal: from the initial conditions of its emis-
sion to the energy systems that maintain it; from its projection, diffusion, and
propagation to its reception in an acoustic space. Transitivity, more than stable
continuities, is of interest here, creating indiscernible areas and unpredictable

69
 Pascale Criton

couplings that allow one to abandon linear, restrictive models. To this end,
mapping and spatial-temporal diagrams may determine changes in variables
within a “milieu” and the modelling of dynamic events—thanks to either ges-
tural or techno-generated processes. This is where the interest lies in compos-
ing without a pre-established plan, with (in)-consistency, creating an interstice
for a degree zero.
For now, I will focus on microvariability and consider how a musical consist-
ency process may take shape within microintervallic systems.

Microvariability and microtunings

Microtunings take their whole meaning from stirring up sound sensibility,
modifying the relationships between timbre and pitch, re-inventing ways of
producing sound and instrumental techniques, generating unheard differ-
ences. Attention to the instrument is very important, and I work in close col-
laboration with instrumentalists to adapt tuning possibilities, ways of playing,
expression, and notation. I consider microtunings and extended techniques as
a means of accessing the acoustic variability of sound. Microintervallic systems
bring out new possibilities to modify sound, to organise it under the identity
of the note. It allows modulations, tiny differences in frequencies that favour
transitiveness, and emergent micro-acoustic properties, from all of which arise
new forms of expression.
Three different levels may be distinguished which are at work and intersect
with each other: a “distributive” level (organisation), a “physical” level (sound
properties), and an “intensive” level (expression).
Distributive aspects cannot be separated from acoustic qualities: the “dis-
tributive” level is directly linked to the micro-physical properties of sound-
determining timbral qualities, inharmonicity, and the acoustic system’s behav-
iours. Regarded this way, the analysis of temperaments reveals interesting and
different degrees of fusion, masking, and residual effects, which elaborate the
inter-relations of sound’s variables as a function of the physical behaviour of the
instruments and following the specificity of the tuning.
The “intensive” third level concerns time and expression. It takes shape
through a transverse process that crosses materiality, technique, and qualita-
tive differences in, for instance, the elaboration of specific styles (ways of play-
ing) designed for each instrument when tuned in a system, regular or irregular.
I propose to step through Chaoscaccia (2013), a solo work for a cello tuned in
sixteenths of a tone designed with a processual focus, and to point out these
aspects: from distribution to interpretation; from expression to technical
means and aesthetic matter.

70
 Variables, Diagrams, Process

Chaoscaccia, a gestural “shift process”

Chaoscaccia (Criton and Walker 2013a; 2017) explores the technical and expres-
sive possibilities of scordatura in sixteenths of a tone on the cello. This piece
was designed in close collaboration with cellist Deborah Walker and co-
authored with her. The work is based on a matrix involving changes of variables
and gestures that can be flexibly performed.
Chaoscaccia is based on a “shift process.” The basic concept relates to instabil-
ity and the sudden switch (shift) between different styles (ways of playing). The
route is determined by a gestural map that contains five stages: I—Rebonds; II—
Parlando; III—Multiphonies; IV—Polyphonies mutantes; V—Disparaissant.
Each style proceeds in an unstable and emerging fashion, without a fixed begin-
ning or end. The cycle can be performed either in a short, condensed form or
in a more extended one.
The cello is strung with four identical C strings (65.40 Hz) pitched a sixteenth
of a tone apart (see figure 1.4.1). This arrangement gives access to complex
string activity such as neighbouring harmonics, multiphonics, timbral instabil-
ity and high-partial variability. It makes it possible to play with slight differ-
ences that allow transitive access to noise and formant effects that are close to
vocal articulations.

Figure 1.4.1.

Experimenting with the degree zero of the

instrument
On string instruments, modified tunings bring one quickly to unknown areas;
alterations in usual tuning provoke a sense of rupture in which all markers slip
away. (We must remember that strings are not equipped with frets that make it
possible to control pitches; the touch is smooth.)
My close collaboration with Deborah Walker is an attempt to elaborate a
processual practice, an intermediate stage between codified music-making and
experimental listening experimentation. It is also attempts to move towards a
subjectivating experience that takes the time necessary to develop extended
techniques, to build modalities, to design together an idea, a form, an expres-

71

Figure 1.4.1. Pascale Criton and Deborah Walker, Chaoscaccia, cello tuning in sixteenths
of a tone (96 TET).
 Pascale Criton

sivity. That’s how we elaborated conceived styles, which are a mix of techniques
and expression.
Some principles were applied from the outset. First, sound is considered
to be a vibratory event that does not pre-exist in any absolute sense: it is an
aggregate of determinations whose conditions of production need to be built.
Second, the instrument is taken to be an “environment” (milieu), a transform-
able set of variables. And third, instrumental techniques play with variables,
bringing out new possibilities as well as new constraints, shifting habits and
requiring technical and expressive experiments to be stabilised.
In this sense, we work in a liminal domain of perception with what is yet per-
haps not music but can become music, looking at conditions for the emergence
of both sound and musical idea. Giving value to what may appear as a detail,
paying attention to modalities, undoing stratified habits—all these serve to
favour unknown relationships that allow a state or a sound-event to gain con-
sistency and provide access to new individuations and subjectivations.

Intensive gesture
No known repertoire can be played using this dense scordatura; it is necessary
to devise an instrumental technique that is adapted for this specific tuning. To
that aim, several abilities are privileged:

—Priority is given to dynamic expression, to time and consistency

processes, and to the development of a productive listening within
duration.
—Time is not metric but adjustable, related to floating variables and
degrees of uncertainty (elasticity).
—Gesture is above all productive, elaborating new connections
through the expression of the event consistency rather than submitting
itself to a fixed result. Kinaesthetic memory is involved in haptic
patterns (embodied gestures).
—Durations are valued for the dynamic imagination they carry.
Navigation within variables makes it possible to shape events and
fashion transitions; in view of this, the “right time” might be quite
different from the “exact time”!

Styles and extended techniques

A dozen styles are described precisely. They rely on extended techniques and
articulations developed through “ways of playing.” The variables involved in
each style are summarised in a table (figure 1.4.2), which is indexed and docu-
mented with explanations and video excerpts.

72
 Variables, Diagrams, Process

Figure 1.4.2.

Each style is represented by an abbreviation (or sign) used as a mnemonic

device to link and perform events, sequences, or movements. These are given
in a synchronic schema, “Abbreviated form” (figure 1.4.3); this is presented with
a diachronic schema, “Energetic diagram” (figure 1.4.4) that shows the shifting
progression. Together they give an overview of the piece from different per-
spectives that facilitates performing Chaoscaccia’s continuity in a flexible and
variable time.

Figure 1.4.3.

73

Figure 1.4.2. Pascale Criton and Deborah Walker, Chaoscaccia, “Parlando” style: “voice-
like expression obtained by sliding movements of the left hand combined with varying
pressure and multidirectional bow movements.”
Figure 1.4.3. Pascale Criton and Deborah Walker, Chaoscaccia, “Abbreviated Form.”
 Pascale Criton

Figure 1.4.4.

Time and subjectivation

Performing Chaoscaccia is a time-subjectivating experience based on a plural-
ity of states. Classified from noise to spectral qualities (see figure 1.4.4), the
different styles are latent and virtually coexistent. Each style, as we said previ-
ously, is a technical and expressive feature, but each is also characterised by
a certain energy and by a psychic state. To perform the polyphony by shifting
with flexibility is to pass from one state to another with imperceptible ruptures
while playing, as a bird makes use of hot and cold currents in its flight. Two ten-
dencies may emerge: shifting and progress. Both are active to varying degrees
(like Deleuze’s smooth and striated space–times). Performance is rather like
surfing; it’s a mobile state passing through different environments, crossing
different densities and couplings, operating through an energetic flow. As
Deborah Walker describes it, “My inner score is a reservoir of body energies
that I have progressively integrated, stored in my body. States that coexist and
do not conclude, because the transition from one to the other is made by shift-
ing, shiftando. It’s like operating in a multitrack mode, being a multitrack body”
(in Criton and Walker 2013b, 83, my translation).
Chaoscaccia took shape in parallel with a collective reading of Chaosmosis
(Guattari 1995) organised in 2011–13 by the review Chimères (Criton and Walker
2013b). Among the countless openings suggested in this luxuriant writing—
Guattari’s final book—one proposal stood out: “What does matter is the
mutant rhythmic impetus of a temporalisation able to hold together the heter-
ogeneous components of a new existential edifice” (Guattari 1995, 20).
Being several and encouraging the emergence of subjectivities and pathic
abilities (Guattari 1995, 25–26) are recurrent refrains in Deleuze and Guattari’s

74

Figure 1.4.4. Pascale Criton and Deborah Walker, Chaoscaccia, “Energetic Diagram.”
 Variables, Diagrams, Process

ethic and aesthetic. Beyond music and its capacity to enhance subjectivation,
an individuating processuality enables possibilities for deviating from the regu­
latory control of signs and circumstances to form free expressions by means of
autonomous signs. This is again the issue of a “machinic” affiliation engaged
in technical, material, and perceptual flows and also of subjective representa-
tions that do not comply with a dominant molarity, injecting a relationship of
creating and subjectivating openness to desire (Criton 2011, 235–36). It is on
this ethical, transverse, and category-crossing axis of heterogenesis, together
with a procedural vector through disparate, non-communicative environments
(milieux), that the issue of an individuating or deterritorialising differentiation
arises—in music, just as it does in every domain of the arts and in individuation.

References
Criton, Pascale. 2005. “L’invitation.” In published 1968 as Différence et répétition
Deleuze épars: Approches et portraits, edited (Paris: Presses universitaires de France).
by André Bernold and Richard Pinhas, ———. 2007a. “Making Inaudible Forces
55–56. Paris: Hermann. Audible.” In Deleuze 2007b, 156–60. First
———. 2011. “Nothing is Established presented 1978 as “Rendre audibles des
Forever.” Translated by Shane Lillis and forces non audibles” (IRCAM).
revised by Andrew Goffey. In The Guattari ———. 2007b. Two Regimes of Madness:
Effect, edited by Éric Alliez and Andrew Texts and Interviews 1975–1995. Edited by
Goffey, 235–50. London: Continuum. David Lapoujade. Translated by Ames
———. 2015a. “L’hétérogénèse sonore.” In Hodges and Mike Taormina. New York:
Gilles Deleuze: La pensée-musique, edited by Semiotext(e). First published 2003 as
Pascale Criton and Jean-Marc Chouvel, Deux régimes de fous: Textes et entretiens,
51–60. Paris: CDMC. 1975–1995 (Paris: Minuit).
———. 2015b. “Intensive Difference and ———. 2007c. “What is the Creative Act?”
Subjectivations.” Paper presented at the In Deleuze 2007b, 312–24. First delivered
conference “Gilles Deleuze and Félix 1987 as a lecture (FEMIS film school),
Guattari: Refrains of Freedom,” 24–26 distributed on video as Qu’est-ce que l’acte
April, Athens, Greece. de création?
Criton, Pascale, and Deborah Walker. 2013a. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987.
Chaoscaccia [musical score]. Available A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
from Art&Fact ([email protected]). Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian
———. 2013b. “Chaoscaccia.” Chimères 79: Massumi. Minneapolis: University of
77–88. Minneapolis Press. First published 1980
———. 2017. Chaoscaccia. Potlatch, P317, as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie
compact disc. 2 (Paris: Minuit).
Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault. Translated by Guattari, Félix. 1995. Chaosmosis. Translated
Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis.
Minneapolis Press. First published 1986 Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
as Foucault (Paris: Minuit). First published 1992 as Chaosmose (Paris:
———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Galilée).
Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Xenakis, Iannis. 1994. Kéleütha: Écrits. Paris,
Columbia University Press. First L’Arche.

75
 Performing Music,
Performing the Figure
Deleuze and Painting
Lois Fitch
Royal Northern College of Music

A remarkable trait of Deleuze’s monograph on the painter Francis Bacon is the

directness of its critique of the painter—himself famously direct in interviews
when reflecting on his work, and no less incisive in his observations than the
philosopher.1 Among the main concepts elaborated in Bacon’s discussions with
David Sylvester is sensation—appropriated and explored in Deleuze’s Francis
Bacon: Logique de la sensation (1981) and to a lesser extent in the virtually contem-
poraneous Mille Plateaux (Deleuze and Guattari 1980). It is nonetheless ironic
that Deleuze’s central dichotomy—between the figure and the figurative—is
so wholly dependent on Bacon’s status as a figurative painter; yet I would argue
that it is precisely this tension between figure and figurative that can illuminate
certain areas of musical practice, both compositional and performative.
Centuries of debate surrounding the relationship between painting and
music or, more broadly, between temporal arts and visual arts (“ut pictura poe-
sis”) cannot conjure, by definition, a notion of the figurative in music that is
not always already qualified: a Gestalt figure against a ground, a metaphor, or a
figuration that relies first on the ear and not the eye (as in Clément Jannequin’s
and Olivier Messiaen’s sounds of war and birdsong, respectively).2 Although
few would argue that music is incapable of arousing sensation very directly
for its listener, it is nonetheless filtered through notation and the perform-
er’s technique—the former the locus of the transaction between performer
and composer, and the latter between performer and audience. Unlike paint,
notation cannot conform to the likeness, to the image grasped by the recipient
of the experience. The listener, to grasp “the work” as a viewer can observe a

1 Deleuze’s book offers a close analysis of the paintings and, in its original French, was accompanied by
a catalogue of images, ensuring that the detail of the works themselves remained at the forefront of
Deleuze’s discourse and enabling the reader to engage with a clear exemplification of some Deleuzian
concepts that are elsewhere (in Anti-Oedipus, for example) rather more abstractly expressed. In fact,
Dana Polan (1994, 232) argues that “for all his discussion of the arts as conceptual, Deleuze understands
the concepts as quite physical operations, rather than as ideal abstractions.”
2 Horace’s Ars Poetica invites its reader to consider poetry with the same attention to detail as contem-
porary interpreters of painting afforded that visual medium. Lessing, in his Laocoön: An Essay upon the
Limits of Painting and Poetry ([1962] 1984), nuances this understanding by arguing that there is no verifia-
ble means to reconcile the perception that grasps visual art with relative immediacy with the perception
that encounters poetry, a temporal art, through time.

76
 Performing Music, Performing the Figure

painting in a gallery, must accept that “the work” is a complex concept in itself
and that musical works have traditionally been taken to be those generated by
composers, captured or represented in notation, and discussed in terms of for-
mal models and tonalities.3
While a number of composers (Mark-Anthony Turnage, Brian Ferneyhough,
Aaron Cassidy, Michael Finnissy, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf) have engaged with
Deleuze and/or Bacon during the creative process, and of course with perform-
ers (many in close collaborations from the inception of a work), it is not typical
for musicological or philosophical exegeses to focus on what performers bring
to realisation throughout their own “creative process.”
Deleuze’s analysis of Bacon is pertinent to the evaluation of musical expres-
sion precisely because it is the abstraction away from image per se, in favour
of an exploration of the viscerality manifest in the painter’s work, that leads to
the conceptualisation of sensation, subverting the typical discourse around the
purely visual in painting. The figurative is extensively critiqued and overhauled
by the concept of figure, which supplants “appearance” with sensation, as char-
acterised in Bacon’s famous claim that he “attempt[s] to bring the figurative
thing up onto the nervous system more violently and more poignantly” (quoted
in Sylvester 1987, 12). Certain musicological models have implicitly privileged
composition over performance, not least Theodor Adorno’s (2006) distinc-
tion between musical production (composition) and reproduction (perform-
ance). Although the very title of Adorno’s essay—Towards a Theory of Musical
Reproduction—suggests a binary opposition that is highly uncharacteristic of his
work, its substance elaborates a complex argument around musical notation
and understanding, requiring the performer to appreciate the detail of musi-
cal parameters in their proper historical context. Hence there arises a typically
Adornian paradox: interpretation will always be unequal to the work; however,
interpretation is a necessity if music is to express its immanent qualities, those
precisely not ascribable to any kind of parametric or formal “laws.” This is what
Deleuze might, in another context, refer to as making invisible forces visible.4
However much Adorno admits that there is something inexpressible about
musical performance and what it conveys, he arguably underplays the scope for
performer artistry, invention, and independence in its own right: for him per-
formance is always ultimately reproduction. By contrast, Deleuze’s Bacon offers
a reading of musical performance as a force of bodily production: the concept
of figure is to be understood as a harnessing of expressive force and sensation
at every stage of the creative process (and not simply as another formal model pro-
posed as a surrogate for innovation) (Deleuze 2003, 56). In other words, one
might argue that performers do not so much reproduce (in Adorno’s sense) as
harness their own creative energies, just as notation might be considered the
composer’s harnessing of creative forces.

3 Hence Adorno’s concept of the expert (structural) listener (Paddison 1993, 209–13).
4 “What fascinates Bacon is not movement, but its effect on an immobile body: heads whipped by the
wind, or deformed by an aspiration, but also all the interior forces that climb through the flesh. To make
the spasm visible” (Deleuze 2003, xi).

77
 Lois Fitch

The remainder of this chapter sets out three case studies, beginning with
well-established territory (Deleuze’s appraisal of Bacon) and moving towards
less well-trodden ground (musical performance “read” according to concepts
explored in Deleuze’s Logic of Sensation).

Case study 1: Francis Bacon

The concept of the figure in Bacon is distinct from, and yet wholly dependent
on, the figurative, the body, or the representation (Deleuze and Bacon inter-
change terms). Simply put, Bacon aspires to “[unlock] areas of sensation other
than simple illustration of the object” (Sylvester 1987, 56), thus acknowledging
his status as a figurative painter in a post-photographic age. As D. H. Lawrence
expresses it: “once you have got photography, it is a very, very difficult thing to
get representation more true-to-life” (Deleuze 2003, 88; see also Lawrence 1936,
578–79). Most importantly, Bacon recognises that the contemporary experi-
ence of appearance amounts to a constant “assault” from lens-based media,
changing the way we see forms, bodies, and artefacts around us: these all-perva-
sive images are “what is seen, until finally one sees nothing else . . . [photographs]
impose themselves upon sight and rule over the eye completely” (Deleuze
2003, 91, original italics).
Bacon refers often to concepts of the “real” or “fact”: the body as it actually is,
rather than how it might be configured in a conventional representation that
“tells a story in a long diatribe through the brain” (ibid., 18). For example, his
emphasis on the colour blue in his paintings of meat reflects the “fact” of the
colour of the blood in the flesh as it hangs in the butcher’s shop window: he
does not paint it red, which would be a fiction (ibid., 26). Bacon often painted
from photographs rather than models, flirting with the furthest reaches of that
which he was resisting: “the more artificial you can make it, the greater chance
you have of its looking real” (Sylvester 1987, 148).5 Deleuze (2003, 87) uses this
as an opportunity to play on the double meaning of the French word cliché,
both photographic exposure and an overused expression: “a whole category of
things that could be termed ‘clichés’ . . . fills the canvas, before the beginning.”
The concept of the figure is thus evolved as a means of critiquing the figura-
tive (Sylvester 1987, 91). Where the figurative is tired and clichéd, the figure is
flesh, or the capturing of forces acting on and from within the body (Deleuze
2003, 22). Bacon’s canvases are notable for the stark surrounds of the figure(s),
often little more than a geometric “frame,” whether a cube, parallelepiped, or
angular throne (the Pope series). Against this apparently constricting force, the
figure is characteristically twisted, grimacing, and smeared (Bacon used socks,
his bare hands, or handfuls of paint thrown at the canvas to effect strokes or
flicks of paint across the features). In a number of paintings, most notably
in the famous Pope series, the figure is depicted screaming, though at what
remains undisclosed. According to Deleuze, Bacon thus creates a counter-flow
of forces: “the body is not simply waiting for something from the structure,

5 See Interview 6 for expanded discussion of this point.

78
 Performing Music, Performing the Figure

it is waiting for something inside itself, it exerts an effort upon itself in order
to become a Figure. . . . it is the body that attempts to escape from itself . . .”
(Deleuze 2003, 15).
The surrounding frame, together with the stubborn resistance of the figu-
rative “cliché” to deformation (ibid., 89),6 limits the proliferation of the forces
emerging from the figure and prevents them from sprawling into total abstrac-
tion.7 The meat carcasses perform this force-limiting function in Painting
1946, in which a wide grimace can be seen below an open umbrella flanked by
the carcasses. Of the image itself, Bacon recalls that “I was trying to paint an
image of a bird alighting on a field” from which the complex figure—a kind
of composite of the lower face and teeth, the shadow that disappears under
the umbrella, and the umbrella and carcasses themselves—emerged (Sylvester
1987, 11). Deleuze refers to Bacon’s own description of the mouth here as a
“wide Sahara smile.” The painter argues that “you suddenly see . . . that the
mouth could go right across the face. And in a way you would love to make
a Sahara of the appearance—to make it so like, yet seeming to have the dis-
tances of the Sahara” (Deleuze 2003, 56). The paradox is an important one for
the discussion that follows: for Deleuze, the further Bacon pushes towards total
abstraction through the lines of force emanating from figures (“the distances
of the Sahara” from figuration), the more strongly and sensately is the figural
image returned to the viewer’s “nervous system”; thus, the figure is dependent
both on the figurative or on representation—since it is its undoing, a condition
of its escape from itself—and complete abstraction, the absolute limit of the
figurative painter’s discipline.

Case study 2: Brian Ferneyhough

As observed earlier, it is quite common for composers to appropriate models
and concepts from philosophers and artists in order to explicate aspects of their
creative practice. Brian Ferneyhough’s articulation of his own practice using the
conceptual language of Deleuze’s reading of Bacon at the outset of the 1980s
is significant for the numerous parallels it points up between the painter’s and
composer’s critical attitudes to contemporary artistic imperatives and expres-
sions. Ferneyhough perceives an analogous “assault” performed by clichés on
musical listeners, going so far as to polemicise against a number of German
composers identified under the collective term Neue Romantik,8 describing
“much recent music [that] relies heavily on variants of a rather limited reper-
toire of gestural types calculated to energise the receptive and interpretational

6 Deleuze (2003, 63) argues that “But great painters know that it is not enough to mutilate, maul or paro-
dy the cliché in order to obtain . . . a true deformation.”
7 “This first figuration cannot be completely eliminated; something of it is always conserved” (Deleuze
2003, 97).
8 See his reference to “the Neue Romantik tendency (Rihm, von Bose, von Schweinitz et al.)” (Ferneyhough
1995, 21). More usually, this stylistic tendency towards the re-establishment of musical expression
through a gestural language whose currency intentionally courts references to long-established styles
and (Romantic) expressive devices, in contradistinction to serialism and the European avant-garde in
the 1950s and 1960s, has been called Neue Einfachheit [New Simplicity].

79
 Lois Fitch

faculties of the listener in a culturally quite specific fashion” (Ferneyhough

1995, 23).9 He argues that “the gesture usually manifests clear-cut boundaries;
it has certain object-like qualities” (386). Accordingly, Ferneyhough “borrows”
Deleuze’s terminology in order to present his own critique of the clichéd fig-
urations he perceives, but like Bacon he does not seek to jettison the figura-
tive (gesture) so much as deform it, envisaging the preservation of the tension
between it and the figure to be at the heart of his own composition: “a gesture
whose component defining features . . . display [this] tendency towards escap-
ing from that specific context in order to become independently signifying rad-
icals, free to recombine, to ‘solidify’ into further gestural forms may, for want of
other nomenclature, be called a figure” (26, italics original).10 Furthermore he
suggests that “the idea of the figure is locked, for me, precisely at the intersec-
tion of the defined, concretely apperceptible gesture and the estimation of its
‘critical mass,’ its energic volatility” (37). He proposes a “mode of composition
which enhances the affective gesture with the energy to productively dissolve
itself in a quasi-analytical fashion” (41). His words clearly echo Bacon’s obser-
vation that “there is the appearance and there is the energy within the appear-
ance. And this is an extremely difficult thing to trap . . . you have to try and trap
the energy that emanates from [the model]” (Sylvester 1987, 175).
A pertinent musical example of the “productive dissolution” of figuration
into the furthest reaches of parametric abstraction can be found in the open-
ing bars of “Song 4,” in Ferneyhough’s Etudes transcendantales (1982–85) (figure
1.5.1).

Figure 1.5.1.

9 One commentator says of Rihm that he “feels able to utilise traditional gestures and usages when ap-
propriate, yet places them in contexts that are anything but traditional. . . . ‘Musical freedom’ is a phrase
that crops up frequently in . . . Rihm’s own discussions of his music. . . . it means the freedom to pursue
his own creative path, removed from the burden of historical and aesthetic constraints. . . . Yet such an approach
by no means excludes historical or programmatic associations and allusions, and the enormous list of
Rihm’s works is filled with titles (especially in his pieces from the late 1970s and early 80s) that seem
designed to evoke specific cultural or emotional references, as if emphasising the intuitiveness of his methods.
Similarly the music itself can contain moments, events, that rely heavily upon some external reference,
perhaps tonal usage, to make a point . . .” (Clements 2000, 12; my italics).
10 Ferneyhough (1995, 26) also suggests here that “the ideology of the holistic gesture . . . be dethroned in
favour of a type of patterning which takes greater account of the transformative and energic potential of
the subcomponents of which the gesture is composed.”

80

Figure 1.5.1. Opening of “Song 4,” Etudes transcendantales. Even without a description
of the parametric processes applied to the first gesture in order to generate the second,
third, and fourth in this sequence, a short study of the notation will indicate some trans-
formation is underway, and listening confirms the impression, articulating as clear a “line
of force” in the flute part as any heard in Ferneyhough’s music. Brian Ferneyhough: Etudes
transcendantales. Edition Peters No.7310. © 1987 by Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition
Limited, London. Reproduced by Permission. All Rights Reserved.
 Performing Music, Performing the Figure

This is the kind of texture that Ferneyhough (1995, 251) refers to as “wiped over,
in the Baconian sense”: the generation of sensation in the music is effected
by the activity of “lines of force” applied to independent musical parameters
(rhythm, register and so on) such that the listener is able to perceive a trajec-
tory towards the deformation of the initially presented gesture. To what extent
Ferneyhough’s model draws heavily on much longer-established motivic-de-
velopmental thinking is a legitimate critical question, although when listening
to the music it is striking that of all the aspects of his appropriated Deleuzo-
Baconian discourse, it is the audible “line of force” enacted through progres-
sive erosion of gestures that is most immediately affective. A similar strategy is
observable on a larger scale in the opening bars of the chamber orchestra piece
Carceri d’Invenzione I (1982), with its “assault” on the ear through extreme high
and low registers: the directness of the effect on the listener’s nervous system
is deliberately sought after, the composer keen to ensure a performing and lis-
tening experience at the limits of tolerability.

Case study 3: performance

In his monograph on Bacon, Ernst van Alphen (1992) has argued that critics
have been too quick to focus on Bacon’s figures as forms, locating the interest
of the figure in the artwork itself (as a document, read as a narrative “scene”)11 at
the expense of the role of the viewer (and thus the painting’s “effect”). Alphen
(1992, 9–10) writes that:

The . . . more traditionally art historical [vein of Bacon criticism] avoids the issue
of effect in an even more blatant manner. Here, the focus on visual art in terms of
the history of forms and motifs marks a profound denial of what this particular
visual art most acutely is: an act, a performance, and an event. The insistence on the
act of painting in terms of colour, shape and composition, covers up the denial of
“painting according to Francis Bacon”: its particular moving quality—in the literal
sense.12

Despite that, Alphen’s critical appreciation of Bacon’s work is problematic, his

conceptualisation of Bacon’s works as performance or event, emphasising the
role of the viewer/audience in experiencing figural force, has much in common
with a reading of Ferneyhough’s approach to musical performance (and also
with his critics’ disapprobation of Ferneyhough’s notational practice, which
typically overloads the performer with information, rendering elements of a
piece practically “unrealisable”). The composer confronts the performer with
the impossible or even the unreasonable in order to induce heightened per-
formance intensity, engaging the body and mind at a level of commitment and

11 Nevertheless, this is debatable in reality. Certainly Deleuze does not do this, nor Sylvester. Deleuze’s
lengthy discussion of deformation in Bacon and its qualitative difference from deformation as violence
done to the figure testifies to the extent to which he is mindful of Bacon’s own resistance to the “story,”
as well as the latter’s concern that the viewer experience the impact of violence done to the figure as
sensation. See note 6, above.
12 Again, Alphen overlooks this very element of Deleuze’s critique.

81
 Lois Fitch

concentration that stretches the performer’s prior experience and technical

ability and the limitations of the instrument.
However, despite the obvious discomfort and physical effort expended, per-
ceiving Ferneyhough’s performer as “Baconian” (even if Alphen can refer to
Bacon’s technique as a performance) collapses the musical expression straight
back into representation or storytelling (the “predicament”).13 Instead, it is the
performer’s physical and psychological discomfort when presented with and
enacting this thick, unremitting notation that elicits the sensuous response.
According to its performers, Ferneyhough’s music demands similar creative
immersion in the pursuit of abstraction to its furthest reaches in order to return
to performance more incisively and viscerally. This kind of movement is dis-
tinct from music’s movement in time: it is the “distance of the Sahara” that the
performer must travel to master the work. Percussionist Steven Schick (1994)
describes breaking down the complex layers of notation into separate param-
eters while learning Bone Alphabet,14 effectively (even quite literally) endorsing
Bacon’s efforts to “go right out from abstraction” to return to performance
more incisively, and with more bodily, visceral energy (Sylvester 1987, 12): “I
learned the left hand precisely at MM 46.3 and then, thinking that line as the
primary rhythmic voice, I guessed where the upper triplets would fall. I then
taped myself playing the lower line on my leg” (Schick 1994, 140). His account
describes an experience that resonates emphatically with Bacon/Deleuze’s
concept of sensation in the effect of the paintings and with Alphen’s character-
isation of a “moving quality” in Bacon’s works: “In the learning process, rhythms
must be calculated and reduced to some potable form, the turbulence of the
microforces of form must be generalized, and various kinds of inane mnemon-
ics must be employed simply to remember what to do next. An artificial skin of
practical considerations must be stretched tightly across the lumps of a living,
breathing piece. Performance reinflates the piece, fine-tuning its formal gyro-
scope, revivifying polyphonic structures, and packaging the intellectual energy
of the score into meaningful physicality” (Schick 1994, 133).
Schick’s evaluation of his learning and performing experience testifies to the
performer’s total immersion in the network of forces that Ferneyhough insti-
gates through his treatment of material and that necessitates the performer
becoming part of the creative process in the “extended practice phase” rather
than energetically reproducing the life force of a piece considered to be locked
into and entirely derivable from purely compositional material. Although
Ferneyhough has appropriated Deleuze’s figurative-figure dynamic and its con-
comitant concepts of energy and force to describe his compositional approach,
Schick clearly considers performance to be the forum for “meaningful physi-

13 Ferneyhough himself is ambivalent on this point. He originally subtitled the cello piece Time and Motion
Study II (1973–76) “Electric Chair Music,” but then retracted the subtitle on account of its being “far too
explicit for the final interpretational approach” (Ferneyhough 1995, 215); and yet he appears to contra-
dict this when he adds that “the cellist who sings, ‘plays’ two foot pedals, and reads complex notation
on up to five systems simultaneously, is certainly tortured throughout. We have yet to see if he survives”
(ibid., 215–16).
14 For solo percussion (with seven different sound sources), composed 1991–92.

82
 Performing Music, Performing the Figure

cality.” He argues that “performance, then, is a real-time explosion of the rich

complexity of a work: what took months to learn takes only minutes to play.
Kinetic energy, embedded in a piece during an extended practice phase, burns—like a
kind of musical lignite—as the heat and light of a performance” (Schick 1994,
133, my emphasis). Finally, the terms in which he recounts his own encounter
with learning this material describe both the resistance offered up by the nota-
tion, and his role in providing a counterforce to it: “Ironically, in a score which
seems so rigorously determined, certain idiosyncratic decisions on my part in
the first days of practice reveal a path through the thicket of Ferneyhough’s
notation that inevitably gives my interpretation of Bone Alphabet a wholly per-
sonal and rather intuitive aura” (ibid., 134).

Conclusion
Applying Deleuze’s reading of sensation in Bacon’s work to Ferneyhough’s
music, it is possible to interpret comments made by the composer himself, not
least drawing out the clear appropriation of concepts that the composer per-
forms in order to explicate aspects of his own musical-critical agenda. However,
in limiting oneself to this observation one passes over the more intriguing, less
explored possibility of investigating how performers, listeners, and the act of
performance can be interpreted through (as much as lend their own ongoing
critical perspectives to) Deleuze’s Bacon and the notions of figural force and
sensation. Deleuze understands the potential for Bacon’s paintings to recon-
ceive interpretation and appearance so assaulted by lens media, so much so as
to reinvent them altogether. Bacon explains, “What one longs to do above all, I
think, is to reinvent appearance, make it stranger, and more exciting. . . . But it’s
a hair’s breadth thing, particularly nowadays. If you go too far, you just fall into
abstraction. . . . All painting, well all art, is about sensation. Or at least it should
be. After all, life itself is about sensation” (Bacon quoted in Peppiatt 2015, 28).
Attempting to execute a performance of Ferneyhough’s work by learning the
extraordinary detail of the notation, using techniques such as Schick recalls
to obtain as close a reading as is humanly possible, the performer of necessity
enacts a figural deformation—strange and exciting—of the piece. Although
there has been considerable debate around the “work,” and what exactly its
status is in music, a Deleuzian argument places it in the living performance,
as a “real-time explosion” (akin to Bacon’s aim of “hitting the nervous system
directly”). Though Kant, for example, refers to music’s “transitory aspect,”
(Stone-Davis 2011, 155), influencing the ambivalence towards the art-form dis-
played by many prominent philosophers (including Hegel), Deleuze’s concept
of the figure as perceivable in musical performance turns the Kantian view on
its head: through the figural, music is enabled to “play with feelings,” to offer a
transient experience as an authentically sensate one. Indeed, there is no neg-
ative implication in Schick’s comment that “what took months to learn takes
only minutes to play”; for the committed creator-performer, this is not a failing
of his or her art, but precisely its virtue.

83
 Lois Fitch

References
Alphen, Ernst van. 1992. Francis Bacon and the Lawrence, D. H. 1936. “Introduction
Loss of Self. London: Reaktion Books. to These Paintings.” In Phoenix: The
Adorno, Theodor W. 2006. Towards a Theory Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence,
of Musical Reproduction: Notes, a Draft and 551–84. London: Heinemann.
Two Schemata. Edited by Henri Lonitz. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. (1962) 1984.
Translated by Wieland Hoban. London: Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting
Polity Press. First published 2001 as Zu and Poetry. Translated by Edward Allen
einer Theorie der musikalischen Reproduktion: McCormick. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Aufzeichnungen, ein Entwurf und zwei University Press. First published 1766 as
Schemata (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp). Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Malerei
Clements, Andrew. 2000. “Without und Poesie (Berlin: Voss). This translation
Maps.” Liner note for Wolfgang Rihm: first published 1962 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-
Streichquartette III, VIII, V, performed Merrill).
by the Arditti String Quartet, 12–13. Paddison, Max. 1993. Adorno’s Aesthetics of
Montaigne, Auvidis/Naïve, MO 782134, Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University
compact disc. Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1981. Francis Bacon: Logique Peppiatt, Michael. 2015. Francis Bacon in Your
de la sensation. Paris: Éditions de la Blood: A Memoir. London: Bloomsbury.
Différence. Translated by Daniel W. Polan, Dana. 1994. “Francis Bacon: The
Smith as Deleuze 2003. Logic of Sensation.” In Gilles Deleuze
———. 2003. Francis Bacon: the Logic of and the Theater of Philosophy, edited by
Sensation. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea
London: Continuum. First published as Olkowski, 229–54. New York: Routledge.
Deleuze 1981. Schick, Steven. 1994. “Developing an
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1980. Interpretative Context: Learning Brian
Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie Ferneyhough’s Bone Alphabet.” Perspectives
2. Paris: Minuit. Translated by Brian of New Music 32 (1): 132–53.
Massumi as A Thousand Plateaus: Stone-Davis, Férdia. 2011. Musical Beauty:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: Negotiating the Boundary between Subject and
University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Object. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books.
Ferneyhough, Brian. 1995. Collected Writings. Sylvester, David. 1987. The Brutality of Fact:
Edited by James Boros and Richard Interviews with Francis Bacon. 3rd ed.
Toop. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic London: Thames and Hudson.
Publishers.

84
 Machining the Voice through
the Continuous Variation
Paolo Galli
Royal Conservatoire Antwerp; University of Antwerp; Orpheus Institute (docARTES)

Introduction
In an article entitled “A-Ronne,” Luciano Berio ([1991] 1995) mentions an epi-
sode narrated by the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson:

In Africa, there was a missionary who complained of the fact that the indigenous
people were always naked. “But you are naked too,” one of them said to him one day,
pointing to his face. “Sure, but it is just my face.” “Well,” was the reply, “for us the
face is everywhere.” The same goes for poetry, Jakobson concludes: the face of poetry
is everywhere, every linguistic element can be converted into a poetic figure. (Berio
[1991] 1995, 103)1

In this regard, according to Deleuze and Guattari, it is impossible to conceive

a separation between linguistics and stylistics. Following Labov’s thesis ([1972]
1991), the philosophers refuse to consider language as a homogeneous and
self-contained system of invariants not conditioned by pragmatic variables.
On the contrary, pragmatics is acknowledged as an intrinsic factor to language
itself that, for this reason, is consistently crossed by flows of “continuous vari-
ation” determining a style (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 94). Second, Deleuze
and Guattari emphasise the social character of language, stating, “a style is not
an individual psychological creation but an assemblage of enunciation” (97).
In this sense, utterances are always generated by a “collective assemblage”
(88) implying the presence and connection of heterogeneous elements that
give language a polyphonic connotation. With this in mind, a writer’s style can
therefore be characterised by the attempt to expand the limits of the stand-
ard language by making “the standard language stammer, tremble, cry, or even
sing” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 176). This procedure “involves placing all lin-
guistic, and even nonlinguistic, elements in variation” (Deleuze and Guattari
1987, 98). Therefore, all the phonological, syntactic, semantic components can
be affected by a process of continuous variation, leading to the creation of what
the French philosophers called “a language within a language” (97).
If every linguistic element contributes to the development of a literary
style, vocal music, in turn, will be stylistically determined by “the possibility
of exploring and absorbing musically the full face of language” (Berio 2006,
50), thus interacting with all the linguistic dimensions. In this perspective,

1 Except were stated otherwise, all translation are my own.

85
 Paolo Galli

the dissemination of new linguistic theories, the improvement of vocal and

instrumental techniques, and the development of new technologies enabled
a composer such as Luigi Nono to establish in his compositions an interaction
with all the linguistic elements, especially focusing on the phonetic features of
a text, thus emphasising the timbral dimension of the language. As stated by
Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 96): “Only when the voice is tied to timbre does it
reveal a tessitura that renders it heterogeneous to itself and gives it a power of
continuous variation: it is then no longer accompanied, but truly ‘machined.’”
More precisely, a “musical machine” (ibid.)—that is, the set of lines of varia-
tion to which heterogeneous musical elements are subjected—changes the
traditional relationship between voice and instruments by placing them on the
same plane and therefore implementing their merger.

Omaggio a György Kurtág

Nono’s Omaggio a György Kurtág (1983/1986) (see Nono 1996) can be considered
as a paradigmatic example of such a musical machine. The lines of variation
conceived by Nono act as catalysts for those musical procedures by means of
which a voice can be processed as an instrument and an instrument can be
processed as a voice. To better understand this idea, it might be useful to briefly
focus on the genesis of this work. The text of this composition, conceived by
Nono as “purely acoustic material” (Ramazzotti 2007, 198), is entirely based
on the phonemes that constitute the forename and surname of Hungarian
composer György Kurtág. While “cutting all semantic ties with the poetic
text” (ibid.), this composition implies a sound semantics whose roots can be
traced in the intense relationship between the two composers. “There are com-
posers—and Kurtág is among them,” Nono asserts, “among whom you can notice
a way of inventing, a way of finding the unknown” (Nono 2007, 213). What Nono
called the “anxiety for the unknown” (ibid.) prompted him to create Omaggio a
György Kurtág: the idea of exploring a limit, or, in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987,
273) words, “a zone of indetermination” within which “something or someone
is ceaselessly becoming-other (while continuing to be what they are)” (Deleuze
and Guattari 1994, 177), giving rise to musical textures where a voice never
ceases to become an instrument and an instrument to become a voice.
The phonemes that constitute the name of György Kurtág are sung by the
alto through a variety of vocal techniques ranging from breathing to sounds of
fixed pitch. The use of a specific phoneme during the vocal emission is strictly
connected to the necessity of modifying the shape of the oral cavity in order to
obtain subtle timbral variations.
Figure 1.6.1 presents a phonetic transcription of the text fragments used by
Nono. The boldface type has been used to mark the appearance of the entire
forename of the Hungarian composer. The fragments of his forename and
surname are in italics, whereas the underlined parts show the vocalic pattern
of his forename and surname, arranged so as to follow the original order. The
phonetic transcription (based on the symbols of the International Phonetic
Alphabet) is shown in the lower row.

86
 Machining the Voice through the Continuous Variation

Figure 1.6.1.

The given name and family name of the Hungarian composer use five conson-
ants whose features can be summarised as follows:

Concerning the manner of articulation, the consonants [ɟ], [k], [t], [ɡ] are
plosives. A plosive consonant is produced by “a temporary occlusion of the
phonatory tract. This occlusion . . . is then followed by an abrupt re-open-
ing of the channel due to the expiratory air pressure” (Maturi 2009, 32).2

As pointed out by Marinella Ramazzotti (2007, 197), Nono evokes and

emphasises the sonic characteristics of plosive consonants through the use
of loud sound impulses emitted by wind instruments.

2 Szende classifies the consonant /ɟʝ/ as a palatal affricate. However, he asserts that “in formal style” the
previously mentioned consonant is “realized mostly as a palatal stop . . . [ɟ]” (International Phoenetic
Association 1999, 106). Siptár and Törkenczy (2007) agree in considering this consonant a palatal stop,
y
notating it by the symbol /d /. In this essay I will use the following symbol of the International Phonetic
Alphabet: [ɟ].

87

F igure 1.6.1. Luigi Nono, Omaggio a György Kurtág. The text fragments used.
 Paolo Galli

Furthermore, both the forename and the surname of the Hungarian com-
poser are characterised by the presence of the trill [r], whose sound, gen-
erated by a “fast alternation of short phases of occlusion and explosion . . .
[that] produces the effect of vibration” (Maturi 2009, 35) within the oral
cavity, is evoked by the flute and the clarinet by means of flutter tongue
and trills.

Regarding the articulation of the consonants, the use of two different conson-
ants (implying a different degree of stricture of the vocal tract and/or a dif-
ferent place of articulation) to filter the sound of the voice (thus obtaining a
subtle timbral variation) is evidenced by intoning the phonemes [r]-[ɟ] and [r]-
[t] on the same pitch. Figure 1.6.2 shows, using the criteria of the International
Phonetic Alphabet (International Phonetic Association 1999, 104), the inton-
ation of the abovementioned couples of phonemes on a single pitch through
the entire piece.

Section 1 2 3 4
Phonemes [r] [ɟ] [k] [t] [ɡ] [ɟ] [r] [ɟ] [r] [t]
Manner of articulation Trill Plosive Plosive Plosive   Plosive Plosive Trill Plosive Trill Plosive  
Place of articulation Dental   Palatal Velar   Dental Velar Palatal Dental   Palatal Dental   Dental
Voiced/Voiceless Voiced Voiced Voiceless Voiceless Voiced Voiced Voiced Voiced Voiced Voiceless

Section 6 7 9
Phonemes [ɟ] [r] [ɟ] [t] [ɡ] [r] [t]
Manner of articulation Plosive Trill Plosive Plosive   Plosive Trill Plosive  
Place of articulation Palatal Dental   Palatal Dental Velar Dental   Dental
Voiced/Voiceless Voiced Voiced Voiced Voiceless Voiced Voiced Voiceless

Section 10
Phonemes [r] [ɟ] [r] [t] [ɡ] [ɟ] [r] [ɟ]
Manner of articulation Trill Plosive Trill Plosive   Plosive Plosive Trill Plosive
Place of articulation Dental   Palatal Dental   Dental Velar Palatal Dental   Palatal
Voiced/Voiceless Voiced Voiced Voiced Voiceless Voiced Voiced Voiced Voiced

Section 11 12 13 14
Phonemes [k] [r] [t] [ɡ] [ɟ] [r] [ɟ]
Manner of articulation Plosive Trill Plosive   Plosive Plosive Trill Plosive
Place of articulation Velar   Dental   Dental Velar Palatal Dental   Palatal
Voiced/Voiceless Voiceless Voiced Voiceless Voiced Voiced Voiced Voiced

Figure 1.6.2.

Regarding the vowels, the given name and the family name of the Hungarian
composer use just three, namely the lower mid-front-rounded [ø], the high-
back-rounded [u], and the lower low-back-unrounded [aː] (Siptár and Törenczy
2007, 51). However, Nono added to these the high-front-unrounded [i], notated
in the score by using the letter “Y,” thus taking advantage of the main places of
phonation within the oral cavity. As mentioned above with respect to the con-
sonants, by modifying the size and shape of the resonant cavity of the mouth,
a vocal sound is filtered. For this reason, in some parts of the composition, the

88

Figure 1.6.2. Luigi Nono, Omaggio a György Kurtág. Pairs of consonants (in boldface type).
 Machining the Voice through the Continuous Variation

contralto sings two different vowels on the same pitch. Furthermore, the simul-
taneous use of specific registers (in which the instruments produce sounds
similar to sine waves) and specific vowels (filtering the sound of the voice) gives
rise to an area of timbral indeterminacy within which the identities of voice and
instruments seem to be dissolved. Finally, the filtering technique is also impor-
tant at a large-scale level: the use of specific vocalic patterns within the various
sections of the composition allowed Nono to create areas possessing specific
vocalic colours (see figure 1.6.3).

Figure 1.6.3.

89

Figure 1.6.3. Luigi Nono, Omaggio a György Kurtág. Vowels, section by section.
 Paolo Galli

Il mare come materiale

On the basis of the results of my previous research and compositional activ-
ities, I aim: (i) to investigate further the interactions between the phonetic
characteristics of a text and the timbral and formal features of a composition,
including voice, instruments, and electronics; and (ii) to explore the subtle
transformations between sound and sense. A substantial part of my research is
based on the use of music itself as a tool for text analysis3 through the rework-
ing of a piece composed in 2013, namely Il mare come materiale for soprano and
ensemble. The original piece that I composed is based on the first line of a
poem written by the Italian poet Giorgio Caproni entitled “Il mare come mate-
riale” (Caproni [1983] 1999). The first line of the poem “Scolpire il mare . . . ”
has been decomposed into phonemes and subsequently reassembled through
the following phonetic criteria (figure 1.6.4; see also International Phonetic
Association 1999; Maturi 2009):

The degree of stricture of the vocal tract

The place where the phonation of the phonemes occurs
The distinction between consonants and vowels
The distinction between voiceless consonants and voiced consonants

!
Place of phonation
!

! ! ! ! !
! ! ! ! ! !
! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
!
Section 1 ! ! !
Front ! Back ! ! Front !
Voiceless Voiced Voiceless Voiced Voiceless Voiced
Open
Open-mid
Vowels
Close-mid
Close
Trill [r]
Lateral [l]
Consonants Nasal [m]
Fricative [s]
Plosive
!
[p] [k]

! ! ! ! ! ! !
! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
! Degree of stricture
! of the !vocal tract ! ! ! ! !
! ! ! ! !
Figure 1.6.4.

3 “I think about the possibility of using musical criteria to analyze . . . a text” (Berio 1995, 102–3).

90

Figure 1.6.4. Paolo Galli, Il mare come materiale. Text processing in the first section.
 Machining the Voice through the Continuous Variation

This composition can be further developed by using the full poem by Caproni.
Since the piece is still a work in progress, I will highlight the early stages of
my creative process (related to the second section of the piece), which include
the phonetic transcription of the poem, the phonetic analysis of the text, the
analytic transcription, and the adoption of heterogeneous techniques of text
fragmentation.
The creation of a musical machine is mainly based on the application of con-
tinuous variation to the invariants of language, such as a phoneme’s distinctive
features, with the primary aim of exploring the role of such features, first, as
a tool for decomposing and recomposing a text and, second, as a catalyst for
acoustic functions. In the Distinctive Features Theory formulated by Roman
Jakobson, Gunnar Fant, and Morris Halle in 1952, “linguistic analysis gradually
breaks down complex speech units into morphemes as the ultimate constit-
uents endowed with proper meaning and dissolves these minutest semantic
vehicles into their ultimate components, capable of differentiating the mor-
phemes from each other, . . . termed distinctive features” (Jakobson and Halle
1956, 3–4). Such discriminations involve the use of a set of binary selections
(+/-).
Distinctive features can be divided into fundamental source features and
resonance features and are classified according to a binary opposition, which
implies a choice “between two polar [acoustic] qualities of the same cate-
gory . . . or between the presence and absence of a certain [acoustic] quality”
(Jakobson [1952] 1965, 3). Therefore, I aim to explore the continuum between
the opposing terms that form a series of distinctive features. In this way, induc-
ing “the placing-in-variation of the correct forms [and] uprooting them from
their state as constants,” the exploration of the continuum “plays the role of
tensor” that “causes language to tend toward the limit of its elements” (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987, 99). One such limit is that which separates language itself
from music and sound from sense. This delicate process involves, as a last stage,
the production of “a molecularized matter, which must accordingly ‘harness’
forces” (ibid., 342): nothing but “movements, vibrations . . . underground
intensities” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 13). In this regard, the “continuum of
values and intensities” was identified by Deleuze (1987, 98) as one of the key
factors characterising Carmelo Bene’s theatrical practice when, writing about
Manfred (Bene 2008a), he highlighted Bene’s ability “to extract musical forces
from the speaking voice” (Deleuze 2008, 1466) through a voice treatment that
aimed “to fix, create or change the basic color of a sound” (ibid., 1467). This
ability allowed Bene to blend his voice with the sound of the orchestra, thus
creating a “single sound plateau” (Giacché 2007, 84).
With this in mind, to study the acoustic characteristics of the poem, I carried
out a phonetic transcription by using the symbols of the International Phonetic
Alphabet and by following the criteria related to the Italian phonological sys-
tem (figure 1.6.5).

91
 Paolo Galli

skol'piːre il 'maːre ka'tastrofi

le 'suːe 'muːzike liɲɲifi'kaːre

le esterre'fatte alle'ɡriːe
'luŋɡe di 'ki vi si 'tuffa
le 'mɔːbili 'suːe kordiʎ'ʎɛːre
kres'taːte di 'neːve skol'piːre
il 'maːre 'fiːno a 'farne il 'volto
skol'piːre del dile'ɡwante
blu'astre le 'skedʤe
'delle 'suːe 'iːre 'diːre
in kalme'riːa o in fortu'naːle
i fran'tuːmi lindi'ʧiːbile u'zando
'kontro mu'raːte o skoʎ'ʎɛːre il 'maːre 'koːme mate'rjaːle
'delle 'suːe eufo'riːe
il 'maːre 'koːme kostrut'tsjoːne
fi'larne il 'veːtro in 'laːmine
semivipe'riːne il 'maːre 'koːme inven'tsjoːne

in taʎ'ʎɛnti
'naːstri 'dalɡe

fis'sarne
'sotto le traspa'rɛnti
batte'riːe del 'ʧɛːlo le 'bjaŋke

Figure 1.6.5.

I followed that by making an analytic transcription, decomposing the pho-

nemes of Caproni’s text into bundles of distinctive features according to the
criteria of the Distinctive Features Theory. Figure 1.6.6 shows the analytic tran-
scription of the word ['maːre].4

4 The underlined terms in the figure are taken from Jakobson ([1952] 1965, 18–40). The descriptions of
acoustic qualities (in italics) are taken from Jakobson and Halle (1956, 29–31). Distinctive features are
written in boldface type.

92

Figure 1.6.5. Paolo Galli, Il mare come materiale. Phonetic transcription of the poem.
 Machining the Voice through the Continuous Variation

m a r e
Vocalic vs. Non-vocalic Presence vs. absence of a sharply defined formant structure – + + +
Fundamental source features
Consonantal vs.
Low (vs. high) amount of total energy
Non-consonantal + – + –
Silence (at least in frequency range above vocal cord
vibration) followed and/or preceded by spread of energy
Envelope Interrupted vs.
over a wide frequency region (either as burst or as a rapid + +
feature Continuant
Primary source transition of vowel formants) vs. absence of abrupt
Secondary
consonantal features transition between sound and such a silence
Stridency
Strident vs. Mellow Higher intensity noise vs. lower intensity noise – –
feature
Supplementary Voicing
Voiced vs. Voiceless Presence vs. absence of periodic low frequency excitation + +
source feature
Higher (vs. lower) concentration of energy in a relatively
Compactness
Compact vs. Diffuse narrow, central region of the spectrum, accompained by an – (+ –) – (– –)
feature
increase (vs. decrease) of the total amount of energy.
Concentration of energy in the lower (vs. upper)
Grave vs. Acute + + – –
frequencies of the spectrum.
Tonality
Basic resonator Flat phonemes in contradistinction to the corresponding
features
Flat vs. Plain plain ones are characterized by a downward shift or – – – –
Resonance features weakening of of some of the upper frequency components.
Higher (vs. lower) total amount of energy in conjunction
Tenseness
Tense vs. Lax with a greater (vs smaller) spread of energy in the spectrum – +
feature
and in time.
Spreading the available energy over wider (vs. narrower)
Supplementary Nasalisation frequency regions by a reduction in the intensity of certain
Nasal vs. Oral + –
resonator feature (primarily the first) formants and introduction of additional
(nasal) formants

Figure 1.6.6.

The study of both the phonetic transcription and the analytic transcription
allowed me to discover several acoustic characteristics. Of these, one of the
most important derives from the extensive use of vocalic alliterations, which
enhance phonetic relations between words. Figure 1.6.7 illustrates the vocalic
patterns extracted from the poem. Focusing carefully on some of the many
alliterations, one can notice that the vocalic pattern [o]-[i]-[e] (belonging to
the word [skol'piːre] in line 1) is repeated in lines 4, 8, and 16. The same pattern
is then reiterated and permuted so as to give rise to the following variations:
[e]-[ɔ]-[i]-[i] and [o]-[i]-[ɛ]-[e] (in line 3), [o]-[o]-[ɛ]-[e] (in line 7), [i]-[e]-[o]
(in line 9), [o]-[o]-[e] (in line 12), and [o]-[e] (in lines 21, 22), [i]-[e]-[e]-[ɛ]-[o]
(in line 13), [e]-[i]-[o] and [e]-[i]-[o]-[o] (in line 17), and [o]-[e]-[i]-[e]-[o]-[e] (in
line 23). Similarly, the vocalic pattern [i]-[a]-[e] (derived from [il 'maːre] in line
1) is repeated in lines 9, 11, 17, 21, 22, 23 and then permuted as follows: [e]-[a]-
[e]-[i]-[e]-[e] (in line 4), [a]-[e]-[e]-[e]-[e] (in line 5) and [a]-[e] (in lines 7 and 19),
[i]-[a]-[i]-[e] (in line 9), [i]-[a]-[ɛ]-[i] (in line 10), [a]-[i]-[a]-[e] (in line 11), [a]-[a]-
[ɛ]-[i] (in line 12), [a]-[e]-[i]-[e] and [e]-[a]-[e] (in line 13), [i]-[i]-[i]-[a]-[e] (in
line 14), [e]-[e]-[e]-[e]-[a]-[e]-[a]-[e]-[i]-[e] (in line 15), [a]-[a]-[e]-[i] (in line 17),
[e]-[i]-[e]-[a]-[e] (in line 18), [i]-[a]-[e]-[i]-[a] (in line 19), [a]-[e]-[a]-[e] (in line
21). Furthermore, the vowels [i]-[e], belonging to ['diːre] (in line 18) as well as
to the two main vocalic patterns mentioned above, appear also in lines 2, 6, 10,
and 20. One might say that the echo of the sea seems to resonate throughout
the poem.

93

Figure 1.6.6. Paolo Galli, Il mare come materiale. Analytic transcription of the word
[‘maːre].
 Paolo Galli

Lines Vocalic alliterations

1 [o] [i] [e] [i] [a] [e]
[e] [u] [e] [u] [i] [e]
2
[u] [e]
3 [e] [ɔ] [i] [i] [u] [e] [o] [i] [ɛ] [e]
[e] [a] [e] [i] [e] [e]
4
[o] [i] [e]
5 [u] [a] [e] [e] [e] [e]
[e] [e] [u] [e] [i] [e]
6
[i] [a] [u] [i]
7 [o] [o] [u] [a] [e] [o] [o] [ɛ] [e]
8 [e] [e] [u] [e] [e] [u] [o] [i] [e]
9 [i] [a] [e] [i] [e] [o] [i] [a] [i] [e]
[e] [i] [i] [e] [i] [e]
10
[i] [a] [ɛ] [i]
[a] [i] [a] [e]
11
[i] [a] [e]
12 [o] [o] [e] [a] [a] [ɛ] [i]
13 [a] [e] [i] [e] [e] [ɛ] [o] [e] [a] [e]
[a] [a] [o] [i]
14
[i] [i] [i] [a] [e]
15 [e] [e] [e] [e] [a] [e] [a] [e] [i] [e]
[i] [i] [i] [i] [u] [a]
16
[o] [i] [e]
17 [i] [a] [e] [i] [o] [a] [a] [e] [i] [o] [o]
[e] [i] [e] [a] [e]
18
[i] [e]
19 [i] [a] [e] [i] [a] [o] [i] [o] [u] [a] [e]
20 [i] [i] [i] [i] [e] [u] [a] [o]
21 [i] [a] [e] [o] [e] [a] [e] [a] [e]
22 [i] [a] [e] [o] [e] [o] [u] [o] [e]
23 [i] [a] [e] [o] [e] [i] [e] [o] [e]

Figure 1.6.7.

Having determined the vocalic patterns, I examined their characteristics

according to the criteria of the Distinctive Features Theory (figure 1.6.8).5

5 As stated by Battistella (1990, 53): “Jakobson and Halle point out that in vowel systems the compact/
diffuse opposition is sometimes split into two separate features, compact/noncompact and diffuse/
nondiffuse, a split which is necessary in order to distinguish three heights of vowels.”

94

Figure 1.6.7. Paolo Galli, Il mare come materiale. Vocalic alliterations.

 Machining the Voice through the Continuous Variation

Figure 1.6.8.

Finally, adopting techniques such as text fragmentation and using distinctive

features as a criterion for organising the phonetic material, I processed the text
of the poem (related to the second section of the piece). I processed the vocalic
patterns extracted from the poem so as to create an alternation between areas
characterised by different degrees of stricture of the vocal tract, ranging mainly
from close to close-mid vowels, from close to open-mid vowels and from close
to open vowels (Figure 1.6.9).

95

Figure 1.6.8. Paolo Galli, Il mare come materiale. Vocalic patterns.

 Paolo Galli

Figure 1.6.9.

I then gradually added the consonants to form linguistic units such as syllables,
words, and sentence fragments.
The first subsection (figure 1.6.10), based on the superposition of four voices,
is characterised by the gradual introduction of the liquids [l] and [r], which
leads to the creation of a new language unit, the syllable (e.g. [le], [re]). From the
acoustical point of view, the liquid phonemes are characterised by the presence
of both the vocalic and consonantal source features, as discussed by Jakobson,
Fant, and Halle (1965, 19): “like vowels, the liquids have only a harmonic source;
like consonants . . . they have an obstructive barrier along the median line of
the mouth cavity.” Regarding the envelope features, “the continuant l-sound,”
possessing a smooth onset, “is opposed to the interrupted r-sound” (ibid., 21).

96

Figure 1.6.9. Paolo Galli, Il mare come materiale. Processed text, second section.
 Machining the Voice through the Continuous Variation

Figure 1.6.10.

In addition, I introduced a pair of consonants: the fricatives [z] and [s], which
have smooth envelopes, like the previous continuant liquid [l], and are marked
by the stridency feature, implying the presence of irregular waveforms, “a noise
which is due to turbulence at the point of articulation” (Jakobson, Fant, and
Halle 1965, 24). Finally, regarding the voicing feature, the opposition between
the voiced [z] and the voiceless [s] manifests itself through “the superposition
of a harmonic sound source upon the noise source of the latter” (ibid., 26).
The second subsection (figure 1.6.11) involves the gradual reconstruction
of the first text-fragment [il 'volto del dile] through the use of liquid and fric-
ative phonemes and the addition of the plosive voiceless [t] and the plosive
voiced [d], both of which possess an abrupt onset. Despite being consonants,
the mellow plosives [t] and [d] are characterised by more regular waveforms
and are opposed to the strident sound of the fricatives. In relation to the first
subsection, it is important to note that the opposition between the liquids [l]
and [r] and the fricatives, which had a purely acoustic value in the first subsec-
tion, becomes now a key factor in order to distinguish the first syllable of the
word ['volto]6 from the previous word fragments [sol] (belonging to the word
[skol'piːre]) and [for] (belonging to the words [fortu'naːle] and [eufo'riːe]).
Furthermore, starting at this very moment, the opposition between the liquids
[l] and [r] becomes a catalyst for the creation of areas of semantic ambiguity,
due to the appearance of the word fragment [dile] (belonging to [dile'ɡwante])
at the end of this subsection and the word ['diːre] at the beginning of the fol-
lowing one.

6 Here and below, the dash underneath the phonemes should not be interpreted as a diacritical mark
indicating a retracted articulation. Its function is to highlight the relations between word fragments, as
described in the text.

97

Figure 1.6.10. Paolo Galli, Il mare come materiale. First subsection.

 Paolo Galli

Figure 1.6.11.

The third subsection (figure 1.6.12) is based on the superposition of six voices
and the use of text fragments that have been filtered to create a degree of text
fragmentation ranging from pure phonetic material to whole words. A new
class of phonemes has been introduced, namely the nasal consonants, which
can be distinguished from all the previously mentioned phonemes by the pres-
ence of the nasalisation feature, due to a supplementary resonator: “the nasal
(or more exactly, nasalized) phonemes are . . . produced with a lowering of the
soft palate, so that the air stream is bifurcated and the mouth resonator is sup-
plemented by the nasal cavity” (Jakobson, Fant, and Halle 1965, 40). The oppo-
sition of distinctive features related to the nasal phonemes [n] and [ɲ] exhibits
a discriminatory function by differentiating the syllables [lin] and [liɲ], belong-
ing to the words [lindi't∫iːbile] and [liɲɲifi'kaːre].
Furthermore, besides being a constant acoustic characteristic, the allitera-
tion of the liquid, fricative, and plosive phonemes is involved in the differenti-
ation of word fragments such as [koʎ], [kor], [kol], and [vol], belonging to the
words [skoʎ'ʎɛːre], [kordiʎ'ʎɛːre], [skol'piːre], and ['volto].
Finally, the opposition between specific classes of phonemes, with the
superposition and the filtering of several text fragments, gives rise to a new
text—“dire le dire le dire le, il volto del dire”—and determines the creation
of areas of semantic ambiguity: thus, in this regard, the words “dire le” have
been generated by the encounter of words such as [lindi't∫iːbile]-[liɲɲifi'kaːre]
and [skoʎ'ʎɛːre]-[kordiʎ'ʎɛːre]-[dile'ɡwante], while the succession of the word
['diːre] and the syllable [ɡwan] clearly recalls the word [dile'ɡwante].

98

Figure 1.6.11. Paolo Galli, Il mare come materiale. Second subsection.

 Machining the Voice through the Continuous Variation

Figure 1.6.12.

In the next subsection (figure 1.6.13), based on the superposition of seven

voices, the discriminatory function has the main aim of distinguishing the
words [fi'laːre], [il 'maːre], [liɲɲifi'kaːre], [fis'saːre], ['fiːno a 'faːre], and [in
kalme'riːa]. Looking carefully at these words, it is possible to notice a relevant
characteristic: the phonemes constituting the words [il 'maːre] are contained in
the words [fi'laːre], [liɲɲifi'kaːre], [fis'saːre], ['fiːno a 'faːre], and [in kalme'riːa].
The second part of this subsection and the last subsection are character-
ised by the presence of the following poetic fragments: [le 'suːe 'muːzi], ['diːre
lindi't∫iːbile u'zando il 'maːre 'fiːno a 'farne il 'volto del dile'ɡwante].

99

F igure 1.6.12. Paolo Galli, Il mare come materiale. Third subsection.

 Paolo Galli

Figure 1.6.13.

Finally, the entire new text derived from the aforementioned text processing
reads as follows: [il 'volto del dile 'diːre le 'diːre le 'diːre le il 'volto del 'diːre
le 'suːe 'muːzi 'diːre lindi't∫iːbile u'zando il 'maːre 'fiːno a 'farne il 'volto del
dile'ɡwante].

100

Figure 1.6.13. Paolo Galli, Il mare come materiale. Next and last subsections.
 Machining the Voice through the Continuous Variation

After the processing of the text was complete, the polyphonic texture was
compressed and reduced to a monodic line whose polyphonic features have
been emphasised by exploring the manifold gradations of the speech-music
spectrum: the phonetic fragments are generally sung by changing the pho-
nemes on the same pitch, whereas the text fragments emerging from the poly-
phonic texture are characterised by a gradual transformation of the vocal style
that goes from melismatic singing to whispering, passing through syllabic sing-
ing, Sprechgesang, and speaking (figure 1.6.14).

Figure 1.6.14.

In this way, the initial use of phonetic criteria as a catalyst for acoustic functions,
together with the use of techniques such as text fragmentation, simultaneous
text presentation, text compression, and the exploration of the speech-music
spectrum, leads to the creation of a sound assemblage characterised by the
presence of manifold virtual voices within a single voice: a sort of creative stam-
mering that, as pointed out by Deleuze, can be observed (albeit with differ-
ent procedures of variation) in Carmelo Bene’s theatre or in Gherasim Luca’s
poetry. The virtuality of the voices is closely related to the virtuality of the line
in the poem by Caproni: eight out of twenty-three lines have been fragmented
by the poet through the use of steps, white spaces, and suspension points.
Therefore, as pointed out by Mengaldo (2014, 17, my translation), “we can ask

101

Figure 1.6.14. Paolo Galli, Il mare come materiale. The monodic line.
 Paolo Galli

ourselves: under these conditions, are lines with seven syllables or with nine
still understood as such? Or are they understood as such only on the page? Or
are they understood as such only virtually? . . . The graphic arrangement con-
tradicts the rhythmic one, which . . . becomes . . . indeed almost virtual.” The
virtuality of the voices is obviously also in close relationship with the virtuality
of those text fragments which cannot be recognised because of the stratifica-
tion, the high degree of text fragmentation, and the use of a specific vocal style.
Further, all the text fragments extracted from the poem are characterised by
the juxtaposition of contrasting elements, giving rise to oxymoronic expres-
sions: “‘Scolpire il mare . . . ,’ . . . ‘mobili [. . .] cordigliere,’ . . . ‘ire—euforie,’
. . . ‘volto [. . .] dileguante,’ . . . ‘dire [. . .] l’indicibile,’ . . . ‘calmeria—fortunale’”
(Mengaldo 2014, 18). However, despite being partially unintelligible, the pro-
cessed text fragments, woven into a dramatic stammering, intensify one of the
central themes of the poem (namely “dire [. . .] l’indicibile”) by amplifying the
phonetic connections between words. An excellent example of this is provided
by the gradual emergence of the word [skol'piːre] (figure 1.6.15). Although this
word is never audible in its entirety, the phonetic criteria described above
allow one to create acoustic connections between it and words such as ['diːre],
[lindi't∫iːbile], [dile'ɡwante], ['volto], [kordiʎ'ʎɛːre], and [skoʎ'ʎɛːre]. In the
words of Mengaldo: “the face of the sea looms compactly in the very act of its
vanishing” (ibid., 22–23).

Figure 1.6.15.

To conclude, with regard to the relationship between voice and instruments,

an important observation has to be mentioned. As shown above, when consid-
ering the production of phonemes from the perspective of motor phonetics, it
is possible to compare the vocal apparatus to a system of filters. Filters are used

102

Figure 1.6.15. Paolo Galli, Il mare come materiale. Partial emergence of the word
[skol’piːre].
 Machining the Voice through the Continuous Variation

in electronic music “to shape the spectrum of a source sound. As the source sig-
nal passes through a filter, the filter boots or attenuates selected regions of the
frequency spectrum” (Roads 1996, 184–85). Furthermore, electronic tools can
enhance the sonic characteristics of a text. It follows that to apply the process of
continuous variation to the musical instruments, thus creating a timbral rela-
tion between vocal and instrumental sounds, I actually must carry out experi-
ments to filter the sound of a musical instrument according to the spectral
content of a specific vowel extracted from Caproni’s poem. In addition, using
vocalic patterns mentioned earlier, it is possible to compose a continuum of
instrumental sounds that have specific vocalic qualities—for instance, going
from a sound comparable to an open vowel to a sound comparable to a close-
mid vowel: [a]–[e].
To summarise, one way of machining the voice is made possible primarily by
the application of the process of continuous variation consisting in the explo-
ration of a continuum between opposing terms forming a series of distinctive
features. Second, considering a phoneme’s distinctive features as a catalyst for
acoustic functions, it is possible to extend this process of variation to musical
instruments by filtering them according to the spectral content of phonemes
extracted from the text.
Besides making music itself a tool for text analysis, this “double capture”
(Deleuze and Parnet 1987, 2) leads all the sound components to become “a sin-
gle abstract Wave whose vibration propagates following a line of flight or deter-
ritorialization traversing the entire plane” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 252):

il mare come materiale . . .

  Il mare come costruzione . . .

  Il mare come invenzione . . . (Caproni 1999, 725)

In the words of Thomas Mann, quoted by Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 97):
“a simple scream suffusing all degrees.”

References
Battistella, Edwin, L. 1990. Markedness: The Berio, Luciano. (1991) 1995. “A-Ronne.” In
Evaluative Superstructure of Language. Berio, edited by Enzo Restagno, 98–106.
Albany: State University of New York Turin: E.D.T. First published 1991 in
Press. Musica senza aggettivi: Studi per Fedele
Bene, Carmelo. 2008a. “Manfred: Byron— d’Amico (Firenze: Olschki).
Schumann; Versione italiana e ———. 2006. Remembering the Future.
rielaborazione per concerto.” In Bene, Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1993–
2008b, 925–51. 1994. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
———. 2008b. Opere: Con L’Autografia di un Press.
ritratto. Milan: Bompiani. Caproni, Giorgio. (1983) 1999. “Il mare come

103
 Paolo Galli

materiale.” In Tutte le Poesie, 724–25. International Phonetic Alphabet. Cambridge:

Milan: Garzanti Editore. Book first Cambridge University Press.
published 1983. Jakobson, Roman, and Morris Halle. 1956.
Deleuze, Gilles. 2008. “A proposito del Fundamentals of Language. The Hague:
Manfred alla Scala.” Translated into Italian Mouton.
by Jean Paul Manganaro. In Bene 2008b, Jakobson, Roman, Gunnar Fant, and Morris
1466–67. Halle. (1952) 1965. Preliminaries to Speech
Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. Analysis: The Distinctive Features and Their
1987. Dialogues. Translated by Hugh Correlates. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. First published 1952 (Cambridge, MA:
New York: Columbia University Press. MIT Press).
First published 1977 as Dialogues (Paris: Labov, William. (1972) 1991. Sociolinguistic
Flammarion). Patterns. Philadelphia: University of
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Pennsylvania Press. First published 1972
1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: Press).
University of Minnesota Press. First Maturi, Pietro. 2009. I suoni delle lingue, i suoni
published 1975 as Kafka: Pour une literature dell’Italiano: Introduzione alla fonetica. 2nd
mineure (Paris: Minuit). ed. Bologna: Il Mulino.
———.1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo. 2014. “Intorno
and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian a ‘Il mare come materiale.’” In Giorgio
Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Caproni: Lingua, stile, figure, edited by
Minneapolis Press. First published 1980 Davide Colussi and Paolo Zublena, 15–24.
as Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie Macerata: Quodlibet.
2 (Paris: Minuit). Nono, Luigi. 1996. Omaggio a György Kurtág.
———. 1994. What is Philosophy? Translated Milan: Ricordi.
by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham ———. 2007. La nostalgia del futuro: Scritti
Burchell. New York: Columbia University scelti 1948–1986. Edited by Angela Ida de
Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que Benedictis. Milan: Saggiatore.
la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Ramazzotti, Marinella. 2007. Luigi Nono.
Giacché, Piergiorgio. 2007. Carmelo Bene: Palermo: L’epos.
Antropologia di una macchina attoriale. Roads, Curtis. 1996. The Computer Music
Milan: Studi Bompiani. Tutorial. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
International Phonetic Association. 1999. Siptár, Péter, and Miklós Törkenczy. 2007.
Handbook of the International Phonetic The Phonology of Hungarian. Oxford:
Association: A Guide to the Use of the Oxford University Press.

104
 Templates for Technique in
Mantel and Lachenmann
Between Transcendence
and Immanence
Keir GoGwilt
University of California San Diego

In chapter 10 of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) illustrate their

concepts of the “planes” of “transcendence” and “immanence” with musical
examples. For musicians, this chapter comes tantalisingly close to address-
ing what we are so invested in: methods and techniques of musical creation.
Deleuze and Guattari’s planes of transcendence and immanence begin to
address both the structural knowledge of musical systems and the material ele-
ments of practice that often seem to elude such systems. Such a knowledge and
practice are indispensable for technique.
However, Deleuze and Guattari’s planes of immanence and transcendence
are not specific enough to fully unravel the complexities of musical produc-
tion and reproduction. I attempt a revision and specification of their concepts
by analysing two detailed accounts of musical technique—one from a com-
poser, the other from a performer. I suggest that we may find a middle ground
between immanence and transcendence, as well as between the practices of
composition and performance, in the templates1 that guide musical technique.
The texts in question are composer Helmut Lachenmann’s Pression for
solo cello and cellist Gerhard Mantel’s Cello Technique: Principles and Forms of
Movement, both first published in 1972 (see Lachenmann 2011; Mantel 1975).
Though disparate as aesthetic and intellectual projects, they end up achieving
similar ends. Two points will be argued: (1) Pression is a musical composition and
Cello Technique is a treatise on cello playing; however, their basic operation is
the same, in that they are both abstractly representing and defamiliarising the

1 I use the term “template” to refer to forms abstracted from and employed in forming the work. (“Work”
is used in the sense that Heidegger employs the term in “The Origin of the Work of Art”—as a mode of
revealing. In this sense, a performance may be considered a work, even if not considered what we call
“musical works”). Templates mediate between the structural knowledge and singular enactments of
technique; the affordances of an instrument can operate as a guiding template for technical practice, as
can the staff of the musical score. But the practice or entrainment of a body also has templates existing
to guide its movement—these may take the form of some heuristic saying or bodily motion. Identifying
this template removes it from the unreproducible context of its work-being, while also opening the
possibility of its reproduction.

105
 Keir GoGwilt

cellist’s technique. (2) Both texts use repeatable templates to mediate between
technique as (A) a structural knowledge of systems (corresponding to Deleuze
and Guattari’s “plane of transcendence”) and (B) its material enactment in per-
formance, with all the contingencies of this singularity (corresponding to the
“plane of immanence”).
Whereas Mantel addresses a technique geared towards the performance of
music from the Classical-Romantic canon, Lachenmann has the explicit aes-
thetic agenda of defamiliarising conventional techniques and sounds of the
instrument. This agenda is part and parcel of Lachenmann’s political aesthetic,
which follows Frankfurt School critical theory in marking the avant-garde as
able to, in Herbert Marcuse’s (2007, 67) words, “break the power of facts over
the word, and to speak a language which is not the language of those who estab-
lish, enforce, and benefit from the facts.”
Mantel’s intention, on the other hand, is narrowly pedagogical: he wants to
find the best method to teach cello technique. And yet Lachenmann the theorist
turns out to be a pedagogue, and Mantel the pedagogue turns out to be a the-
orist. That is, Lachenmann’s Frankfurt School–inspired imperative of defamil-
iarising a common musical language marks his work as pedagogical in nature,
in that he intends to change how we think and hear. Likewise, Mantel’s treatise,
by virtue of the impossibility of fully representing the contingencies of material
action, comes to “deconstruct” (a word often employed by Lachenmann [Ryan
and Lachenmann 1999, 21]) seemingly familiar cello techniques. The two musi-
cians perform similar processes despite their differing intentions.
However, differences between the particular texts in question should be
acknowledged. Pression is circumscribed as a self-standing work to be per-
formed; certainly it has experimented with and incorporated unfamiliar tech-
nical procedures, but it also justifies them by collecting and revealing them in
a musically organised way. Cello Technique still aims at the facility of technical
procedure for musical compositions of the Classical-Romantic canon. And yet,
throughout the treatise, there are no mentions of any specific musical com-
positions. It is as if Cello Technique holds up the possibility that technique can
work autonomously from the autonomous work. This investigation of tech-
nique, independent from musical works, reflects the manner in which com-
position itself has come to work so abstractly that it may exclude the technical
body from its operations. A symptom of this abstraction is that the experiences
of the composer and the performer are often alien to each other due to the
specialisation of their practices.
Lachenmann overcomes this alienation by returning to the bodies of the
instrument and cellist, although again necessarily remapping abstract nota-
tion on these bodies’ features and capacities. In his cello treatise, Mantel is also
concerned with technical bodies, but it is through the abstraction of the cel-
list’s practice (and the exclusion of musical works) that he reinvigorates such
a practice. It is through the mediation of templates that both authors navigate
the dual nature of cello technique between abstract knowledge and material
practice. This similarity is visible in a side-by-side comparison of specific rep-
resentations of templates guiding material practice (figure 1.7.1).

106
 Templates for Technique in Mantel and Lachenmann


 


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(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 256). That it is inferred demonstrates the difficulty
of representing the structural knowledge guiding musical production and
reproduction. Such a plane is not given in material enactment: “The plan(e)
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“alongside” that which sounds.
In the “plane of immanence,” “there are no longer any forms or developments
Edition Breitkopf 9221
of forms; nor are there subjects or the formation of subjects. There is no struc-
ture, any more than there is genesis” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 266). Funnily
enough, Deleuze and Guattari’s musical examples of the immanent plane also
end up sounding like inferred, discursive structures existing “alongside” the
sounds. “Floating time against pulsed time,” “experimentation against any
kind of interpretation,” “nonpulsed time for a floating music” (ibid., 267) are
sayings drawn from Cage’s and Boulez’s music or their statements about their
music. They suggest either the failure of a plan (pulsed time or interpretation)
or an operative principle (nonpulsed time for a floating music). In either case,
some structure is still inferred, even if only to ground what escapes it.2

2 It is strange that Deleuze and Guattari use Cage and Boulez to illustrate the plane of immanence, in
which there are no forms or structures. After all, the appearance of formlessness in Cage’s and Boulez’s
music arguably stems from their commitment to the forms furthest abstracted from moving, perform-
ing bodies. In Boulez’s case, this abstraction results through his attempts at integral serialism (in which
not only pitches, but dynamics, articulations, and durations were serialised); for Cage, it results through
his experiments with graphic notation, to the point that before performing Solo for Piano, David Tudor
would measure distances in the score with a ruler and multiply them by the total duration of the piece,
completely renotating Cage’s scores in order to render them playable (see Schankler 2012).

107

Figure 1.7.1. Templates: left, Mantel’s diagram (reproduced from Mantel 1975, 75, fig. 16,
with kind permission of Indiana University Press); right, Lachenmann’s clef (© by Breitkopf
& Härtel, Wiesbaden. Reprinted by permission of the publisher).
 Keir GoGwilt

Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 270) themselves note the collapse of these
planes, suggesting it is necessary to retain “a minimum of forms and functions.”
But this creates the question of why they should make such radical distinctions,
if only to retreat to the pedestrian observation that the “minimum of form” in
Ravel’s Bolero takes its organisation to “the bursting point” (ibid., 271).
I would revise this distinction between the transcendent and immanent by
pointing to a middle ground that is developed in other parts of A Thousand
Plateaus. It is true that we may infer a transcendent plane that exists alongside
but is not audible/visible in musical practice. This is the structural knowledge
of technique that is itself never presently given. However, there are templates
that gather and guide our systems of musical representation into repeatable
forms: the staff lines of the musical score that give regular pitches and time-
intervals, the strings of the cello that produce regular impulses when bowed,
the heuristic motion that reminds the bow arm how to reproduce the necessary
conditions of pressure to quickly induce periodic motion of the string.
These templates guide movement, but are still premised on and propelled by
immanent action. No matter how precisely a building is planned, the stonecutter
still works by eye and hand, as suggested by Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 364) in
their section on “nomad science”: “Garin de Troyes . . . speaks of an operative
logic of movement enabling the ‘initiate’ to draw, then hew the volumes ‘in pene-
tration in space,’ to make it so that ‘the cutting line propels the equation.’”
My revision of the term “immanence” in a musical context addresses the par-
ticulars of musical production: that is, the fact that a cellist can have a plan
for how she or he accurately shifts between fingerboard positions, but in the
moment of enactment, her or his hand/arm/body must measure the distance of
the shift. A template (such as a heuristic motion) may guide the shift, certainly,
but the action is not a knowledge that can be initiated mathematically. This
“immanence” of action thus marks the impossibility that one’s bodily tech-
nique—in all its contingencies and particular idiomatic qualities—could ever
be externally represented as a system for musical reproduction.
To return to the main focus of this essay, Lachenmann and Mantel develop
technique via structures of the body in Pression and Cello Technique. These struc-
tures inevitably fail as comprehensive transcendental systems. This is because
the structural knowledge of technique is not the same as its abstract representa-
tions in Mantel’s text or Lachenmann’s notation. These abstract representa-
tions are rather templates that mark the possible reproduction of what is in
practice unreproducible: the immanent particulars of technique’s unfolding.

Pression and “instrumental musique concrète”

This section is not meant as a full exegesis of Pression, but rather as an introduc-
tion to Lachenmann’s use of templates guiding technique as it is articulated
both in this piece and in his idea of “instrumental musique concrète.”
In his composition, Lachenmann replaces the traditional bass clef with a
player’s-eye view diagram of the cello (figure 1.7.1, right). The similarity to tab-
lature notation comes to mind, in that writing is instrument-specific—Lachen-

108
 Templates for Technique in Mantel and Lachenmann

mann’s notation directs the player’s actions on the instrument rather than the
sound. However, unlike tablature, the directions are not discrete, designating
continuous movements of the body across the instrument, rather than posi-
tions. Additionally, his notation designates independent functions for the left
and right hands: in the opening passage, the bow is drawn along the bridge
while the left hand, notated along the fingerboard part of the clef, metrically
sweeps up and down.
Different episodes in the composition investigate different departures from
a conventional cello technique. In one section, Lachenmann composes a rico-
chet motion of the bow off different spaces and surfaces underneath the cello
strings. In another, the cellist is instructed to bow the tailpiece.
However, the point of Pression is not that it simply experiments (“against
interpretation,” as Deleuze and Guattari [1987, 267] claim Cage does in the
plane of immanence) with new sounds and techniques. Rather, it attempts to
defamiliarise the inherited materials of sound. The notation takes time for the
performer to learn, challenging the cellist’s common-sense conception of what
a properly musical “tone” is, challenging her or his automatic association of a
symbol with a common sound or expression. Through this defamiliarisation,
the abstract notation reaffirms its connection with the material considerations
of the cellist’s technique.
In fact, Lachenmann makes this explicit point as he addresses what he calls
“instrumental musique concrète”:

The idea of “instrumental musique concrète”— i.e. sound as a message conveyed

from its own mechanical origin, and so sound as experience of energy, marked the
compositional material of my pieces between 1968 (TemA) and 1976 (Accanto). . . .
It signifies an extensive defamiliarization of instrumental technique: the musical
sound may be bowed, pressed, beaten, torn, maybe choked, rubbed, perforated and
so on. . . . Such a perspective demands changes in compositional technique, so that
the classical base-parameters, such as pitch, duration, timbre, volume, and their
derivatives retain their significance only as subordinate aspects of the compositional
category which deals with the manifestation of energy. (Ryan and Lachenmann 1999,
20–21)

Lachenmann adapts “Musique concrète”—Pierre Schaeffer’s use of recorded

sounds as raw materials for composition—and turns it into a study of the musi-
cal instrument. In the above quotation, Lachenmann draws attention to the
composer’s structural parameters of pitch, duration, timbre, and volume. In
another essay, he draws attention to the structure already inherent within a
produced “sound” of the performer: “The violin note . . . shows how, under very
particular conditions of pressure, the bow moves across a string of a particular
material constitution and at a very particular height between bridge and finger-
board” (Lachenmann 2003, 37). What is often taken as the basic compos-
itional unit—the singular note produced by the instrument—is in fact a highly
manufactured and conditioned object. A technical procedure, standardised
and modified over the course of history, gives way to the template of the musi-
cal note. This template is not the singularly performed note, but rather what

109
 Keir GoGwilt

guides compositional technique. This is the template that Lachenmann seeks

to “deconstruct” through instrumental musique concrète.
However, this “deconstruction” is not to simply negate the template of the
note. Lachenmann infers the “experience of energy” from a structuring system,
from the “mechanical origin” of the instrument. Thus while he “deconstructs”
the inherited musical note, he does so to expose an underlying mechanics:
the immanent technics conditioning and conditioned by the template of the
instrument. Again, this immanence of technics—the focused attention on
the energetic particulars of sound as it is produced by aperiodic impulses of
the “pressed, beaten, torn” instrument—does not escape the transcendence
of the template. It is only against the template that such an energetic tech-
nics explodes. Furthermore, Lachenmann (2003, 36) speaks of composing as
building an “imaginary sound-form-instrument”—he reveals the template of
the musical note only to reaffirm the composer’s ability (and responsibility) to
remake it.
This responsibility to reveal and remake templates is part of Lachenmann’s
philosophy, which advocates a Frankfurt School–inspired imperative of resist-
ance: “Expressing oneself means . . . above all, offering as much resistance to the
inherited categories of communication as is demanded by the contradictions
and unfreedoms embodied in them” (Lachenmann 1980, 22). The “deconstruc-
tion” of musical forms thus has the political (and pedagogical) motive of break-
ing down pre-existing structures as they have come to accumulate the calcified
“contradictions and unfreedoms” of an industrialised culture machine.

Cello Technique
Lachenmann’s “deconstruction” and renewal of musical composition moves
dialectically in that new forms are required to defamiliarise old ones. Guiding
templates mark the unreproducible to facilitate its reproduction.
Gerhard Mantel (1975) also navigates this oppositional relation, as is evinced
in the subtitle of his treatise: Forms and Movements. While he details bodily
forms employed by the cellist, Mantel (1975, 229) insists that “Even detailed
explanations of positions, intended to make the playing easier, do not pene-
trate to the center of the playing experience. This experience consists of the
dynamic movement, of the way in which the movements develop.” However,
in dialectical fashion, descriptions of movement become more abstract than
those of forms.
How does Mantel represent movement? He gives an account of the cellist’s
shifting motion in his treatise: “The acceleration [of the left arm] . . . needs to
be great enough that the main part of the movement will consist of the ‘toss-
ing’ phase, which requires no energy” (Mantel 1975, 31). The “tossing phase”
refers to the motion of the left arm as it shifts from one note to another along
the fingerboard. According to Mantel, this “toss” requires less energy, keeping
the arm muscles loose and thereby increasing the accuracy of the motion. The
word “toss” conveys the impulsive and indeterminate nature of the motion.

110
 Templates for Technique in Mantel and Lachenmann

The “tossing” motion, while emphasising its impulsive, indeterminate

nature, is nonetheless guided: “The acceleration must be gradual enough that
it does not produce jolts that will require compensation; but it needs to be
great enough that the main part of the movement will consist of the ‘tossing’
phase, which requires no energy. The acceleration, of course, depends on the
mass involved . . . Thus we can state that within a certain margin every bone has
a specific optimal speed at which energy expenditure is lowest and control is
therefore highest” (Mantel 1975, 31–32).
Mantel indicates the need to identify and structure the different speeds of
the body’s partial movements. Of course, this identification cannot be classifi-
catory or quantitative: it remains to some extent a heuristic device to indicate
differences within the sensing, moving body that are neglected in everyday
practice. After all, who would first think to identify the mass and corresponding
optimal speed of each bone in the arm and hand? This heuristic device works
as a template that guides the cellist’s movement to reproduce itself differently
each time.
The question arises: from where do these principles of technique derive?
Is technique merely a tool, standing in reserve for aesthetic ends? Is its pur-
pose the dialectical defamiliarisation and reaffirmation of templates for musi-
cal composition, as in Lachenmann’s view? Or is technique there to continue
the interplay between planes of transcendence and immanence, between the
minimum of forms and Deleuze’s “lines of flight” and “deterritorialisations”
that escape this minimal requirement? (A further question for another time
would be whether there is a substantive difference between these last two
alternatives.)
In an interview, Mantel catalogues his teacher’s views on technique: Pierre
Fournier likened technique to “hygiene,” a matter of “responsibility” so that
the body would “obey your artistic demands”; Paul Tortelier advocated for
performances in which one’s concept of the piece was fully determined before
performance; Pablo Casals obsessed over micro-details of rhythm and inton-
ation, presenting his cello lessons as quasi-mystical experiences; André Navarra
traced technique to a “naturalness” of movement, “whatever definition one
might attribute to this ‘nature’” (Janof and Mantel 2000). Each of these cellists
answers the question of technique’s origin and purpose differently—Navarra,
for example, finds justification in “natural” movement (which Mantel is justifi-
ably sceptical of), whereas Fournier and Tortelier seem to think of technique as
a tool for achieving artistic ends.
These “artistic ends” presumably come from the performer’s “interpretation”
of the music; but, as we see in Lachenmann’s case, the “artistic ends” of a com-
position are not necessarily established ideals, and may point back to the very
technique that was in the first place seen as a tool for expression. Complacency
with the dominant modes of expression drives Lachenmann to create innova-
tive compositional forms—his political aesthetic thus takes shape at the mater-
ial level of technique. Mantel claims that he wrote his treatise to “de-mythol-
ogize” the material act of playing the cello (Janof and Mantel 2000). Unlike
Lachenmann, he takes a more tempered approach to his predecessors, consid-

111
 Keir GoGwilt

ering even what he views as the questionable approaches taken by his teachers
as pedagogically useful. And, again in dialectical fashion, while he describes
Casals’s lessons as taking place in a “religious state of mind” (ibid.), it is Casals’s
method that obsesses over what would seem to be most removed from mythol-
ogies of interpretation or expression: that is, intonation and rhythm.
Navarra’s insistence that technique derives from natural movement echoes
Kleist’s parable of the marionette puppet, which, by virtue of its being uncon-
scious, moves in the most naturally beautiful way (see Kleist 1972). Kleist’s mar-
ionette is given in A Thousand Plateaus as an example of art on the immanent
plane in which no subjects take form. Often, Mantel himself describes the body
as if it were no more than a mechanical system of parts. Additionally, he sug-
gests that technical considerations are often best thought of independently of
what he terms “musical proceedings,” as if expression might be an afterthought
of physically derived movement: “In many cases . . . the anticipatory movement
[of the cellist] is independent of the musical proceedings” (Mantel 1975, 34).
This is, however, in direct opposition to the views taken by Tortelier and
Fournier, who required a conceptually determined understanding of the music
directing its execution. However, I would not simply suggest that Tortelier and
Fournier operate with structural principles on the transcendent plane, and
Navarra and Mantel on the immanent plane. Rather, Mantel exhibits a complex
understanding of the body’s mechanics as both determined by compositional
structures, as well as independent of them. The origin and purpose of tech-
nique is not simply what is physically natural, nor what is determined in the
expression and interpretation of the musical score. Rather, there is a negoti-
ation of abstract templates (such as Lachenmann’s clef, or Mantel’s concept
of the shift) that guide both compositional practice and the entrained bodily
techniques of the performer. The continual need for a dialectic renewal of
such templates is common to both Lachenmann and Mantel, though moti-
vated by different intentions: breaking dominant forms of communication for
Lachenmann; demythologising material practice for Mantel.

Conclusion
Gerhard Mantel, the cello pedagogue, had no aspirations to grand creative or
theoretical claims for performance in relation to composition. Rather, he was
a realist who understood his role as a cellist in the Classical-Romantic tradi-
tion of performance, and who found pleasure and difficulty in the process of
describing what was involved in the material practice of playing the cello.
This essay is similarly meant neither as a manifesto for performance nor as a
dramatic intervention in the division of labour between composition and per-
formance. However, I do indicate a subtle shift in thought by pointing to what
is common to composition and performance: the negotiation between forms
and movements, knowledge and practice, technical reproduction and the irre-
producible singularities of material enactment.
The analysis of these two figures—Helmut Lachenmann and Gerhard
Mantel—provides a brief snapshot from 1972 of much larger and longer

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 Templates for Technique in Mantel and Lachenmann

movements in the relations between performers and composers in the Euro-

American art music tradition. If there is any conclusion to be drawn from this
brief glimpse, it might be the limits of the creator’s theoretical claims about his
or her own work. The theoretical intentions grounding Lachenmann’s compos-
itional philosophy do not prevent his work from grappling with the same issue
as Mantel’s treatise. This common issue is the renewal of abstract templates
connecting structural knowledge of music with material practice, whether
such a renewal comes under the guise of political avant-gardism or pedagog-
ical inquiry.
This is not meant to deflate the concerns that Lachenmann raises about the
place of art in society. Rather, I am suggesting that one might take a more macro-
scopic view in looking at the longer and broader struggle of musicians (both
performers and composers) with the dialectic between abstract knowledge and
material practice necessary for the continued reinvigoration of both political
and aesthetic concerns.

References
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. On Possibilities and Difficulties.”
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Translated by Derrick Calandrella.
Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Circuit: Musiques contemporaines 13 (2):
Massumi. Minneapolis: University of 27–50.
Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as ———. 2011. Pression. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf
Mille plateaux (Paris: Minuit). & Härtel.
Heidegger, Martin. (1978) 2011. Basic Writings: Mantel, Gerhard. 1975. Cello Technique:
From Being in Time (1927) to The Task of Principles and Forms of Movement.
Thinking (1964). Edited by David Farrell Translated by Barbara Haimberger
Krell. London: Routledge. Translation Thiem. Bloomington: Indiana University
first published 1978 (London: Routledge, Press. First published 1972 as Cellotechnik:
Kegan and Paul). Bewegungsprinzipien und Bewegungsformen
Janof, Tim, and Gerhard Mantel. 2000. (Cologne: Hans Gerig).
“Conversation with Gerhard Mantel.” Marcuse, Herbert. 2007. The Essential Marcuse:
Internet Cello Society, 2 December. Selected Writings of Philosopher and Social
Accessed 21 December 2016. http://www. Critic Herbert Marcuse. Edited by Andrew
cello.org/Newsletter/Articles/mantel. Feenberg, and William Leiss. Boston, MA:
htm. Beacon Press.
Kleist, Heinrich von. 1972. “On the Ryan, David, and Helmut Lachenmann.
Marionette Theatre.” Translated by 1999. “Composer in Interview: Helmut
Thomas G. Neumiller. Drama Review Lachenmann.” Tempo 210: 20–24.
16 (3): 22–26. First published 1810 as Schankler, Isaac. 2012. “Cage = 100: Tudor
“Über das Marionetten Theater” and the Performance Practice of Concert
(Berliner Abendblätter, 12–15 December). for Piano and Orchestra.” New Music Box,
Lachenmann, Helmut. 1980. “The ‘Beautiful’ 15 September. Accessed 21 December
in Music Today.” Tempo 135: 20–24. 2016. http://www.newmusicbox.org/
———. 2003. “Hearing [Hören] is articles/cage-tudor-concert-for-piano-
Defenseless—without Listening [Hören]: and-orchestra/.

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 Towards a Figural
Paradigm in Music
Capture of Forces
and Logic of Sensation in
Géométries de l’abîme (LeBlanc),
In Vivo (Cendo), and
The Restoration of Objects
(McCormack)
Jimmie LeBlanc
Conservatoire de musique de Montréal

As it investigates the non-discursive dimension1 of the pictorial sign, the semi-

otics of painting developed by Gilles Deleuze in The Logic of Sensation (2003)
extends naturally to the non-discursive aspect of sound as musical sign. As a
composer, this seminal writing has allowed me to conceive a musical and con-
ceptual paradigm where the work can be thought of in terms of “capture of
forces” and be made to function along the lines of a “logic of sensation.” In my
research as a music analyst, the way in which Deleuze delineates various catego-
ries of approaches to painting has also proven to be very effective for laying out
similarly diverse musical practices.2 In the following pages, I will, first, expose
the way in which I have adapted Deleuze’s ideas to the field of music and, more
specifically, how the Figural paradigm has informed Géométries de l’abîme, a
string quartet I wrote in 2014. Second, I will show how this theoretical frame-
work can serve as a basis for discussing two other recent works for the same
instrumentation: In Vivo (2007–10), by French composer Raphaël Cendo, and
The Restoration of Objects (2008), by American composer Timothy McCormack.

1 “Non-discursive dimension” refers to what, in any sign, lies beneath or beyond signification, or, as Hans
Ulrich Gumbrecht (2004) puts it, to “what meaning cannot convey.”
2 For a more detailed account of these compositional and analytical developments, see LeBlanc (2014a).

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 Towards a Figural Paradigm in Music

The Figure as haecceity

The Figure is the sensible form related to a sensation; it acts immediately upon the
nervous system, which is of the flesh, whereas abstract form is addressed to the head,
and acts through the intermediary of the brain . . . (Deleuze 2003, 34)

In The Logic of Sensation, the concept of Figure is used to circumscribe the haptic
dimension in the art of Francis Bacon. The Figure as haecceity is at the cross-
roads of the semiotic distinction between the intellectual and experiential
ends of the aesthetic experience as will be illustrated by discussing the three
following paintings and their respective pictorial languages: William-Adolphe
Bouguereau’s Orestes Pursued by the Furies (1862), Jackson Pollock’s Number 14:
Gray (1948), and Francis Bacon’s Triptych: Studies of the Human Body (1970).
When we experience Orestes Pursued by the Furies, the pictorial sign undeniably
affects the body (by its tangible shape, its texture, its motion), but it also carries
literary signification;3 it unmistakably invites our mind—our brain—to oper-
ate with identification, recognition: this is a logic of signification.4 In Pollock’s
Number 14: Gray, the pictorial sign is rather experienced as an immediate mater-
ial fact: one also finds tangible shapes, textures, and motion, but any layer of
signification, in the literary or representational sense, is absent. This well-
shaped matter is directly addressed to the body, to the “nervous system,” and
it is not repressed behind any veil of signification: this is a logic of sensation.5
Deleuze uses the term “haecceity” to name these pre-individual singularities
that do not constitute themselves as subject or substance, but yet remain sin-
gular facts or events for the sensation.6
In Deleuze’s semiotics, the Figural is centred around the Figure, which is
such a haecceity. From abstraction, on the one hand, the Figure retains the
absence of discursive expression (it is prevented from being erected into a
substance or subject in a web of signification). On the other hand, it preserves
from the Figurative a certain degree of well-formedness. In Francis Bacon’s
Triptych: Studies of the Human Body, for instance, we acknowledge that there are
three “distorted” bodies and heads, but no face or codified attribute pointing
towards culturally significant characters, nor background or supportive ele-

3 In this discussion, it should be assumed that “discursive” and “narrative” are associated with literary
types of meaning and signification, namely at the level of what is “recounted” (the story, the subject of
representation, etc.). That doesn’t exclude the possibility that there can be other levels of meaning to
the work that constitute genuine narratives in themselves, but these are not under consideration here.
4 “Logic of signification” acts as a terminological counterpart to “logic of sensation,” and is used in the
sense that the “figurative (representation) implies the relationship of an image to an object that it is
supposed to illustrate” (Deleuze 2003, 2); also following Anne Sauvagnargues (2013, 20), “The image is
not a statement, and requires a logic of sensation that is nondiscursive and not a logic of signification.”
5 Deleuze generally uses this expression in a broader sense, encompassing, for instance, all his discussion
of Bacon’s painting, all aspects of which “converge in color, in the ‘coloring sensation,’ which is the
summit of this logic” (Deleuze 2003, ix). In the current text, it is used as a counterpart to “logic of signi-
fication,” as previously posited (see footnote 4).
6 Being strongly related in regard to the non-discursivity of the pictorial signs, see also the concepts of
“fact” and “matter of fact”; for example, “By avoiding abstraction, colorism avoids both figuration and
narration, and moves infinitely closer to the pure state of a pictorial ‘fact’ which has nothing left to
narrate” (Deleuze 2003, 134; see also chapters 1, 9, and 16, in particular).

115
 Jimmie LeBlanc

ments identifying a place. To Deleuze, these features function together in a

logic that allows for a direct connection between the pictorial event and the
realm of sensation, without the “detour and boredom of conveying a story”
(Paul Valéry quoted in Deleuze 2003, 36). Moreover, the clarity of contour facil-
itates this logic: just as the classical figure easily imprints our perception by its
well-formedness, a necessary condition upon which relies our capacity to fol-
low any narrative construction, Bacon’s Figure benefits from a similar quality,
but by neutralising its discursive potential, its fulgurant presence and expres-
sive power can be liberated with fuller strength and immediacy. The diagram
is notably what allows Bacon to let the Figure emerge from a certain undeter-
ministic and automatist technique, although it should never be left completely
out of control: “Save the contour—nothing is more important for Bacon than
this. . . . The diagram must not eat away at the entire painting, it must remain
limited in space and time. It must remain operative and controlled. . . . Not all
the figurative givens have to disappear; and above all, a new figuration, that of
the Figure, should emerge from the diagram and make the sensation clear and
precise” (Deleuze 2003, 110).

The performative 7 figure as haecceity in music

Drawing on Deleuze’s distinction between the “optic” and the “haptic”
(Deleuze 2003, ch. 14), we will approach the musical phenomenon by means
of a distinction between the discursive and the experiential. We posit that any
musical aesthetics entails a particular balance or interaction between differ-
ent levels of discursivity and experientiality.8 For instance, we could associate
figuration (as “optic”) with sonata form, where themes and motives establish
discursive relationships, similar to narrative relationships found in figurative
paintings. If, in such paintings, characters and subjects organise the pictorial
matter, in the sonata form, themes and motives organise the sonorous matter.
This is done by means of variation and development strategies that determine
the whole formal narrative by the use of recognisable motives in different tonal
or textural contexts and, most notably, through a dialectical process where an
“opposition” of contrasted key areas, in the exposition, calls for a “resolution”
in the recapitulation. Because the sonic matter is here submitted to the impera-
tives of the formal discourse, this is an example where the experiential is “har-
nessed” by the discursive. By contrast, action painting rather resonates with

7 The term “performative” is used in the following sense: “Musical gestures function as what speech-act
theory calls ‘performatives’—events complete in themselves. Rather than making ‘statements’ about
something, performatives, musical or otherwise, do something (they belong to Pierce’s category of
Firstness), and that’s why they have direct affective impact” (Tarasti 1994, 12).
8 Alongside optic and haptic, Deleuze also discusses abstraction and the manual. In our theoretical
schema, abstraction takes the form of a neutralisation of both the discursive and the experiential (in
music, abstract relationships organise the material, but beyond any discursive or experiential logic), and
the manual is a radicalisation of the experiential, implying an eradication of the discursive (see LeBlanc
2014a, 12–32).

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 Towards a Figural Paradigm in Music

what Umberto Eco has defined, in The Open Work (1989), as informal art,9 as well
as with Deleuze’s concept of the “manual.”10 In informal music (free improvi-
sation, for instance), the chaotic proliferation of sounds totally eradicates any
discursive potential, which gives rise to a situation where the experiential radi-
cally occupies all the available space, leaving no room for the discursive. Finally,
as is the case with the Baconian Figure (as “haptic”), we can envision a music
where the well-formedness of thematicism is preserved, but where all—or at
least most—of the narrative mechanisms are rejected or avoided. A dynamic
equilibrium is thus created, in which a minimum of discursivity is maintained
to take advantage of the perceptual efficiency of the well-formed utterance,
while laying down propitious conditions for the liberation of unaltered expe-
riential forces.
If, after Deleuze (2003, 57), “music must render nonsonorous forces sono-
rous,” the question arises: are there musics that are more apt than others to
capture and make audible such forces? Deleuze’s semiotics proposes that the
logic underneath the Figure precisely keeps us closer to such forces’ capture
and expression. As the Figure is what stands for the Figural in painting, the
performative figure will stand for the Figural in music. The theoretical paradigm
of the performative figure can be schematically delineated through the musical
criteria and compositional strategies outlined in table 1.8.1.

The performative figure paradigm

Musical criteria The musical idea thought of as instrumental action
Figural well-formedness
Performativity (i.e., non-narrativity)
Compositional strategies Anti-discursive qualities
    Raw and rudimentary figural elements
    “Rough-cut” formal articulation
    Repetition and insistence
Isolating the Figure
    Repetition and insistence
    Processes of deformation
    “Monolithic” or “amnesic” form

Table 1.8.1.

9 “Let us take Jackson Pollock’s art as an example. The disorder of the signs, the disintegration of the
outlines, the explosion of the figures incite the viewer to create his own network of connections” (Eco
1989, 103).
10 “But with Pollock, this line-trait and this color-patch will be pushed to their functional limit: no longer
the transformation of the form but a decomposition of matter, which abandons us to its lineaments and
granulations . . . . Here it is no longer an inner vision that gives us the infinite, but a manual power that
is spread out ‘all over,’ from one edge of the painting to the other” (Deleuze 2003, 105–6).

117

Table 1.8.1. The musical criteria and compositional strategies on which the figural
paradigm is based.
 Jimmie LeBlanc

Three musical criteria form the basis of the figural paradigm. First, the musical
idea is thought of as an instrumental action; it is figurally well formed, and it
is performative (i.e., non-narrative). An instrumental action is defined by the
way in which the physical body of the performer is involved in the production
of the sound event. Examples of approaches are: playing at the technical limits
of an instrument; defining actions that are particularly demanding in terms of
energy, physical force, or endurance; or choosing an action for the very specific
way of touching the instrument it implies, including the use of contemporary
extended techniques. Second, by being well formed, the performative figure
is easily and clearly identifiable, notably by the perceptual self-evidence of its
spectromorphological shape. A motive such as the one at the beginning of
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is such a well-formed utterance, as is, even, the ini-
tial door squeak in Pierre Henry’s Variations pour une porte et un soupir. Although
the energetic and spectral shape of the latter is much more complex, it is still
easily graspable as a circumscribed and well-formed event, in opposition to the
textures of drone music (e.g., Phill Niblock’s Harm), where one can hardly seg-
ment the sonic continuum into units of such morphological salience. Third,
the fact that the performative figure is non-narrative does not depend only on
the figure itself; it is eminently determined by the use of compositional micro-
and macro-formal strategies purposefully meant to cancel or counter-weight
its discursive potential. For example, if it is true that Beethoven’s famous four-
note motto is used in a highly discursive way, motives showing similar salience
and simplicity have also been used much less discursively, namely in American
minimalist music (Ramaut-Chevassus 2015, 174).
Two compositional strategies allow for the establishment of the non-narra-
tive aspect of the performative figure: first, favouring anti-discursive qualities;
and, second, making the figure formally isolated.
Regarding the first, just as Deleuze finds in the poetry of Antonin Artaud
a certain dearticulation of language that can be used to resist any sort of ten-
dency towards organisation and that appears as a means to access the inorganic
realm of the body-without-organs and its non-domesticated fluxes of forces, so
also the performative figure preferably features anti-discursive qualities such
as the raw and rudimentary aspects of its constitutive elements, thus avoiding
melodic or rhythmic sophistication that can be found in more discursive para-
digms. Other strategies can also contribute to anti-discursive qualities: one is
to purposefully avoid any sense of discursive procedures such as preparation,
transition, or conclusion by juxtaposing musical situations using a “rough-cut”
type of assemblage in which things “start and stop” rather than “begin and
end.” Another is to favour repetition and insistence, which can contribute their
rudimentary—if not “defective”—forms of expression at the expense of more
elaborated rhetorical and developmental models.
Regarding the second, just as Deleuze demonstrates how Bacon isolates his
Figures to prevent them from producing narrative relationships with other
Figures, so also performative figures can be isolated by means of strategies
such as repetition and insistence, figural deformation, and formal unicity or
accumulation. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze (1994, 96–98) shows how

118
 Towards a Figural Paradigm in Music

iterations of the same or of the similar are contracted, by our imagination and
memory, into only one entity, which makes for a form of isolation of a musi-
cal event that is repeated or prolonged through insistence. To de-form rather
than to trans-form means not to transform, nor even to develop something into
something else (which would create an other to be in relation to), but to deform
the object within the limits of what makes it what it is, so that it remains iso-
lated. Deformation is a powerful and expressive feature of Bacon’s Figures; in
music, it becomes a further way in which the sound object can be projected over
time in a continuous process of deformation. Lastly, drawing from Stockhausen’s
Moment form, a non-narrative form can be seen as being either monolithic, based
on a single idea, or amnesic, when multiple ideas are juxtaposed without seem-
ingly recalling what preceded and without apparently anticipating what will
follow, in such a way that no narrative construction can be elaborated or recre-
ated from their accumulation.

We will now turn to the first section of Géométries de l’abîme11 in order to illus-
trate the performative figure paradigm just described.

F igure 1.8.1.

As we can see in figure 1.8.1, the instrumental action is thought of as a “falling”

phenomenon taking the form of descending glissandi, at variable speeds, with
oscillating dynamics. The performers are asked to control speed, pitch, and
intensity in a seamless rhythmic and harmonic space. The “descending line”
is a rather elementary shape that is well formed and easily graspable. As figure
1.8.2 illustrates, this performative figure is repeated six times, and is gradually
deformed by registral expansion and constant micro-variation of contours,
which results in the isolation of only one action. This isolation is further con-

11 For a complete score and live recording by Quatuor Bozzini see www.jimmieleblanc.net/dare2015/
geometries.html.

119

F igure 1.8.1. Jimmie LeBlanc, Géométries de l’abîme (2014b), section 1, bars 1–2.
 Jimmie LeBlanc

firmed by an amnesic approach to form: all seven sections of Géométries de

l’abîme are completely independent as regards to their content, which is never
recurring nor developed elsewhere in the twenty-five-minute duration of the
work.

Figure 1.8.2.

The performative texture

An extension of the performative figure, the performative texture results from
a specifically chosen instrumental action, and it also complies with the non-
narrative or performative criteria. However, its main distinctive feature con-
cerns figural well formedness, because what makes the Figure so distinguishable
must here be erased or blurred in order to create a more complex and diffused
effect. The performative texture functions according to one or more of the fol-
lowing modalities: additive texture, textural figurality, and textural listening.
An additive texture is produced when the individual parts, each based on a
specific action, are fused into an overall textural effect. In the passage shown in
figure 3, multiple attacks, with various durations, dynamic contours, timbres,
and articulations, are added together to create a dense and complex texture in
which each instrumental part, despite its individual figural qualities, can hardly
be singled out.

120

Figure 1.8.2. LeBlanc, Géométries, section 1, pitch contours of the successive glissandi.
 Towards a Figural Paradigm in Music

F igure 1.8.3.

Falling midway between figure and texture, a textural figure shows well-
defined contours but presents enough material richness to be perceived as
having a tangible textural quality. In this case, the figural aspects are not blurred
but rather “overflowed” by a notable level of textural complexity. In figure 1.8.4,
the way the material is sculpted into the G harmonic series gives it a certain
spectral “modelé” that renders its overall sonority more textural.

F igure 1.8.4.

121

F igure 1.8.3. LeBlanc, Géométries, section 4: additive texture.

F igure 1.8.4. LeBlanc, Géométries, section 7, bars 470–3.
 Jimmie LeBlanc

Lastly, in the textural listening mode, texture is brought to the front less by
the working out of the material itself than by the way in which its organisation
over time invites our listening to become more acutely aware of various textural
qualities. In figure 1.8.5, it is assumed that the extended action of bowing such
long notes will invite the listener to become aware of a multitude of micro-vari-
ations in the sound, due in particular to the very nature of the string instrument
technique involved (which is never perfectly stable) and by the use of micro-
tonal deviations.

Figure 1.8.5.

122

Figure 1.8.5. LeBlanc, Géométries, section 3, bars 119–24 and 143–48.

 Towards a Figural Paradigm in Music

Raphaël Cendo, In Vivo (2007–10)

One of the initiators, in France, of a musical paradigm based on the concept of
saturation (Cendo 2008), Cendo’s music is centred around the idea of excess:
excess of matter, excess of energy, timbre, movement, in regard not only to the
production of sound but also to an excess of information on the perceptual
level. In this approach, the musical idea is essentially conceived as an action
meant to saturate the sound and the sonic space. With In Vivo, Cendo creates a
music that strongly resonates with the ideas of logic of sensation and capture of
forces that were described above as part of the performative figure paradigm.
As can be seen in figure 1.8.6, the instrumental action here invokes at least
three criteria that concern the performative figure: playing on the technical
limits of the instrument; being significantly demanding on the physical level;
12
and using extended techniques to produce complex tones.

Figure 1.8.6.

With respect to figural well formedness, there are gestures that present rather
clear contours, but Cendo often uses different strategies to blur them to a
certain extent; thus, because of the frequently noisy or saturated quality of
the instrumental timbre, these complex sounds, with their nonetheless well-

12 A live recording of the piece can be found on the web by Quatuor TANA (2011), including a video that
shows the physical demands of the work. A CD recording is also available (Cendo 2012).

123

Figure 1.8.6. Raphaël Cendo, In Vivo, bars 1–8. © 2011 by Gérard Billaudot Editeur SA,
Paris. Reproduced with the kind permission of the publisher.
 Jimmie LeBlanc

defined general shapes, become examples of textural figures. In addition, this

figuro-textural clarity on the individual level tends to merge into the overall
density of the ensemble texture. As Cendo (2008, my translation) puts it, this
results from the “multiplication of instrumental gestures,” which produced an
additive texture. Finally, we also find anti-discursive qualities in what Cendo
himself describes as a “passage from animality to total saturation,” placing his
aesthetics within a certain primitivism, where one is “no longer trying to
domesticate sounds (or form) nor to civilise a gesture,” but rather where one
must “act primitively, while thinking strategically” (ibid., my translations).
Yet it is precisely at the level of formal strategies that Cendo’s music diverges
from the Figural’s non-narrative aspect. Indeed, if we observe that all the basic
conditions for a more experiential listening are found in the way the musical
materials are conceived, it is because of their formal organisation that we move
towards discursivity, and thus, inevitably, towards a certain “domestication of
form.” By refusing to isolate the Figure in a non-amnesic form where ideas recur,
alternate, present themselves as the development or the transformation of
other ideas, the listener cannot escape being invited to listen narratively, just as
the composer cannot deny a certain discursive approach to form.13 This leads
to a constructive tension between the discursive and the experiential: while
Cendo develops rather complex and experiential materials, he still treats them
discursively at the level of form—even if the latter remains rather complex and
unconventional. The aesthetic consequence of such a stance is all the more
vivid and dynamic: by trying to harness the chaotic and violent expansion of
the saturated matter, the discursive structure makes us feel the extent to which
its own cohesion is always threatened by the material it contains, always being
pushed to the limit of implosion. Cendo (2008) is thus purposefully playing on
the limit of “losing control” and somehow captures and makes audible such
forces.

Timothy McCormack, The Restoration of Objects

(2008)
Instrumental Mechanism and Physicality as Compositional Resources is the
title of Timothy McCormack’s doctoral thesis (2010) and clearly situates the
core of his compositional concerns: the tension arising between the instrumen-
tal mechanics and the physicality of the performer.14 We find in McCormack an
example of aesthetic stance that deliberately refuses discursivity and that seeks
to function as capture of forces in an overtly Deleuzian sense.15

13 See, for instance, how the musical ideas alternate and recur throughout the first movement, thus
suggesting a sense of discursive organisation. It is also worth mentioning that the second movement is
based on an extreme time-stretch of the first two measures of the first movement, which represents a
developmental strategy (Cendo 2014).
14 “The exact points of contact between the body and the instrument are examined as if through a micro-
scope—extremely small, precise spaces inside of which catastrophically violent physical phenomena
take place” (McCormack 2010, 2).
15 McCormack’s Deleuzian filiation is suggested, in the first place, by quotations from Deleuze and Guat-
tari in the score’s programme notes and throughout his doctoral thesis.

124
 Towards a Figural Paradigm in Music

Here, again, the musical idea is thought of as an action: the composition of

The Restoration of Objects is focused around the very “act of bowing.” As can be
seen in figure 1.8.7, the performer’s bowing action in exclusively defined by
parameters of placement (between bridge and fingers on the fingerboard),
direction (up–down), string (4 line-staff = 4 strings), speed (determined by
rhythm), and pressure (noteheads).

Figure 1.8.7.

The left hand keeps a mostly flat shape over the strings, while it is asked to
constantly and randomly vary the finger spacing and is given indications to
move between both ends of the fingerboard, according to three discrete points
(a three-line staff), with varying pressure (noteheads). All these gestural vec-
tors are synchronised by the use of four staves for each instrument. Regarding
the definition of the performative figure as action, as set out above, we find,
then, a musical idea that is thought of essentially as a specific way of touching
the instrument, supported by using extended techniques to create complex
sounds.
If the figural component remains weaker than in Cendo’s In Vivo, this is to
the benefit of the textural aspect. The Restoration of Objects features an outright
additive texture, combining Cendo’s multiplication of gestures with a tech-
nique of canonic imitation by deformation. As shown in figure 1.8.8, each new
entry is a rewriting of the previous one in the context of a new metre, which
necessarily entails compression and expansion of the material.

125

Figure 1.8.7. Timothy McCormack, The Restoration of Objects, bars 1–2, viola.
 Jimmie LeBlanc

Figure 1.8.8.

This strategy—insisting on a unique idea under constant deformation—

appears as part of a combination that serves to isolate the figure, and this is
further supported by a monolithic approach to form: not only is this musical
situation prolonged over the entire fifteen-minute duration of the piece, but
also the very complex nature of the sonic material, added to the choice of a
rather extended time, invites the listener to adopt a textural listening mode.
Finally, The Restoration of Objects shows a strongly anti-discursive nature: it is
radically asyntactical (no pitch organisation involved), inorganic (in the sense
of refusing the organism as organization of organs),16 highly proliferating, and
extremely dense. In other words, such a texture can easily be seen as reified
streams of pre-individual forces that chaotically run through the body-with-
out-organ, as a musical expression capturing such forces. However, as opposed
to Cendo’s In Vivo and despite the evidence of rigorous formalisation (sys-
tematically changing metres, highly complex and detailed rhythmic structure,
etc.), here the result operates on the limits of the informal,17 which recalls how
Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 161) used to warn their readers about the barely
sustainable state of an actual body-without-organs:

This is because the BwO is always swinging between the surfaces that stratify it and
the plane that sets it free. If you free it with too violent an action, if you blow apart
the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will
be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged toward catastrophe. Staying
stratified—organized, signified, subjected—is not the worst that can happen; the
worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse,
which brings them back down on us heavier than ever.

16 As in, “Thus the body without organs is opposed less to organs as such than to the organization of the
organs insofar as it composes an organism” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 30).
17 In this respect, it is interesting to compare two versions of the piece, and observe that this notation,
despite its high precision, remains rather open in terms of sounding results (for weblinks see
http://timothy-mccormack.com/restoration.html).

126

Figure 1.8.8. Timothy McCormack, The Restoration of Objects, bars 8–12: Cello (8–11)
remapped with different meters to Violin II (9–12).
 Towards a Figural Paradigm in Music

This surely illustrates how vertiginous it is to get closer and closer to forces
that are just as violent as they are inescapably unutterable—but yet that are
precisely what language, art, and music are all about.

References
Bacon, Francis. 1970. Triptych: Studies of the Press. First published 1962 as Opera aperta
Human Body. Accessed 16 June 2017. (Milan: Bompiani).
http://francis-bacon.com/artworks/ Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 2004. Production
paintings/1970s. of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey.
Bouguereau, William-Adolphe. 1862. Orestes Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press
Pursued by the Furies. Accessed 16 June LeBlanc, Jimmie. 2014a. “Fil rouge:
2017. www.the-athenaeum.org/art/detail. Les concepts de figure et de texture
php?ID=237098. performatives comme fondements d’une
Cendo, Raphaël. 2007–10. In Vivo. Paris: approche expérientielle de la musique.”
Gérard Billaudot Editeur. PhD thesis, McGill University.
———. 2008. “Les paramètres de la ———. 2014b. Géométries de l’abîme [musical
saturation.” IRCAM. Accessed 30 score]. Accessed 22 June 2017. www.
December 2016. http://brahms.ircam.fr/ jimmieleblanc.net/dare2015/geometries.
documents/document/21512/. html.
———. 2012. Raphaël Cendo: Furia. ———. 2014c. Géométries de l’abîme [live
Performed by Ensemble Cairn, recording]. Accessed 22 June 2017. www.
Guillaume Bourgogne (dir.). Aeon, 1224, jimmieleblanc.net/dare2015/geometries.
compact disc. html.
———. 2014. “An Excess of Gesture and McCormack, Timothy. 2008. The Restoration
Material: Saturation as a Compositional of Objects. Self-published by the composer.
Model”. Accessed 30 December 2016. ———. 2010. “Instrumental Mechanism and
http://www.dissonance.ch/upload/ Physicality as Compositional Resources.”
pdf/125_21_hb_cen_saturation_engl_def. PhD thesis, University of Huddersfield.
pdf. First published 2014 as “Excès de Pollock, Jackson. 1948. Number 14: Gray.
geste et de matière La saturation comme Accessed 16 June 2017. http://artgallery.
modèle compositionnel” (Dissonance 125 yale.edu/collections/objects/33977.
[March]: 21–33). Quatuor TANA. 2011. “Quatuor TANA ‘In
Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Vivo’ 1er Mvt.” YouTube video, 7:23,
Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New posted by “tanaquatuor,” 13 December.
York: Columbia University Press. First Accessed 22 June 2017. https://youtu.be/
published 1968 as Différence et répétition qorvTIZ2vYA.
(Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Ramaut-Chevassus, Béatrice. 2015. “Capter
———. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of des forces: l’exemple des processus
Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. répétitifs américains.” In Gilles Deleuze: La
London: Continuum. First published pensée-musique, edited by Pascale Criton
1981 as Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation and Jean-Marc Chouvel, 181–90. Paris:
(Paris: Éditions de la Différence). CDMC.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. Sauvagnargues, Anne. 2013. Deleuze and
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Art. Translated by Samantha Bankston.
Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian London Bloomsbury. First published
Massumi. Minneapolis: University of 2005 as Deleuze et l’art (Paris: Presses
Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as universitaires de France).
Mille plateaux (Paris: Minuit). Tarasti, Eero. 1994. A Theory of Musical
Eco, Umberto. 1989. The Open Work. Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana
Translated by Anna Cancogni. University Press.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

127
 L’image-temps
Conceptual Foundations of
My Compositional Approach
Nicolas Marty
Université Paris-Sorbonne

On one hand: rhetorical music, declamatory, dramatic, music as language, as

gestures, as articulated discourse. On the other: music as colour, timbre, sound-
scapes, clouds, processes too slow to imply an energetic development, seen
from a distance (Grisey 2008, 273). The first is Luciano Berio’s Sequenza I, Pierre
Boulez’s Dialogue de l’ombre double, Baroque contrapuntal music, Classical and
Romantic melody, functional harmony, tonal or otherwise. It’s musique con-
crète (Symphonie pour un homme seul, many works by Pierre Henry inspired by
dance, Bernard Parmegiani’s Incidences / Résonances, etc.), the “séquence-jeu,”
discovering something that works and letting it lead its own development,
following the sound’s own energy to produce a form. The second is Iannis
Xenakis’s Pithoprakta, Gérard Grisey’s Jour, Contre-Jour, Debussy’s La cathédrale
engloutie, maybe even Mahler’s Titan Symphony. It’s the idea that orchestration
is not there just to underline a development but to make form on its own, as it
produces an emerging timbre, meant to be listened, to be explored, to be read,
to be seen. It’s the orchestra from Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin, it’s acous-
matic music, contrasted with musique concrète: time animates sound rather than
being articulated by it (Battier 2013, 708). It’s Parmegiani’s Points contre champs,
Denis Smalley’s Empty Vessels, and so on. Sound becomes impressive rather than
expressive (Bériachvili 2010); sound is looked at, leaves an overall impression,
rather than having an articulatory, discursive function.
But this does not rely on music by itself, nor does it rest on composers’ inten-
tions only. Listening, and listeners, are key to such a distinction. If I want to
hear a soundscape, I will most probably hear a soundscape. If I want to find
some support for my own gestures and bodily movement, I will most prob-
ably find exactly that. Psychological and musicological studies about listening
are very clear about this: when Spampinato (2015) asks his listeners to verbalise
their experience of musical extracts from Debussy and Ravel in terms of their
own bodily movements or in terms of music’s movements, listeners find these
movements in their experience—and they are quite happy about it! When
Delalande (2013) asks listeners of Sommeil, by Pierre Henry, to tell him how
they listened and what they heard, he finds three main categories of listening
behaviours for a single extract: some listeners, with an “empathetic behaviour,”
are mainly interested in the physiological impact of sound, without giving

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any consideration to musical structure; others, with a “figurative behaviour,”

distinguish between setting elements and living elements in the music, turn-
ing the experience into some kind of narrative or description; others, with a
“taxonomic behaviour,” categorise sounds to create a mental representation of
the whole work.
Seeing this distinction both in compositional approaches and in listening
behaviours, my point is this: music is not necessarily an art of time (Marty 2016).
Why? Because it doesn’t have to be. Space, rather than being a new parameter
come to emphasise gestures and allow for new formal articulation, is an iden-
tity—meaning that chronology is not essential to music. This is the foundation
of the theoretical developments that follow, regarding composition and listen-
ing. Of course, without allowing music to enter the realm of sound installations
completely, this foundation cannot be applied compositionally in a radical
way.

Aesthetic approach
In his extensive writings, Deleuze rarely concentrated exclusively on music,
although he borrowed some concepts and ideas. Nevertheless, his whole body
of work can be “exported” to a certain extent, whatever the target domain,
because of the implicit generality of his thought. The “movement-image”
(1986) and the “time-image” (1989), although clearly related to cinema and cin-
ema history, are concepts that can be applied to music. Antoine Bonnet (2015)
did this, in fact, but we won’t delve into his rather historical approach here.
The “movement-image” is best exemplified by action films, where the discov-
ery of a situation by characters (perception-image) affects them in some way
(affection-image) and drives them to change the situation (action-image). This
is the classical schema for Westerns: the character sees the empty city, hears a
sound behind a closed door, and goes on to kill the hiding antagonist. Around
the time of World War II, other kinds of films start to appear, using images in
different ways, not necessarily linking them to an ongoing action, to a plot.
These images show a place, a moment: they stay there, an unfolding duration
of daily life. In Alain Robbe-Grillet, these may be close-ups of faces inserted in
the film’s unfolding (L’homme qui ment, 1968). In Yasujirō Ozu, they may be long
shots of places, framed so that depth may best appear, fixed rather than fol-
lowing characters entering and leaving the room (Tokyo Story, 1953). In Stanley
Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968), we also find long static shots, where the
action unfolds as it happens, with no ellipses; and there are other shots where
the computer is given an anthropomorphic nature, with a close-up of its red
“eye.” Chronology, in some of these films, is sometimes destroyed entirely or
distorted: flashbacks appear, lies, perspectives, and so on.
What we get out of this, beyond the domain of cinema, is that chronological
development does not have to depend on the “sensorimotor link”: a character
leaving the frame does not mean that the frame isn’t important by itself—we
stay there, we look at it, we read it. In acousmatic music, we read it with our
ears; and because this space cannot be given as a persistent object, it may also

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be a silent space, a space populated by microscopic sounds, barely revealing

its acoustics. This is the “duration-image” (image durée), or maybe the “read-
able image” (image lisible). Moreover, with the “crystal-image” (image-cristal),
Deleuze reminds us that chronology and reality are but mental constructs: the
sequencing of sections, their chronological order, might not be as important as
we thought. In fact, what will interest us most is an emerging image.
Space is not, to me, a new parameter that would allow one to reinforce this
morphology with a spatial movement, to show sound moving through space
as a salient element of musical development, or to place sounds in different
spatial positions to facilitate their counterpoint. Space is rather an identity that
holds a field of possibilities, a “spatial field” (in the same way we could talk of a
“harmonic field”), inside which entities obey their own rules. This is, in a sense,
Smalley’s space-form (2007), the way in which we listen to a sound environ-
ment without getting interested in the chronology of events inside this envir-
onment. In the case of a harmonic field, we can listen to pitches belonging to
that field without paying much attention to their order, their melodic contours,
in order to listen to their overall behaviour through the whole harmonic field.
In the case of space-form, of a spatial field, we can listen to entities moving
through space without having much interest in their succession, being more
interested in how each entity allows us to define the spatial field more pre-
cisely. This use of space, in fact, is closer to orchestration than to articulation
(not Classical or even Romantic orchestration, but essential orchestration, that
part of orchestration that cannot be reduced without compromising the work
itself). This space is also a psychological space, the one that separates us from
the sound, intimate or detached: space as the matter of silence, as we find in
Lucie Prod’homme’s Leçon du silence. An intimate sound, close to listeners with-
out submerging them. A sound which in order to touch you’d need to be closer
to, although it is already right here before you. Leçon du silence, le son du silence
(the sound of silence), this empty space surrounding sounds, delineating them,
containing them, as André Souris (1976, 61–62, my translation) said:

To distinguish the sound object from the setting where it unfolds, to find the
equivalent of what space is in plastic arts, one can only refer to the notion of silence.
Silence is to sound what empty is to full. It is the original climate, the first given, the
fundamental need without which music could not exist. . . . This is not, of course,
silence before or after the musical work, but the constant silence surrounding
the work and entering it, just like emptiness enters and enlivens the forms of
architecture.

And so we return to duration, to this direct image of time. This image is that of
nothing, of silence.

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 L’image-temps

L’image-temps (2015)
Whatever the situation, one cannot control the listening behaviours of an audi-
ence. If listeners refuse to practise a specific behaviour towards silence and
time for instance, or if they are unable to do so because of a lack of understand-
ing or because of psychological factors, the aesthetic project is not annulled.
The main principle is that it is possible to practise such a behaviour. Without
seeking to induce this listening behaviour, we can at least think about how it
can be facilitated, for instance through compositional processes. From here
on, examples will be given from my acousmatic cycle L’image-temps (2014–15),
which was a prelude to the composition of Une des chambres n’aurait presque pas de
fenêtre. (2015), a quadraphonic acousmatic work.
Some basic rules may help listeners avoid an interest in characters, which
is incompatible with observing space and silence. Space should generally
avoid (spatial and spectral) symmetry, which can tend to put a character at the
centre of action, surrounded by the frame, becoming an attentional anchor.
Asymmetrical space is the guiding principle for my Image-temps I, composed of
fragments of diverse identities, one of which (the “baby”) always keeps its place
on the right, while the middle and left part of the stereo space are taken up
by punctual, harmonic, sounds. Thus the “baby” is not the protagonist of an
action, but one of the figures of a sonic picture drawn on a canvas of silence.
If a sound entity holds a salient energetic or gestural development, listen-
ers’ attention might be drawn to this development, this gesture. This was the
case for my Image-temps III, in which a section seemed to be “misunderstood”
by listeners perceiving an articulated, local, agitated character in the fore-
ground. Three processes allowed me to resolve this: phase inversion of one of
the channels diffused low frequencies in space; a reduction of overall volume
and brilliance attenuated the sounds and their gestures; and their integration
in a more global space, added afterwards, facilitated their representation as
entities inhabiting this space.
Formal structure does not rely on perception alone, but on mental representa-
tion also. Principles are thus much more arbitrary than the ones described
above about local characters. Thus we are led to the concept of crystal-image:
an image that puts together different versions of the same phenomenon or
entity—for example, the image of the world before the monolith is discovered
in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where nothing indicates whether the successive scenes
represent a chronological unfolding, a disorderly series, or diverse simultan-
eous moments—although, as Deleuze (1989, 205–6) mentions, viewing the film
as a whole tends to put emphasis on a simultaneous interpretation, with the
monolith at the centre of everything.
L’image-temps I—Funambule et autres abstractions comprises fourteen sound
fragments separated by silences of diverse durations (from zero to twelve sec-
onds). Fragments can be grouped in three or four categories, according to their
timbral and spatial identity. Fragments have been composed separately, one
category at a time, before being put together, mixed, matched against each
other, intuitively. The only link between the categories is their appearance on
a “canvas” of silence—their being in this fragmented form. At no point is the

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link between categories made explicit. The work’s form is thus what I would
call a “kaleidoscopic crystal”: a series of plans with no link between them other
than that they are presented one after the other in the same form, in a similar
manner. Thus, form becomes salient not in the sense of a directional unfolding
but in the sense of a spatial identity: all the fragments are present on this same
blank canvas made of the speakers’ silence.
On the contrary, L’image-temps II—Les lèvres d’Isis is coherent overall and does
not contain any actual silence. The idea was to make a readable image, a space,
from the point of view of a peeping Tom (it was composed to answer a call
for works on the theme of eroticism). The original plan for the piece showed
a process slow enough and implicit enough so that it would not become the
centre of attention. But the making of this “plan-séquence” quickly made me
want to return to the crystal-image, to a fragmented form, excising material to
create “ellipses” in the image: from the original 2'30", the piece went to 2'00".
Fragments are put together with no silence, and the end—rather than fading
out, as was the case at first—is cut in a much more clearly arbitrary manner:
something is starting to happen, so I might as well cut there. These “ellipses”
which do not answer to any logic of action, reaction, narrative, can be related to
Deleuze’s “time-crystal” (1989): fragments could be given a different order, the-
oretically, but they would still show the same place, be the same entities. This
may be the least convincing form perceptually, because the idea of an ellipse is
not generally common in music or, indeed, outside a clearly narrative context.
In L’image-temps III—Le dormeur du val, the principles of the first two images
are applied. Silences fragment the piece, in which coherence is maintained
by space: fragments from the three spectral and spatial identities (c.100 Hz,
c.2 kHz, over 5 kHz) are put together at least once. The title came from my
fiancée’s first impression, thinking of Rimbaud’s sonnet, while listening to the
pieces’ first drafts, and it became a basis for the composition of the piece’s form
and principles. Thus, here we have what we could call a “space-crystal” follow-
ing Deleuze’s “crystal-image” (1989), which puts emphasis on different spaces
happening at the same time: as if each fragment was a part of the reality of the
moment preceding the death of the sonnet’s sleeper. The kaleidoscope is still
there, as variations of perspective on the same space: the landscape surround-
ing the sleeper, people he’s hallucinating, the sky. Links are not immediately
clear, but become explicit during the piece: the sky gets superimposed with
the landscape in the last third of the piece, while the sleeper imagines people
around him.

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 L’image-temps

Une des chambres n’aurait presque pas de fenêtre.

(2015)
Une des chambres n’aurait presque pas de fenêtre. follows the series of Images-temps,
which were composed to be heard in front of the listeners, by opening the space
around listeners with quadraphony. The idea was to compose a plural space
with a specific identity: both a space-crystal and a time-crystal put together in a
kaleidoscopic crystal. In this quadraphony, I distinguished four plans:

1. The rear left speaker, with a descriptive text in Morse code (drawn
from Roxane Villeneuve’s L’aveugle (2012–13), like the title of the
piece) which would serve as an articulation between sections and be
“orchestrated” very shyly on other speakers

2. The frontal plane, where a more “readable” space would be given

3. A triangle between the front speakers and the rear right speaker,
where another layer of material would appear, floating: an inharmonic
unifying field comprising frequencies used for spectral modifications
on plan 2 (4698.64–7458.62–8372.02–13289.76 Hz), a group of noisy
wefts, and so on.

4. The whole quadraphony, with the fundamental frequency of the

inharmonic field (1740 Hz), unstable, with phase cancelling and micro-
variations processes.

In the actual making, this distinction applies mainly to the first half of the work,
a space-crystal offering several perspectives on a single space, an empty room
slowly going into oblivion. The articulation that brings about the “baby” intro-
duces a disturbance of the spatial identity with the appearance of the “baby”
on the rear left speaker before the Morse code is transferred to the rear right
speaker. Then the Morse code goes silent, and the quadraphony is unified in
high frequency noisy components, phase-cancelled and microvariated, fading
out.

The overall form is thus more of a kaleidoscope in the sense of L’image-temps I,

except here silence is nearly absent, articulations between fragments happen-
ing with very sharp and short sounds, light flashes made of oversaturated digit-
al artefacts. The chronology of fragments roughly goes from an “inside” (an
empty room in an abandoned house) to the “psychological” (the baby’s hypo-
thetical dreams), and then—after briefly returning to reality—to an “ambigu-
ous” space (night, outside, looking at the stars protected by a bubble—maybe
this “room with nearly no windows” mentioned in the title).

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 Nicolas Marty

Figure 1.9.1.

Concluding remarks
We knew from the beginning that this paper would not propose a complete
denial of chronology and time in music: sections follow one another in a fixed
order, are sometimes articulated in a manner exclusive to their order, some sec-
tions are processual, directional, and so on. What has been filtered out is the
importance of local articulation, of articulated “language,” of the interest for
gestures’ energy, for “organic” form, justified form, continuous form. Sections
follow one another whether they are explicitly related or whether the only link
relating them is the fact that they belong to the same work and that we can
reflect on that circumstance.
We could think it’s all for the better: keeping things moderate, gauging con-
trasts, making small sounds even smaller by putting them together with big-
ger sounds. This moderation is the “hybrid-image” of today: in cinema, this is
the “bizarre,” the strange, the weird, underlining altered states of conscious-
ness, dreams, madness, and so on (Sutton and Martin-Jones 2008, 99 et seq.)

134

Figure 1.9.1. Wavelet sonogram of Une des chambres n’aurait presque pas de fenêtre.
(8'30"). Channels, top to bottom: rear left, front left, front right, rear right.
 L’image-temps

There the time-image is just a way to spice up the movement-image, the linear
plot, with a surreal happening. Thus, although we think things are balanced in
a “hybrid” genre, in fact the time-image has been absorbed and exploited in
terms of the movement-image, losing its own formal characteristics.
The movement-image seems to always work: Star Wars, Westerns, action films
with no flashbacks or ambiguous montage are clear examples; Mozart, Chopin,
Wagner, Rachmaninov, Boulez (Répons, . . . explosante-fixe . . .), and others, have
exploited it musically, with a gestural, articulated language. The hybrid image
works as well in many ways, as long as a minimal chronological thread is main-
tained, with its use of seemingly weird or ambiguous situations, as we can see
with the television series Lost and Fringe, with the emphasis on places and pic-
tures rather than energy in some modern operas (Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle,
Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande), with the depiction of the character’s multiple per-
sonalities in David Fincher’s Fight Club, with the superimposition of places and
ideas as in Francis Dhomont’s Forêt Profonde, and so on. My final point is this:
as has been shown with my own works discussed above, the time-image can, by
itself, be an efficient compositional model, putting together images related by
an implicit idea, percept, or concept. Related concepts can be found in Morton
Feldman’s “crippled symmetry” works, where slightly dissimilar repetition is
pursued for long durations to induce specific listening behaviours (For Philip
Guston); in La Monte Young’s installations and happenings, where emphasis
is put on identity rather than development; in some of François Bayle’s acous-
matic works, where very few source materials are looked at under diverse per-
spectives and superimposed (Tremblement de terre très doux); and so on.
We may also wonder whether the time-image can be sustained outside the
long durations of these works, maybe for one minute, a few seconds even, with
an identity similar to that of works extending over several hours, giving the
essence of something that could be an object of meditation for several hours,
just like haikus, just like some of Webern’s works, maybe—avoiding repetition,
avoiding lingering on something to induce a particular state in the listener,
instead giving something and letting it sink in (or not), letting it mature (or not).

References
Battier, Marc. 2013. “La composition Bonnet, Antoine. 2015. “Cinéma, musique:
concrète et acousmatique: Pierre Lecture musicienne de Deleuze.” In Gilles
Schaeffer, le Groupe de recherches Deleuze: La penseé-musique, edited by Pascal
musicales et leurs précurseurs.” In Criton and Jean-Marc Chouvel, 81–91.
Théories de la composition musicale au XXe Paris: CDMC.
siècle, vol. 1, edited by Nicolas Donin Delalande, François. 2013. Analyser la musique:
and Laurent Feneyrou, 689–709. Lyon: Pourquoi, comment? Paris: INA.
Symétrie. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement
Bériachvili, Georges. 2010. “L’espace Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and
musical: Concept et phénomène—à Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone
travers l’avant-garde des années 1950–60 Press. First published 1983 as Cinéma 1:
(Stockhausen, Xenakis, Ligeti . . .).” PhD L’image-mouvement (Paris: Minuit).
thesis, Université de Rouen. ———. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image.
Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and

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Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Souris, André. 1976. Conditions de la musique

Minnesota Press. First published 1985 as et autres écrits. Paris: CNRS; Brussels:
Cinéma 2: L’image-temps (Paris: Minuit). Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles.
Grisey, Gérard. 2008. Écrits ou L’invention de la Spampinato, Francesco. 2015. Les incarnations
musique spectrale. Paris: MF. du son: Les métaphores du geste dans l’écoute
Marty, Nicolas. 2016. “Deleuze, Cinema and musicale. Paris: l’Harmattan.
Acousmatic Music (or What if Music Sutton, Damian, and David Martin-Jones.
Weren’t an Art of Time?).” Organised Sound 2008. Deleuze Reframed. London: I. B.
21 (2): 165–74. Tauris.
Smalley, Denis. 2007. “Space-form and the Villeneuve, Roxane. 2012–13. L’aveugle.
Acoustic Image.” Organised Sound 12 (1): Unpublished theatre work.
35–58.

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 Circumstantial Scores,
Graphic Scores,
Extended Scores
The Work as
“Ecopraxic” Rediagrammatisation
Frédéric Mathevet
Institut ACTE umr8218 (Paris 1/ CNRS)

1. Nomadic

I have a nomadic practice of musical writing. I construct tools that enable the
auscultation of the real, the realisation of photographic or video scores that can
later be reinterpreted. These tools are both image and sound recording machines.
(Daniel Charles [1988, x] on John Cage, my translation)

Figure 1.10.1.

137

Figure 1.10.1. Two pages from Kurruwarri for piano, mezzo-soprano, and field recording.
Work in progress.
 Frédéric Mathevet

Kurruwarri user instructions

The pianist
Each photograph presents a tablature to be interpreted at the piano. The
superficial accidents, the more-or-less visible traces, and the shadows, grain,
and dust suggest the notes to interpret. They are chosen from the full range
of the piano according to the reading of the image. In the same way, the fram-
ing, the content signified by the image, and the light all provide information
that enables the interpreter to choose the speed of execution, the order of the
notes, and their intensity.

The soprano
She sings the texts that appear in the images played by the pianist. She tries, as
far as is possible, to put herself at the same sound level as the piano. She inter-
prets the forms of writing that give her indications of intensity, vocal colouring,
and melodic variation.

Field recording
The field recording is prepared in advance of the piece. Each image gives indi-
cations of ambient sound that must be captured and played back to support the
pianist’s interpretation. To do this, the pianist can be accompanied by a sam-
pler. The playback of the recordings marks the cuts linked to changes of place.

Figure 1.10.2.

Transparent paper representing a piano keyboard, a tablature pad, cubes, a

button . . . These nomadic tools enable one to question place and time. For
this piece, I wanted to record each room in my parents’ apartments, emptied of
all presence. This emptiness appeared very full (the sound of the fridge, from
the neighbours above, from outside) and the recording took on the status of
a tabernacle: a space where spells are conjured, where traces of the sacred are
preserved, where memory is kept.

138

Figure 1.10.2. Sono Ba Sono Ba #2 : my mother’s apartment, my father’s apartment. For

piano, bass, and field recording. Excerpts from the bass and the piano scores.
 Circumstantial Scores, Graphic Scores, Extended Scores

2. Circumstantial

Figure 1.10.3.

139

Figure 1.10.3. Excerpt from Under-score: Circumstantial Partitions. Work in progress. From
top to bottom: “Piece for 100 knitters, the time it takes to make one pair of mittens /  A
loaf of bread out of the oven /  Five violins in a greenhouse / Hard Lines, for percussion.
Rewrite the veins visible on the drum skin.”
 Frédéric Mathevet

My sketchbook never leaves me. My nomadic writing of sound and music

demands a particular attention to circumstance. I catch the motif, the sound
moments I live, but always with the intention of reinterpreting these sounds
afresh. An everyday musical and visual practice that results in records of
actions, installations, and thoughts. A regular auscultation of the sonic real in
the ultra-thin. These drawings highlight contextual dimensions of sound and
deeply question listening, by simultaneously presenting a mental listening.
The circumstantial questions the notion of sonic objects, or rather the modes
of their appearance.

3. The multi-frame aircraft on the empty white

Figure 1.10.4.

140

Figure 1.10.4. Preparatory drawing for The Exorcist-Antiphon Mix for prepared piano,
electronics, bass, and speaker. An excerpt of the performance is available at http://mathe-
vetfredericscore.blogspot.fr/2014/12/the-exorcist-antiphon-dub.html.
 Circumstantial Scores, Graphic Scores, Extended Scores

According to Henri Van Lier (2010), the specificity of comics is tied to their
mode of production: the white space in between the images. This gutter, as
Scott McCloud (1993, 97) calls it, is not a cut between moments that belong to
the same episode and suggest a logical relation, rather it is an empty, dynamic
cavity that draws texts, sounds, and drawings in a mutational movement. “In
comics, frames are not intervals, but elements of a multi-panel. In this way,
rather than being a link between pre-existing panels, white pre-exists the pan-
els, as a kind of precondition, emptiness, temporary cancellation, radical initial
discontinuity” (Van Lier 2010, 352, my translation).
The “multi-plane aircraft on the empty white” pre-exists what will be
inscribed there. It is the container of the worlds it welcomes: a sensitive multi-
directional surface that receives the plastic mechanics, its movements and
jerks, folds, turbulences, and holes, that are reactivated in the seams. For me,
it is a model of nomadic writing: the “dark precursor” of my plastic writing of
sound and music.

Figure 1.10.5 .

141

Figure 1.10.5. Still from the video recording of The Exorcist-Antiphon Mix for prepared
piano, electronics, bass, and speaker.
 Frédéric Mathevet

It is the nomadic “multi-plane aircraft in the empty white” that makes muta-
tional and mutable the writing proper to comics. Indeed, it is the white emp-
tiness that opens the possibility for a writing of metamorphoses, mutations,
folds, and transformations. When readers of comics grasp sequences on the
page, they simultaneously perceive surfaces. Thus, the writing of comics is both
linear in its geometrical figuration and topological, in that it pertains to gen-
eral and to differential topology.
My meta-workshop and worktable, where the writing of my graphic and aug-
mented scores coagulate, is similar to the multi-panel aircraft of comics. It is a
sensitive surface that receives images, sounds, materials, and gestures, each of
which can pass through one another or stay away from the fray. It is a container
for the dynamics of “the large living cluster” (Ballif 1988, 75, my translation).

4. Flatbed

Figure 1.10.6.

142

Figure 1.10.6. Once upon a Time Fukushima. For baritone saxophone, board game, tracing,
electronic processing, and frames. Installation shot. Galerie Planète Rouge, Paris, 2017.
 Circumstantial Scores, Graphic Scores, Extended Scores

Henri Van Lier’s “multi-plane aircraft on the empty white” is analogous to

the plate of the printing press (“flatbed”1) that Leo Steinberg (1972) uses to
describe postmodernist painting that once again welcomes the world. “In
printmaking, as the French term ‘mise en page’ insists, framing is sometimes
determined by the full page and at other times, as the English term ‘layout’
suggests, by its evasion and by flipping through the pages. Through it all, the
same object appears at disconcerting angles and distances to the point that it
overturns notions of substance and event, of Same and Other” (Van Lier, 1988).
This makes the comics and “flatbed” works conceptualised by Steinberg exem-
plary for twenty-first-century ontology and epistemology.
Moving to the plastic writing of music, sound arts are thought of as following
a rhapsodic aesthetic, which privileges the seams, the mixed relations and the
metamorphosis of materials to materials, from the visible to the audible.

5. Ecopraxis

Figure 1.10.7.

1 “I borrow the term from the flatbed printing press—‘a horizontal bed on which a horizontal printing
surface rests’ (Webster). And I propose to use the word to describe the characteristic picture plane of
the 1960s—a pictorial surface whose angulation with respect to the human posture is the precondition
of its changed content” (Steinberg 1972, 82).

143

Figure 1.10.7. Crisis graphic score for chamber music (rock’n’roll). All graphic scores in
Crisis are obtained by appropriating graphics found in the media that explain the current
crisis. Pages 16 and 17 of the score (Sidragasum: solo percussions) and the original
appropriated document: the Euro debt crisis.
 Frédéric Mathevet

The graphic and augmented score as a sensitive surface of reception provides

an intermedia and intersemiotic space to interpret. This is an offered space, the
sonic and visual outcome of which is unknown. Each interpreter, in a collective
or individual “assisted improvisation,” will be able to select what is meaningful
and what is insignificant in this open space, thereby creating other significa-
tions and producing new signs, sounds, and so on.
The score becomes the moment of an experiment in plastic semiotics.
Importantly, it requires the score itself to be made, which is the necessary
condition of a certain distancing that allows both the performer and the audi-
ence-listeners to understand the semiotic construction site in which they work.
It is about rethinking the way we inhabit space and live in our environment,
itself defined by signs, sounds, and images. It is about questioning our habi-
tus through the intermedia and intersemiotic processes it involves, forcing us
actively to participate in our way of living, rediagrammatising received signs,
sounds, and images, and putting them back in a circle. In a way, the score calls
into question the constituted sphere of immunity and tries to displace its bor-
ders, to transform them and challenge them.

References
Ballif, Claude. 1988. Économie musicale: Twentieth-Century Art, 55–91. Oxford:
Souhaits entre symbols. Paris: Méridiens Oxford University Press.
Klincksieck. Van Lier, Henri. 1988. “La bande dessinée,
Charles, Daniel. 1988. Musiques nomades. une cosmogonie dure.” Bande dessinée,
Edited by Christian Hauer. Paris: Kimé. récits et modernité, Colloque de Cerisy.
McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Accessed 15 December 2016. http://www.
Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: anthropogenie.com/anthropogenie_
HarperPerennial. locale/semiotique/bande_dessinee.htm.
Steinberg, Leo. 1972. “Other Criteria.” ———. 2010. Anthropogénie. Paris: Les
In Other Criteria: Confrontations with Impressions Nouvelles.

144
 Perform Now!
The Ethics of
Musical Improvisation
Vincent Meelberg
Department of Cultural Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen,
and the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden and The Hague

Introduction
Musical improvisation is an encounter. It is an encounter between sounds,
bodies—both human and otherwise—and ideas. All these entities—Bruno
Latour (2004, 237) calls them “actants”—are affected by this encounter, just as
the encounter itself is influenced by the entities involved. Consequently, this
encounter codetermines how the performance will continue. Put differently,
an encounter is disruptive: it disturbs the actants’ state of rest and autonomy
and incites them into action, into doing something that they did not intend to
do before the encounter. We are incited to perform, to act, to react.
Gilles Deleuze (1988) suggests that disruptive encounters between bodies,
objects, sensations, and thoughts can be conceptualised in ethical terms. He
asserts that bodies and thoughts can be defined as capacities for affecting and
being affected. For Deleuze, ethics is the study of the relations of speed and
slowness, of the capacities for affecting and being affected that characterises
each thing, each actant (in Latour’s formulation). These can be anything: an
animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea. According to Deleuze (1988, 39),
this amounts to an ethics of joy, in which the production of joy is a positive
expansion of affective capacity, while sadness is a diminution of the power to
act or of the capacity for being affected.
In this chapter I will propose that a musical improvisation, being a disruptive
encounter itself, also always has an ethical dimension. Taking a performance by
my improvisation trio, Molloy, as a case study, I will argue that musical perform-
ance is an act that infringes the autonomy of performers, instruments, and
sounds. Because of its intrusive, deterritorialising nature, it is a performance
that influences the capacity of these bodies to be affected.
This discussion will focus on interaction—interaction between performers,
between performers and instruments, sounds and performers, sounds and
instruments, and so on (in other words, all the actants involved in the improv-
isation)—and on the manners in which these interactions contribute to the
improvisation as it develops during performance. As these interactions are
responsible for the infringements on the autonomy of all actants, human and

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 Vincent Meelberg

non-human, that participate in the performance considered as encounter, a

proper examination of these interactions may lead to a greater understanding
of what musical improvisation is, or can be.
Building on the ideas in Meelberg (2011, 2016), I will argue that interaction
is at the core of those encounters we call improvisation and that Deleuzian
ethics is able to articulate the specificity of the interactions that constitute a
performance, in particular when it is combined with Latour’s actor–network
theory (2005). Conversely, I will suggest that musical improvisation may be a
very productive means to teach us what ethics is really about: the way we human
subjects deal with encounters among bodies, ideas, sounds, and minds.

Performance as disruption
First, I will discuss the beginning of a recording of an improvisation that I per-
formed with my trio, Molloy, which consists of Marc Huisman on drums, Jasper
den Hertog on keyboards, and myself on double bass, on 30 September 2015.1
This improvisation, as do all improvisations, begins with listening and sensa-
tion. We sense our instruments, our movements, and we hear the sounds that
are the results of these movements. We also sense these sounds in our bod-
ies. We are touched by them. Furthermore, we sense the presence of the other
musicians, even though we do not directly touch each other with our bodies.
We try to arrive at some kind of interaction, by exploring the sonic environment
we are at the same time creating. Improvisation is exploratory, just as touch
often is. Like trying to find your way in a darkened room by feeling around you,
the beginning of this improvisation consists of the exploration of sounds, not
knowing where this exploration will end or even how it will evolve. We need
to wait and see, or rather, hear and sense, and listen for both our own and our
fellow musicians’ musical ideas.
Making music is the act of producing gestures through touching the instru-
ment. In this sense the musical instrument functions as an interface between
gesture and sound. Feeling the instrument, as well as kinaesthetically experi-
encing the act of playing an instrument, codetermines the manner in which the
performance is experienced by musicians—but also by the audience, who not
only hears but also sees musicians perform and interact with their instruments.
This may be one of the reasons why Swiss researcher and jazz pianist Guerino
Mazzola (2007, 149, my translation) calls playing jazz “thinking music through
the body.” Improvisation starts with the body, and sound is a consequence of
touching an instrument in particular ways by producing physical gestures.
Sound is related to touch as well. Sound literally touches bodies. Listening
is a corporeal feeling, the feeling of vibrations against the eardrums and the
body, penetrating the body even, as Brandon LaBelle (2006, 174–75) asserts.
Sound penetrates and affects bodies. Sound is intrusive, and its impact is
beyond the control of listeners. Sonic affection is involuntary and inescap-
able. The sequences of sounds that are the result of instrumental touch result

1 See Molloy (2015, 0:00–1:56) for a recording of this fragment.

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 Perform Now!

in music. Sonic affection, musical affection—the way in which music has an

impact on listeners—is involuntary and inescapable; therefore, it is disruptive.
More specifically, it disrupts the autonomy of listeners, as they need to react to
the music, whether they want to or not. Sometimes, this disruption may even be
deterritorialising, in that the stable state of listeners is disturbed in such a way
that they are transformed into new, different listeners that listen differently to
sound.
A musical improvisation is an encounter between sounds, bodies, objects,
ideas. As I explained elsewhere (Meelberg 2016), this encounter can also be
considered as a network, a set of relations between human and non-human
entities such as performers, sounds, movements, and musical instruments.
Actor–network theory, as developed by Latour (2005), focuses on the dynamics
of the making and remaking of networks. According to actor–network theory,
networks consist of actors, better called actants in order to avoid any anthropo-
centric associations: an actant is simply that which accomplishes or undergoes
an act. An actant can be human, but it can also be an animal, an object, or even
a concept, as long as it accomplishes or undergoes an act within a network.
Furthermore, these actants have agency, that is, the power to change other
actants. Consequently, the acts that actants may undergo are always caused
by other actants. As soon as an object, person, idea, or phenomenon has the
power to change other objects, people, ideas, or phenomena, they become
part of a network. In musical improvisation, musicians, instruments, sounds,
and ideas are actants, and all these actants have agency in the network called
improvisation.
To establish connections, actants have to be displaced and transformed so
that they can be fitted into a network, a process that is called translation. This is
a process of changing actants through physical actions, violence, or persuasion
by the actants within the same network as a result of their agency. And just as an
improvisation can be considered to be a network, so also the practice of impro-
vising can be regarded as a process of constant translation—by and of musi-
cians, instruments, sounds, and ideas, all of which can collaborate and resist.
During an improvisation actants are involved in this process of constant trans-
lation, and therefore their autonomy is infringed. They are not capable of fully
developing their own musical ideas; instead, they need to continuously adapt
to the acts of other actants. In other words, the encounter between the actants
during an improvisation is disruptive. This encounter influences, disrupts, all
actants, human and non-human, involved. At the same time, this encounter
contributes to the improvisation as it develops during performance. For this
reason, even though it disrupts the autonomous development of ideas, it is also
creative: it leads to new and unexpected ideas as long as actants partake in the
process of translation.
During the beginning of the Molloy improvisation described above this pro-
cess of translation has already started. One listened to and sensed what was
happening in order to be able to translate one’s own musical ideas in such a way
that they would fit the musical situation. In the continuation of the improvisa-
tion, translation was noticeable in the way I adjusted the bass lines to the loops

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 Vincent Meelberg

that were playing. The bass ostinato that I played resulted from this particular
translation. The percussion, in turn, translated its playing in order to fit this
ostinato. When the drums stopped, the silence that followed incited different
phrasings from both the keyboards and the bass. The keyboard next played
repeated notes, and these made me translate my playing in order to fit with
them (Molloy 2015, 2:43–3:29).
The process of translation that I identified above can also be conceptualised
in Deleuzian terms. As Ronald Bogue (2003, 29) argues: “Music is the deterri-
torialization of the refrain, and all such deterritorialization entails the engage-
ment of a sonic block whose content is a ‘becoming.’” Ostinatos and loops can
be considered musical devices that act as a Deleuzian refrain, for they mark
and confirm a particular musical territory. A refrain is any kind of rhythmic pat-
tern that stakes out a territory (Bogue 2003, 17). By repeating that pattern, the
territory is reaffirmed. Because of their repetitive and rhythmical nature, osti-
natos and loops are musical patterns that co-define the identity of the musical
piece they appear in. And as soon as this identity is set, a musical territory is
established.
A musical territory can be disturbed when loops or ostinatos, the refrain,
can no longer sustain and confirm the musical identity that was established. At
some point, the music may contain too many musical elements that contradict
the musical identity that was previously created, and deterritorialisation sets
in. The territory falls apart and a new musical identity needs to be negotiated:
the process of reterritorialisation has begun. And, whenever a new identity
finally is established, a new musical territory is set.
In this sense, improvising is indeed the deterritorialisation of the refrain: a
creative act that leads to new musical territories, new musical becomings. It is a
constant negotiation of musical ideas that shape and reshape the identity of the
network called improvisation, which happens through the translation of the
actants involved: the musicians, the sounds, the musical ideas, the instruments.
Translation, then, considered as the process of change actants are involved
in, can be thought of as a form of reterritorialisation. After all, translation is the
attempt by actants to arrive at a new balance within the network they are a part
of, while this new balance within the network can be considered a new stable
territory.

The ethics of musical disruption

Translation is affective for all actants involved, for it changes them, voluntar-
ily or involuntarily. Translation is disruptive. Consequently, translation has an
ethical aspect, at least according to the manner in which Gilles Deleuze con-
ceptualises ethics. He suggests that encounters between bodies, both animate
and inanimate, and sensations such as sounds can be conceptualised in ethical
terms. Here, ethics is not considered in terms of morality, but conceived instead
as ethology. It is “the study of the relations of speed and slowness, of the capac-
ities for affecting and being affected that characterize each thing” (Deleuze
1988, 125). These things can be anything, Deleuze explains: “an animal, a body

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of sounds, a mind or an idea” (ibid., 127). Bodies and thoughts can be defined as
capacities for affecting and being affected. Or, to put it differently: actants such
as bodies and thoughts have agency (the capacities for affecting other actants)
and the potentiality for translation (the capacities for being affected by other
actants and the potential to change as a result of this affection).
Referring to Spinoza, Deleuze asserts that everything that increases or
enhances the subject’s power to act is good, whereas everything that diminishes
it is bad. As Deleuze (1988, 71–72) explains, the power to act is a positive expan-
sion of affective capacity and therefore a “good” thing, one that enables the
body to be affected in a greater number of ways. A bad thing, on the other hand,
results in a decrease in the power of acting and is therefore a negative stag-
nation of feeling. Anything that inhibits a body’s ability to be affected is bad.
Thus we arrive at an ethics of joy, with joy understood as a maximisation both
of the capacities for being affected and of the possibilities for establishing any
kind of connection between the affecting and affected bodies. Consequently,
the practice of improvising, regarded as a process of translation, has an ethi-
cal dimension, for it is an act that infringes the autonomy of the performers,
the instruments, and the sonic bodies and ideas, and influences the capacity of
these bodies to experience joy.
Touching an instrument may itself already be affective. The sheer pleasure of
playing an instrument is not only caused by the sounds that can be produced
in this way, but also because the act of playing itself literally feels pleasurable.
Feeling the instrument while playing it is itself already affective. Pleasure was
something I felt during the Molloy improvisation as well (Molloy 2015, 4:46–
6:25). For me, as the bass player, it was very affective to play long bowed notes.
It felt extremely pleasurable to make the physical movements and listen to the
audible results, to how it fit the improvisation.
But while we were trying to sustain and maximise the mood that we had set,
we noticed that this mood no longer “worked.” As a result, we had to look for
other musical options. At one point, the keyboards and bass “found” each other
and locked together, and this locking-together was extremely affective. We
wanted to continue playing in this way; however, at a certain point, the loops
that were playing gradually took over and we needed to follow these, as it was
impossible to directly disrupt or influence them. Instead, they disrupted our
performance. They deterritorialised the musical situation we had created. The
loops, as non-human actants, had an agency that forced us to change our musi-
cal ideas, to reterritorialise them, to translate them into others and to arrive at
a new musical terrain.
This interpretation of the Molloy improvisation may perhaps suggest that
joy is only elicited by musical moments during which actants are in harmony.
This, however, is not the case. As I explained above, the ethics of joy entails the
maximisation both of the capacities for being affected and of the possibilities
for establishing some kind of connection between the affecting and affected
bodies. One way of creating these connections is indeed by harmony or musi-
cal attunement, but there are other ways as well. Provoking actants into a pro-
cess of translation by deterritorialising the musical terrain, for instance, is a

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 Vincent Meelberg

very effective way to maximise the capacities for being affected, as translation
itself is affective. Although on the one hand it disrupts an actant’s power to
act autonomously, on the other hand it opens up new avenues, new possibil-
ities to develop new musical ideas, ideas that might otherwise have remained
undiscovered. Translation incites actants to explore alternatives, to depart
from well-known paths, to become creative. And this, the deterritorialisation
of the refrain, may even be more affective than reaffirming an already estab-
lished musical terrain.

Conclusion
Improvisation is an interaction, an interaction between bodies, minds, things,
and ideas. Improvisation is also disruptive, in that it disrupts the autonomous
development of ideas. This development is constantly disturbed by the agency
of other actants involved in the improvisation. As a result, actants are involved
in a process of constant translation in order to adapt to new musical situations.
At the same time, this disruption is creative, as translation may lead to new
ideas, new musical terrains. Put differently: musical improvisation is a process
of de- and re-territorialisation, in which translation results in new musical
becomings.
Consequently, musical improvisation has an ethical dimension: it consists of
acts that infringe the autonomy of all actants, both human and non-human,
involved. It influences the capacity of these actants to undergo joy. More pre-
cisely, it is the interactive aspect of improvisation that makes it ethical in a
Deleuzian sense. It is interaction that incites affects, while affection, as well as
the promise of affection, itself stimulates interaction with all actants, human
and otherwise. In short, musical improvisation is ethical, for it concerns the
potentiality of disruptive affection of all actants involved.
At the same time, improvisation can be seen to elucidate what ethics is.
Ethics is concerned with dealing with encounters. More specifically, it is about
the ways we, as actants, translate our actions as a result of the agency of other
actants, as well as about the disruptive qualities these encounters generally
have. Ethics is about the process of deterritorialisation, caused by disruption,
and reterritorialisation, made possible through translation. But what improvi-
sation may teach us above all is how disruption may be joyful. It may inspire us,
make us do things we did not imagine being able to do, discover new ideas, and
create new becomings.

References
Bogue, Ronald. 2003. Deleuze on Music, Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights. First
Painting, and the Arts. New York: published 1970 as Spinoza (Paris: Presses
Routledge. universitaires de France), revised 1981 as
Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Spinoza: Practical Spinoza: Philosophie pratique (Paris: Minuit).
Philosophy. Translated by Robert LaBelle, Brandon. 2006. Background Noise:

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 Perform Now!

Perspectives on Sound Art. New York: view/?weave=16068&x=0&y=0.

Continuum. ———. 2016. “Encountering Metal and
Latour, Bruno. 2004. Politics of Nature: Wood: The Double Bass as Collaborative
How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. and Resistive Actor in Musical
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Improvisation.” In CARPA4 Proceedings:
Press. Translated by Catherine Porter. The Non-Human and the Inhuman in
First published 1999 as Politiques de la Performing Arts—Bodies, Organisms and
nature: Comment faire entrer les sciences Objects in Conflict, edited by Annette
en démocratie (Paris: Editions La Arlander. Helsinki: University of the Arts
Découverte). Helsinki, Theatre Academy. Accessed
———. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An 5 January 2017. http://nivel.teak.fi/
Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. carpa4/encountering-metal-and-wood-
Oxford: Oxford University Press. the-double-bass-as-collaborative-and-
Mazzola, Guerino. 2007. La vérité du beau dans resistive-actor-in-musical-improvisation-
la musique: Quatre leçons à l’école normale vincent-meelberg/.
supérieure. Paris: Delatour. Molloy. 2015. “Molloy 20150930—01.”
Meelberg, Vincent. 2011. “Moving to Become Soundcloud audio recording, 14:41,
Better: The Embodied Performance posted by Vincent Meelberg. Accessed
of Musical Groove.” Journal for Artistic 20 June 2017. https://soundcloud.com/
Research 1. Accessed 4 January 2016. vincent-meelberg/molloy-20150930-01.
http://www.researchcatalogue.net/

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 Thinking Sound through the
Notion of the Time-Image
Deleuze’s Cinema Studies
as a Model for Problematising
Sound in Artistic Practice
Gabriel Paiuk
Institute of Sonology, Royal Conservatoire, The Hague
Leiden University Academy of Creative and Performing Arts

In 2013 I had the chance to listen to a performance of Italian composer Luigi

Nono’s work No hay caminos . . . a Andrei Tarkowskij (1987), for seven instrumen-
tal groups distributed around the audience, at the main hall of the Cité de la
Musique, in Paris.1 I recall being startled about three-quarters through this
piece, which lasted approximately twenty-five minutes, by a substantial trans-
formation in the way I experienced some of its sound components. This trans-
formation was not the result of the manipulation of any of the sound elements
of the work but of a displacement of my listening focus. It revealed sound as an
essentially manifold instance, susceptible of acquiring diverse statuses.
In this chapter I would like to use Deleuze’s notion of the “time-image,”
developed in his investigation of the role of the image in cinema, to explore
what was significant about this experience. Along with this, I sketch a proposal
to use the concept of “time-image” as a tool to reassess aspects of how we con-
ceive sound and its role within artistic practices.

The “time-image”
What we understand when we refer to an image is not an undisputed given. As
visual scholar W. J. T. Mitchell (1987, 9) puts it: “[something] that must imme-
diately strike the notice of anyone who tries to take a general view of the phe-
nomena called by the name of imagery . . . is the wide variety of things that go by
this name . . . pictures, statues, optical illusions, maps, diagrams, dreams, hallu-
cinations, spectacles, projections, poems, patterns, memories, and even ideas.”
He elaborates this with an example: “[What] if I try to point to a real image

1 The piece was conducted by Jonathan Nott and performed by the Ensemble Intercontemporain and
members of the Orchestre du Conservatoire de Paris.

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 Thinking Sound through the Notion of the Time-Image

and explain what it is to someone who doesn’t already know what an image is.
I point at Xeuxis’s painting and say ‘There, that is an image.’ And the reply is,
‘Do you mean that colored surface?’ Or ‘Do you mean those grapes?’” (ibid., 17).
An image implies a particular instance of perceptual individuation, a grasp,
an articulation of codes set up within a model that organises the seen. As such,
it acquires different roles and statuses within different sensory and cognitive
models. As Mitchell (2005, 263) points out, “ancient optical theory treated
vision as a thoroughly tactile and material process, a stream of ‘visual fire’ and
phantom ‘eidola’ flowing back and forth between the eye and the object.” This
example shows how such a model defines the nature of the image in a very dif-
ferent way from a model that postulates the mind as “a drawing surface or a
mirror” (Mitchell 1987, 17).
Although not aiming to propose a comprehensive theory of the image, in
the books Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1986) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image
(1989) Gilles Deleuze explores the status and role of images within the domain
of cinematic practices. The manifold nature of the image is expressed by enun-
ciating distinct regimes of the image. As Deleuze explains in chapter 6 of The
Time-Image, what confers a distinct status to an image is not the reference it
conveys, the “object” of an image: “it is not a matter of knowing if the object is
really independent, it is not a matter of knowing if these are exteriors or scen-
ery” (Deleuze 1989, 126); what determines its particular status is the kind of
relationships it establishes.
Throughout the two cinema books, Deleuze strives towards the description
of a particular type of cinematic image that he will label the time-image. This
type, he will claim, emerges as relevant for the first time, albeit not exclusively,
in post-World War II cinema. It is contrasted with the type of cinematic image
that mostly inhabits what he brands as classic cinema, which operates instead
within the regime of the movement-image.

Sensitive transformations
The impression that I had while listening to Luigi Nono’s No hay caminos, which
conveyed the transformation I referred to above, can be described in the fol-
lowing way: at a particular moment in the piece I came to hear the joint sound
of the single and double strikes on the timpani and bass drum, the two lowest
members of the percussion family, as if the sound had been “spatialised” by
electronic means, as if it had been spread throughout, expanded into emerging
from all areas of the hall.
It is well known that the lowest sounding frequencies give the least amount
of directional information, rendering these sonorous instances less localisable
and more diffuse. Nevertheless, in this case the significant aspect is that I was lit-
erally hearing these elements in a fundamentally different way than I had heard
them at the beginning of the piece. This occurred even though no other layer
had been added to these sound components: they had remained unchanged,
and they appeared at rather regular time intervals throughout the work, always

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 Gabriel Paiuk

consisting of similarly repeated, simple gestures.2 In this piece, although most

other percussion, string, and wind instruments are spread throughout the
space in diverse locations, the two timpani and the bass drum, played mostly in
combination, are located only on the front stage and the back of the hall.
As I mentioned before, the transformation in my experience of the sound
resulted not from a manipulation or alteration of the sound but from a dis-
placement of my listening focus. The unfolding of the piece had sensitised my
hearing to the inherently spatial aspect embedded in each sound, to the fact
that every sound entity produced in a conventional medium comprises a series
of successive and multiple reflections; hence, rather than hearing this sono-
rous instance through the pre-eminence of its attack, which had determined
my listening approach at the start of the work,3 my attention had shifted to
the resonances of the timpani and bass drum, to the proliferation of acoustic
excitations produced by the reflections they triggered in the hall. The intensity
of these resonances, previously absent from my awareness, had been levelled
and rendered, through this shift in attention, as equivalent in relevance to that
of the attack. This alteration in my experience of this sounding instance did
not simply imply a change in the sonorous information to which I attended; it
altered the sounds’ role and precipitated a different set of adjacencies. In the
circumstances of apprehension that were established at the beginning of the
piece, and through the perceptual isolation of the attack, this sound event had
been constituted as a point within an autonomous plane of musical figures;
but at this point the sound turned into the experience of the room as a sound-
ing body triggered by the timpani and bass drum’s initial excitation. This sono-
rous instance thus prompted multiple sets of affective memories and traces of
embodied apprehensions.

A crystalline regime
Within Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Deleuze
discusses how images in cinema acquire a different status depending on the
kind of prolongation prompted by their interaction. These prolongations
occur within particular regimes of the image, themselves enabled by specific cin-
ematic operations. Deleuze’s use of the notion of prolongation is rooted in
Henri Bergson’s radical reassessment of the concept of image, which Deleuze
claims entails a redefinition of the basis of our perceptual model.
In The Movement-Image Deleuze contrasts Bergson’s position with that of
phenomenology, observing that Bergson and Husserl undertook in parallel the
challenge of devising their own “solution” to the inherited nineteenth-cen-
tury problem of how to weld “image” and “movement” (Deleuze 1986, 56). He
claims that phenomenology retained the coordinates of consciousness through
the performance of intentionality, asserting the existence of natural “condi-

2 They appear in segments 1, 8, 14, and 21 of the score (Nono 1987).

3 As Morton Feldman remarks: “Actually, what we [usually] hear is the attack and not the sound” (Feld-
man [1973] 1985, 89).

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 Thinking Sound through the Notion of the Time-Image

tions of perception” that define “an ‘anchoring’ of the perceiving subject in

the world” (ibid., 57). Deleuze states that phenomenology “still preserves the
categories of things and of consciousness” (Deleuze 1982a, my translation),4
by way of its main dictum: “all consciousness is consciousness of something”
(Deleuze 1986, 56). Bergson, rather, removed the “of,” claiming that “all con-
sciousness is something” (ibid.). While phenomenology conceives of a “sens-
ible form (Gestalt) which organises the perceptive field as a function of a sit-
uated intentional consciousness” (ibid., 57), in Bergson the “infinite set of all
images constitutes a kind of plane” (ibid., 58), a system of “universal variation”
(ibid.) where instances of perception are not organised according to a model of
“bodies (nouns), qualities (adjectives) and actions (verbs)” (ibid., 59) but actu-
ally emerge through the articulation of pure relationships between images.
“Every image acts on others and reacts to others, on ‘all their facets at once’
and ‘by all their elements’” (Deleuze 1986, 58). Particular instances of percep-
tion arise from this continuous interaction, from the particular “interval [that]
appears—a gap between the action and the reaction” (ibid., 61). Constructing
his argument from this Bergsonian precedent, Deleuze explicates the notion of
regime of the image (ibid., 62), in which a particular kind of prolongation, arising
from their interaction confers a specific status on an image.
In Chapter 3 of The Time Image (1989) Deleuze introduces Bergson’s two
kinds of “recognition,” which involve two different kinds of memory, to further
elaborate the inner workings of the two main regimes of the image. The first of
Bergson’s types of memory can be identified with habit; the second, with the
recollection of past events. In an earlier lecture, Deleuze (1982b) labelled them
respectively memory-contraction (habit) and memory-circuit (recollection).
Habit plays a role in the vast majority of our everyday circumstances, in the
form of sensory-motor links: I see a cup and react to it by taking hold of it and
bringing it to my mouth. It is not necessary to invoke a set of recollections;
a motor-link is prompted directly by the cup. However, if for any reason my
memory habits fail, the sensory-motor link is interrupted, and I’m confronted
with memory-circuits of the past, the diverse layers of interactions and possi-
bilities that constitute the current experience. Deleuze (1982b) cites Bergson’s
references to cases of aphasia, illustrated by the situation in which we meet on
the street a person we know, but we don’t remember from where we know him
or even his name. In this instance a particular effort to activate the recollection
of memories takes place.
The regime of the movement-image, comprising processes of “automatic or
habitual recognition,” is governed by sensory-motor links, where a particular
action, affection or a state of things is constituted. A cinematic shot of an orange
on a table, followed by a shot of a person who grabs it and slams it against a wall,
constitutes an action-image. Within this regime, also identified by Deleuze as an
organic regime, images stand for something beyond themselves: a detached continu-
ity, a “supposedly pre-existing reality” that follows the “laws which determine
successions” (Deleuze 1989, 126).

4 “la phénoménologie gardera encore les catégories des choses et de conscience.”

155
 Gabriel Paiuk

This organic regime is contrasted with a crystalline regime, which is articulated

by time-images. Deleuze claims that the first emergence of this type of image as a
regular feature of modern cinema appears in cinematic situations in which char-
acters are faced with something so “unbearable” (Deleuze 1989, 2) that it has
become impossible for them to react.5 In these first cases that Deleuze alludes
to in The Time-Image, the prolongation of the image into action has been broken,
put into crisis. Comparable to the interruption that occurs in memory-circuits,
where “the actual is cut off from its motor linkages” (ibid., 127), prolongation
is in this case interrupted: “descriptions, which constitute their own object,
refer [now] to purely optical and sound situations detached from their motor
extension” (ibid., 126), and the image, in this case, is relinked to its virtual past
and future. Within the regime of the time-image, “a crystalline description . . .
constantly gives way to other descriptions which contradict, displace, or modify
the preceding ones. It is now the description itself which constitutes the sole
decomposed and multiplied object” (ibid.). In opposition to what occurs within
the realm of the movement-image, in which the function of the images is to
relate to a detached continuity, “a supposedly pre-existing reality” (ibid.), here
an image stands for itself, but not as a self-contained thing-in-itself. Rather, it
is an instance of an image-circuit that, disconnected from sensory-motor links,
is open to all that constitutes it and that is not actual: the multiplicity of past
conditions that allowed it and the future possibilities that arise from it.

Becoming indiscernible
Luigi Nono’s No Hay Caminos . . . is constructed of twenty-six segments inter-
spersed with silences of varying durations. These twenty-six segments expose
in diverse orders and distributions a set of recurrent materials: sound elements
and behaviours that can be broadly identified by their timbral characteristics.
These arise from diverse combinations of instrumental behaviours, including:
conventionally and continuously held notes, iterated stable notes (produced
by either flatterzunge or tremolo actions on string instruments), multiple-attack
sequences on the bongos, deep-low single attacks on bass drum and timpani,
multiple-attack legno gestures on the strings (“jeté”), and slow frequency oscil-
lations on held notes.
The pitch material of the piece consists of microtonal variations around the
single pitch-class G, distributed over all registers, which helps the piece to
develop its focus on material aspects of the sound phenomena. The segments,
although using very diverse dynamic ranges and degrees of vertical or horizon-
tal aggregation, rarely imply a clear sense of directionality across the sequences
that result, since the diverse variants are distributed in a way that does not give
priority to any specific material. The work’s overall design could be said to pose
a particular challenge to how continuity is perceived, as the distribution of
components sets up a fundamentally non-directional character.

5 “What has suddenly been brought about is a pure optical situation to which the little maid has no
response or reaction” (Deleuze 1989, 2).

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 Thinking Sound through the Notion of the Time-Image

The sound elements unfold, distributed among the seven different group
locations around the audience and following diverse combinatorial strategies.
Different patterns of distribution of the sources of sound in the hall take place:
continuously held notes are “relayed” from one point to another in the room
following complex schemes; attacks are interpolated that occur in one and
another location; diversely “weighted” sound sources in the hall are summed
in continuously shifting layers.6
Through the sum of these strategies, No hay caminos . . . , rather than setting
up a layer of trajectories that would render an impression of linear movement
throughout the hall—that is, creating an impression of the spatial as a mag-
nitude based on localisation change—undertakes a sensitisation process that
discloses the inherent spatiality of every sound. The spatial aspect of sound
cannot be expressed as a single parameter; it implies a singular coalescence
of diverse instances: motion parallax, inter-aural differences, spectral filtering
caused by the room, psychological determinations of knowledge of the source,
and cultural memories and conditions that inform the way we engage with
sound. The spatial exceeds what can be grasped in a scalar dimension.
The unfolding of this work, in my experience of its performance, exposed
how conditions of apprehension play a role in the way sound is experienced:
while at first I had grasped the timpani attack as a figure, a point on a plane of
formal relationships, my focus shifted towards the way the active engagement
of my attention defined my listening process. By deploying a specific compos-
itional strategy—including repetitions that ambiguously constitute different
sound aggregates out of the same initial components, together with the isola-
tion of the simplest elements at the subtlest dynamics at the limit of audibility7—
the work disengages these elements from the threads of musical discursivity.
By interrupting the possibility of establishing figural continuities between its
sonorous components, the piece’s organisation enhances a listener’s awareness
of each sound event as a diverse manner of exciting the acoustic conditions of
the hall and of the sensitive adjacencies of these instances, rendering material
aspects of sound as binding together diverse possibilities of apprehension.
Rather than linking one sound to another to constitute a detached continu-
ity, an independent, imaginary plane of formal relationships, the way the piece
unravelled had set up each sound instance as one which “constantly gives way to
other descriptions which contradict, displace, or modify the preceding ones”
(Deleuze 1989, 126). Each perceived component, as in the case of the time-image,
thereby prompted a link to the multiplicity of past conditions that allowed it
and the future possibilities that arise from it.
As in the case of the time-image, the arrival at this sonorous instance is not
equivalent to the arrival at an object “in itself,” an ultimate reality of sound

6 For a detailed account of the scheme for distributing location, see Banihashemi (2005, 30–39).
7 In several works of his so-called late period, Luigi Nono asks for the instrumentalists to play at such a
soft level that the resulting sound is “at the limit of what is possibly audible”, see Fragmente–Stille, an
Diotima for string quartet (Nono 1980) or La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura for violin and eight-chan-
nel tape (Nono 1988). In No hay caminos . . . (Nono 1987), this is expressed by the use of extreme dynamic
markings such as ppppppp.

157
 Gabriel Paiuk

detached from its surroundings; it rather offers a perceptual instance in which

“the two modes of existence are now combined in a circuit where the real and
the imaginary, the actual and the virtual, chase after each other, exchange their
roles and become indiscernible” (Deleuze 1989, 127). From such a perspective,
a sound is neither a pure acoustic instance nor a figure on a musical plane. Like
the image, as introduced at the beginning of this article, sound is instead an
inherently problematic instance, ever implied in singular circuits of material
and symbolic transformations.
In the work I have referred to, through the exposure of the variable con-
ditions at play in the constitution of our apprehension, the role of sound is
problematised, shown to happen in the enactment of particular models. By
describing the sound-event as occurring within a regime comparable to that of
the time-image, sound is exposed as a confluence of latent possibilities of coales-
cence and its actualisations.

References
Banihashemi, Siavosh. 2005. “Analysen ———. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time Image.
zu Luigi Nonos Werk ‘Non hay caminos, Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and
hay que caminar . . . Andrej Tarkovskj.’” Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of
Kunstuniversität Graz, Institut Minnesota Press. First published 1985 as
für Komposition, Musiktheorie, Cinéma 2: L’image-temps (Paris: Minuit).
Musikgeschichte und Dirigieren. Feldman, Morton. (1973) 1985. “The Anxiety
Deleuze, Gilles. 1982a. “Transcriptions de of Art.” In Essays, edited by Walter
Cours at Vincennes—Janvier 1, 1982.” In Zimmermann, 85–96. Kerpen: Beginner
La voix de Gilles Deleuze en ligne, Université Press. Chapter first published 1973 (Art in
Paris 8. Accessed 10 July 2017. http:// America 61 [5]: 88–93).
www2.univ-paris8.fr/deleuze/article. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1987. Iconology: Image, Text,
php3?id_article=76. Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago
———. 1982b. “Transcriptions de Cours Press.
at Vincennes—Mai 18, 1982.” In La voix ———. 2005. “There Are No Visual Media.”
de Gilles Deleuze en ligne, Université Paris Journal of Visual Culture 4 (2): 257–66.
8. Accessed 24 June 2017. http://www2. Nono,Luigi. 1980. Fragmente–Stille, an
univ-paris8.fr/deleuze/article.php3?id_ Diotima for string quartet (1979–80).
article=157. Milan: Ricordi.
———. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement Image. ———. 1987. No hay caminos, hay que caminar
Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and . . . Andrej Tarkowskij. Milan: Ricordi.
Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone ———. 1988. La lontananza nostalgica utopica
Press. First published 1983 as Cinéma 1: futura for violin and eight-channel tape.
L’image-mouvement (Paris: Minuit). Milan: Ricordi

158
 Re-Notations
Flattening Hierarchies and
Transforming Functions
Einar Torfi Einarsson
Iceland Academy of the Arts

The machine is not social unless it breaks into all its connective elements, which in
turn become machines.
—Deleuze and Guattari (1986, 81)

Conceptual models
Where is the score?1 Where is notation? When approaching these questions, we
can initially say that the score and notation are within music. So the question
becomes, where within music?
Without attempting a formal definition, we can say that music is a conglom-
erate of parts or strata that are constantly in motion. Additionally, we can say
that these parts, these strata, can function with a minor or major role, and
moreover, they can function in the background or foreground. From this per-
spective, a basic overview of the most distinct parts of music emerges: Concepts/
composer—notation/scores—performer/instruments—sounds/audience/listening.
Notice that with this simple model is associated a particular order (from left
to right) and a certain hierarchy that is applied to the background/foreground
and major/minor functions. My initial approach or method aims to flatten
this model in terms of both its order and its hierarchy. Applying a Deleuzian
perspective—“One stratum is always capable of serving as the substratum of
another, or of colliding with another, independently of any evolutionary order”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 502)—there results a space for experimentation
that states two things: any stratum is as necessary as any other; and any ordering
of these parts is as possible as any other.
On this conceptual basis I can work with minor parts as if they were major
ones; but, more importantly, I acquire a tool to change the relationships
between the strata of music, so that the “where” of a particular stratum
becomes unstable. Thus, I extract, or deterritorialise, notation—as a stratum
of the music machine—for further experimentation.

1 This article is a renaming of the presentation and the exhibit “Re-Notations III: Schumann’s Kreisleria-
na, I molto agitato” that was part of the DARE 2015 conference.

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 Einar Torfi Einarsson

Notation is usually a background part of music and functions in a minor role,

especially when compared with major, foreground parts such as composer, per-
former, sound, and listening. When receiving and presenting music, we tend
to place much more importance on these aforementioned foreground parts,
whereas notation is merely considered a means to an end. But even in that
capacity, how does notation actually behave? Viewed in light of the model set
out above, notation is a connective force with mapping capabilities; it thrives
on the in-between, meaning it is always situated “betwixt”—one of what
Deleuze and Guattari call “interstratic phenomena” (1987, 502; emphasis origi-
nal). Notation thus functions as a space that gathers or entangles things (ideas,
materials, composers, performers, instruments, etc.) into or with itself. In this
sense, it structures, relates, transcodes, demands, instructs; but, notably, it is
always partial: a functioning part or stratum in a larger machine we call music.
As a connective force, however, notation has great power or potential to alter
perceptions, give new perspectives, stir up thoughts, alienate, and defamiliar-
ise. Deterritorialising notation in order to work with it differently requires us
to problematise its place or position, its functionality and directionality—that
is, its basic role within music. In my approach this roughly translates to moving
notation’s function from its background role to the foreground, as a form of
critique of the most dominant element of music, which is sound. This approach
could be called “against the tyranny of sounds and listening.” This could be
done in many different ways; what follows is an outline of a particular experi-
mental path—Re-Notations—taken to explore this objective.

Prescriptive notation (background and experiments)

To understand Re-Notations it is necessary to trace its background in prescrip-
tive notation. Prescriptive notation focuses on the actions of musicians; that
is, it prescribes actions to be executed instead of indicating how things should
sound. For this reason, the “outcome becomes known only by following pro-
cess-oriented instructions” (Kanno 2007, 235), the “outcome” usually being
sounds or sonic results. The focus of this type of notation is therefore on phys-
ical movements and the materiality of instruments: instrumental and bodily
spaces are employed in order to map out actions.2 An important aspect of this
kind of notation is that by focusing on physical movements it has distanced
itself from sound or complicated its relationship with it.3
Because of its indirect relationship with sound, we could say that prescriptive
notation is not necessarily involved with sound. It proposes, rather, that music
is more than sound. Thus, a space opens up for experimentation: what if we
engage fully with this proposition and deterritorialise this aspect (disengage-
ment from sound) of this stratum of notation?

2 This is also called action notation. See, for example, Helmut Lachenmann’s Pression ([1969] 1980),
Luciano Berio’s Gesti ([1966] 1970), Klaus K. Hübler’s Cercar ([1983] 2010), and almost all Aaron Cassidy’s
work for the past decade.
3 I am not saying that employers of this notation necessarily take this distance but rather that the nota-
tion itself presents this distance.

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 Re-Notations

My earlier experiments built upon this concept, aiming to further problem-

atise the relationship between notation and sound. They explored other kinds
of activities, activities of a non-musical nature, and applied prescriptive nota-
tion to those activities. For example, I made pieces for the activity of pencilling
and erasing (Einarsson 2013–14) that explored those specific activities without
considering possible sonic dimensions but probing their specific (prescriptive)
notational dimensions. The intentions behind the performative results were
left unresolved; indeed, the performative results are probably more graphical
or visual than auditory. The pieces were solely concerned with the physical
actions they required—the pressure, size of action, direction, speed, and so
on, that arise when a pencil or eraser is physically applied. These experiments
were basically with prescriptive notation and notation’s (dis-)placement; that
is, with de- and reterritorialisation of notation in an unfamiliar field of activity
(erasing and pencilling). They disturb the usual foreground of music (sound)
and aim to obscure or diminish that foreground by introducing a competing
foreground element or new performative results (graphics). These possibil-
ities were afforded by using a certain type of notation and by choosing a certain
context (materials or instruments) or making a specific connection between
notation and material when sound is removed from the equation.
The function of notation in these pieces can still be traced back to the model
presented above: there is a composer, there is a score, there is a performer,
there are sounds and listening (although these are problematised) or perform-
ative results, and there is an audience. In these works (Pencil/Eraser Piece I–II),
the directionality of notation, which I define as a vector from composer to per-
formative results, therefore still operates conventionally. In other words, nota-
tion is here to be performed, and thus it still functions in the background or
in a minor role. However, its function is also slightly problematised because
of ambiguities in performative results and intentions: is it about sounds? is it
about graphics? is it about notation?
In an experiment that followed—a piece for typing on a computer keyboard
(Einarsson 2014a)—the directional vector of notation was transformed; and
this, in turn, prepared the methods used in the Re-Notations cycle.

Notation as a foreground functioning element

(notation as the work)
The works discussed above gathered specific actions into a particular nota-
tional space. Those actions were initially treated as abstract forces moving
independently or to explore their possible movements in a particular context.
Thus, an action-based possibility space was filtered through a notational sys-
tem and advanced for performance. The piece for typing on a computer key-
board (Keyboard Piece I) is similar in that it explores the actions associated with
the “instrument” in question (left- and right-hand fingers pressing keys), but it
adds a source element: a pre-existing text. However, this text functions only to
activate a notational technique that emphasises a certain relationship between

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 Einar Torfi Einarsson

keyboards, hands, fingers, and text; thus, the text itself is irrelevant, though it
foregrounds a specific perspective on the activity of typing.

F igure 1.13.1.

In figure 1.13.1 we can see how this technique operates. The text is turned into
words and the words into rows of letters that are filtered through the spatial
dimensions of the qwerty keyboard: the set-up and locations of letters as they
appear on the qwerty keyboard become part of the notation. The order of the
letters is specified by connecting this spatial set-up to a double temporal axis
(the beams in figure 1.13.1) above and below the letter space, indicating left-
hand (below) and right-hand fingers (above). The text is therefore hidden far in
the background, and the notational technique, along with its materials (actions
and spatial/temporal relations), is brought to the front.
Although the notation here turns into a score, this score is not to be per-
formed. If performed, the results would be the sounds of key-clicks together
with the appearance of the text (assuming the keyboard is connected to a com-
puter and a screen and the required programs are running). However, that is
not the piece; that is not the work. In fact, a conventional performance would
diminish the work and render the notational technique superfluous. This piece
is about the relationship we have with keyboards and the possible entangle-
ment of notation with keyboards, hands, fingers, and texts. And this aspect,
this viewpoint, is only communicated through the notation itself. The notation
releases a graphical world, rather than a sonic world, which is presented on its
own terms: the “release” is not through performance, as for conventional nota-
tion, but rather through the act of notating. Here, notation becomes perform-
ative and thus the notation for the score becomes the work, allowing notation
to shift to the foreground; there is no performance option, only the option to
read. The basic function of notation, its directionality and aim towards a score
to be realised, is thus transformed; that aspect of the score is subtracted.
Keyboard Piece I is useful to explain Re-Notations because in it the direction-
ality of notation began to alter. I developed the idea of pointing notation to
an extant phenomenon (the text, in this case) to gain a new perspective on
a particular situation and to release that perspective through the notation
itself. Pointing notation toward something transforms its usual function and
directional aim; it ceases to function as a medium of communication between
composer and performer, with sonification as the usual aim. In Keyboard Piece I
the notation points at an extant text, aiming to contemplate it, to reflect it, to

162

F igure 1.13.1. Fragment from Keyboard Piece I: Notation is Cryptodynamic.

 Re-Notations

see it otherwise, or to deterritorialise it—all through prescriptive notational

techniques and not through conventional performance. Specific strata of that
text—its entanglement with the human body, materiality, and its instruments
(the background functions)—a slice of its multiplicity, escapes through this
method of notating.

The “doings” of Re-Notations

Keyboard Piece I introduced the idea of pointing, which is also the idea of extract-
ing strata, a consequence of following a particular “line of flight” of notation,
rotating its function, and discovering a possible new direction. This deterri-
torialisation of notation can reterritorialise basically anywhere—“How could
movements of deterritorialization and processes of reterritorialization not be
relative, always connected, caught up in one another?” (Deleuze and Guattari
1987, 10)—while forming new relationships such as those between texts and
keyboards.
It may have been necessary to explore notation in this manner “outside”
musical behaviours (hence pencilling, erasing, or typing) but the question then
arose: what if I reterritorialise “inside” music again, only at a different location,
a different “where,” in a different musical context? Thus from the experiment
that was Keyboard Piece I arose the Re-Notations cycle (Einarsson 2014b), which
renotates classical piano repertoire.4

F igure 1.13.2.

4 Re-Notations I–IV (Einarsson 2014b) is a cycle of works that renotate works by Bach, Mozart, Schumann,
and Webern; it was first exhibited at the Reykjavik Arts Festival 2014.

163

Figure 1.13.2. Fragment from Re-Notations III: Schumann’s Kreisleriana, I molto agitato,
bars 25–32.
 Einar Torfi Einarsson

In Re-Notations III (figure 1.13.2), the notation pointed at Schumann’s

Kreisleriana, I molto agitato. Much as in Keyboard Piece I, the notational technique
builds a specific perspective on a “situation” from two elements: spatiality or
location (on musical keyboards); and the temporal order of keys. The order of
notes as they occur in the original score is indicated by lines attached to the
central time axis (with the first note on far left), which then connect to the
spatial/location indicators (keyboards) that also indicate the right (upper)
and left (lower) hand material: “A diagram is a map, or rather several superim-
posed maps” (Deleuze 1988, 44). These are the “doings” of a narrow focus on
materiality, of strata extraction. Importantly, meshing the temporal and spatial
elements (superimposed maps) by the notational technique is essential. The
specific diagrammatic relations release, or reveal, a graphical world, or allow
a pattern to emerge: “The diagrammatic or abstract machine does not func-
tion to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to
come, a new type of reality . . . and extracts expressions and contents” (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987, 142). The emerging pattern or diagram does not have an
author and is not designed by anyone, but it emerges through the notational
technique employed and the “situation” examined in the course of filtering or
revealing a perspective. Notation functions to extract, to look at a particular
situation or event, a specific musical “slice,” in order to reveal the background
or minor parts, and to allow notation to stand on its own as a foreground ele-
ment. And therefore, naturally, as in the keyboard piece, this notation is the
work; there is no performance option (at least not in any conventional sense).

Figure 1.13.3

164

Figure 1.13.3: Fragment from Re-Notations IV: Webern’s op. 27, variationen I, bars 1–29.
 Re-Notations

These notations (figures 1.13.2 and 1.13.3) fold themselves onto other notations,
other scores, other musics, examining their signifier/signified relations with
materiality. Re-notations are always in-between; but by occupying a differ-
ent interstratum than usual, they act in and among the substrata of the music
machine, filtering, extracting perspectives, slicing, segmenting: “segmental
production; he will precipitate segmented series” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986,
58). These re-notations have neither their own music nor a clear relationship
with composer and performer; they relate strata, they go in-between, they
repeat with difference, they allow escape. Thus notation here functions as a
relationship-tool, building relations between different spaces (keyboard space,
hand space, temporal space, score space). In truth, notation always does that,
but here functions with a difference: no longer a substratum of performer or
composer, it occupies a foreground that emphasises its own role of notation
and the materiality of the “score.” The intensity and density of the involved
activity is thereby revealed graphically as an overcrowded space of movements:
“the diagram . . . is the map of relations between forces, a map of destiny, or
intensity” (Deleuze 1988, 36).
However, in contrast with Keyboard Piece I, here the source material is revealed
by the title of the work (Schumann’s Kreisleriana or Webern’s op. 27). The sonic
worlds of these works are therefore somewhat present, but only as a back-
ground element—that is, only conceptually, along with various nuances regard-
ing sound production (dynamics, articulation, etc.) that are completely absent
in the renotations. A transformation or inversion of hierarchy thereby occurs:
a surface stratum (performance/sound/listening) now serves as a “hidden”
substratum (though acknowledged), and notation functions as a foreground
or major element: “One stratum is always capable of serving as the substratum
of another” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 502). The dominant factor of music
as usually encountered has thus shifted to the background, an outcome that
becomes internal instead of external, a history instead of a future—or, rather,
dichotomies of internal/external and history/future become unstable. All these
shifts and shuffles of strata are made possible through a conceptual model that
aspired to flatten hierarchy: an anti-arborescent approach.

Envoi
Music, from the perspective of such works, constantly occupies the same loca-
tions—the intensified spaces—in which actions continually fold on each other.
There is disclosed a “performance” of spatio-temporal multiplicity that fore-
grounds parts hitherto relegated to minor functions: notation and materiality.
Exhausted locations, excessive and obscured quantities, superimpositions, and
interpenetrations become the subject of notational acts, while sounds, per-
formers, and composers are placed in the background. The “score” becomes
an abstract, virtual, diagrammatic “recording” of the physical and material
situation the music demands: a limited number of space-points are occupied
and activated in a specific temporal order. This order, however, is obscured by a
multiplicity of condensed locations: the perspective, the particular (over)flow

165
 Einar Torfi Einarsson

from the crevice. One stratum of a musical multiplicity (a slice) makes a clan-
destine escape by embracing a function that both points and extracts. Notation
thereby diversifies its direction and function and becomes an active post-per-
formance activity—not instructional, not “minor,” not authoritative; but spec-
ulative, reflective and itself performative.

References
Berio, Luciano. (1966) 1970. Gesti: For Alto I–II and Eraser Piece I–II. Accessed 28 June
Recorder. London: Universal Edition. 2017. http://einartorfieinarsson.com/
Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault. Translated works2.html.
and edited by Séan Hand. Minneapolis: ———. 2014a. Keyboard Piece I: Notation
University of Minnesota Press. First is Cryptodynamic. Accessed 7 July 2017.
published 1986 as Foucault (Paris: Minuit). http://einartorfieinarsson.com/works2.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. html.
1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. ———. 2014b. Re-Notations I–IV. Accessed
Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: 18 June 2017. http://einartorfieinarsson.
University of Minnesota Press. First com/works4.html.
published 1975 as Kafka: Pour une Hübler, Klaus K. (1983) 2010. Cercar: Für
littérature mineure (Paris: Minuit). Posaune. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel.
———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism Kanno, Mieko. 2007. “Prescriptive
and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Notation: Limits and Challenges.”
Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Contemporary Music Review 26 (2): 231–54.
Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Lachenmann, Helmut. (1969) 1980. Pression:
Mille plateaux (Paris: Minuit). Für einen Cellisten. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf
Einarsson, Einar Torfi. 2013–14. Pencil Piece & Härtel.

166
 Alone/Together
Simulacral “A-presentation”
in and into
Practice-as-Research in Jazz
Steve Tromans
Surrey University

Mike Fletcher
Birmingham City University

This paper began life as a conference presentation interweaving live music

and spoken word.1 In what follows, we retain our original format of alternat-
ing (individually authored) discourse with audio documentation of the per-
formances given by Fletcher and me (on saxophone and piano, respectively).
This is to evoke for the reader a sense of the liveness of the original event and,
importantly, to retain the balance of spoken word to music-making that we
deliberately factored into our presentation. In this respect, the paper should be
thought of as a performance of artistic research in music, where the knowledge
pertaining to that research inhabits and is expressed by both the writing and
the music-making in equal measure.
We explore jazz practice with the well-known jazz standard Alone Together
(composed by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz in 1932), and enumerate the
motives behind our research experiments with the piece. These practices and
motives are discussed in relation to the Deleuzian concept of simulacrum, which
we utilise in modelling jazz practitioners’ approaches to making music with
the standard repertoire. We likewise employ a Deleuzian notion of “a-pres-
entational” expression in order to draw attention to the multi-modal format of
our paper, and to its evocation of a complex temporal relationship (founded on
difference over similarity) between historical renditions of Swartz and Dietz’s
piece and our own.
In composing our individual discourses, Fletcher and I took care not to influ-
ence each other’s writing; this was a deliberate decision, undertaken to install
a genuine act of difference at the heart of our argument. There are, inevita-
bly, similarities of subject, content, and expression: we are, after all, jazz musi-

1 The lecture-recital was part of The Dark Precursor, the International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic
Research (DARE), hosted by the Orpheus Research Centre in Music, Ghent, Belgium, 9–11 November
2015.

167
 Steve Tromans and Mike Fletcher

cians working often on the same scene, enquiring into our own music prac-
tices for the purposes of higher-level research. However, we would advise the
reader not to cling to these resemblances in place of the far more important
and productive differences that emerge in such deliberate juxtaposition of two
authors’ (and musicians’) outputs. These differences are part-and-parcel of the
Deleuzian aspect of our artistic research in music, as we explore in what follows.

1. Deleuze and the simulacral (Tromans)

In his contribution to Adrian Parr’s The Deleuze Dictionary, philosopher Jonathan
Roffe (2010, 253) neatly summarised Deleuze’s simulacral critique of identity as
“the affirmation of a world populated by differences-in-themselves which are
not copies of any prior model.” From the perspective of theorising what it is
that jazz musicians do when they make new music with the standard repertoire,
the usefulness of the Deleuzian concept of simulacrum lies in its potential to
eschew the hierarchical chronology of, on the one hand, the “original” compos-
ition and, on the other, all ensuing performances of “the same.” With no prior
model to shackle any given rendition of a jazz standard to the predictability of a
re-presentation, difference—internal, affirmative, and in-itself—becomes the
“groundless ground” (the sans fond) that enables novelty in the event of music
performance by dint of the singularity of its emergence, in and of time.
Indeed, in his own words, Deleuze (1990, 53) promoted the world of simu-
lacra over the model-copy system specifically to “remove essences and to sub-
stitute events in their place”—to re-imagine events in terms of what he memo-
rably described as “jets of singularities.” From my own experience undertaking
practice-as-research in jazz, I would argue that music-making in performance
can (and should) be conceived, epistemologically-speaking, in such “explosive”
terms. Far more than providing the mere objects of a musicological analysis,
post festum, the working processes of those engaged in the act of musical cre-
ation in the event of performance offer an insight into what I am calling the
“event of knowledge.”
In this manner—setting up musical events over musical objects, modes of
performance over those of re-presentation—I am drawing focus away from
the obvious effects of music made in performance to better understand some-
thing of the precursory causes. By the “effects,” I am referring to such criteria
as the notes played and the gestures made—in other words, the whole pan-
oply of audio and visual “data” that can be captured, by various documentary
means, and presented and re-presented ad infinitum “in place of ” the differ-
ential acts of performance in the event itself. In resonance with Deleuze’s infa-
mous attack on what he considered to be the superficiality of the phenome-
nological method—in which Deleuze (1994, 52) proclaimed “The whole of
Phenomenology is an epiphenomenology”—I am concerned to delve deeper
below the surface-effects of jazz performance; to evoke a sense of the “dark
precursors” at work forever beyond the reach of the modes of the documentary.
However, despite all this talk regarding the epistemological weight of events
of music-making in performance, my theorising here is in danger of remain-

168
 Alone/Together

ing at the level of the discursive. As performance theorist Susan Melrose (2005)
has argued, if we consider the “theoretical” to be solely articulable in “specific
registers of writing” we ignore the possibility that expert performance itself
“might actually already operate as mixed-mode and multi-dimensional, multi-
participant theoretical practices.” Thus, for a musical-theoretical practice to
adequately operate in mixed-mode, multi-dimensional, and multi-partici-
pant fashion, it is obvious that it must balance the equation of discourse and
music-making, and encourage the interplay of different “voices,” both verbally
and musically articulated. For this reason, the trajectory of this paper will move
into the dimensions of the musical: to Mike Fletcher and his performance of
Alone Together.

2. Solo performance (Fletcher)

Audio example 1.14.1.

3. Jazz standard as dark precursor: part 1 (Fletcher)

To begin my discourse I would like to take up the critique of “hierarchical chro-
nology” as touched on above. Tromans suggested that Deleuze’s concept of
simulacrum is useful to us as practising jazz musicians as it allows us to move
away from the idea of “original” in its primary and subsequent manifestations,
and conceive of each performance as an “event.”
I am grateful that this has already been pointed out as it makes the follow-
ing admission somewhat easier; I confess that I have neither heard the original
recorded version of Alone Together nor seen the first published version of the
sheet music. Rather, my knowledge of the piece is a composite of all the itera-
tions of the piece in which I have participated as a performer and experienced
as a listener. Nevertheless, I would argue that rather than evidencing a lack of
rigour on my part, this fact is actually indicative of the way an expert jazz musi-
cian engages with standard repertoire and creates no impediment to my abil-
ity to expertly interpret the piece as a performer—to which I hope the audio
examples that accompany this text will attest.
However, should it be the case that we are not performing a version of the
“original” Alone Together, how should we understand the event that took place?
Consider the way that my solo performance unfolded. I—the performer—
played a piece that, although largely improvised, was based on the jazz stand-
ard. The other people in attendance—the listeners—witnessed what I played.
We were all participants in the unfolding music, but as I have already men-
tioned, the “original” was not—and, of course, can never be—explicitly evi-
denced during this process. Yet I have clearly and confidently asserted that the
music I played was based on the standard and thus it should be understood as
what I shall call—in reference to Tromans’s earlier “event of knowledge”—an
“Alone Together event.” How can this be so?
At this point I turn to Deleuze and his concept of the dark precursor. In
Difference and Repetition, Deleuze (1994, 119) wrote, “Given two heterogeneous

169
 Steve Tromans and Mike Fletcher

series, two series of differences, the [dark] precursor plays the part of the differ-
enciator of these differences. In this manner, by virtue of its own power, it puts
them into immediate relation to one another.”
In the present case we are examining the way that participants in this “Alone
Together event”—be they performer or listener—might contextualise the osten-
sibly unique musical occurrence as it relates to previously experienced rendi-
tions of the piece. In this respect, I propose a model based on the above in
which Alone Together occupies the role of dark precursor, and each participant’s
unique cumulative experience of the piece represents one heterogeneous
series—an “Alone Together series.” The conceptualising of Deleuze’s words in
this way affords us a way of mediating between the differences that are revealed
within the multiple heterogeneous series while simultaneously accounting for
the identity of the composition.
In reference to identity, Deleuze (1994, 119) observed, “There is no doubt that
there is an identity belonging to the precursor, and a resemblance between the
series which it causes to communicate,” but that these identities and resem-
blances are akin to “an illusion” or “an effect”: “a functional product, an exter-
nal result” (ibid., 120).
Taking these words into account, I propose that an understanding of an
“Alone Together event” might better be articulated as the communication of the
multiple heterogeneous “Alone Together series” that are brought to bear on the
music by the participants present. Thus, it is only during the performance that
the identity of the piece is revealed.
For me as a jazz musician, this concept offers an extremely illuminating way
of conceptualising the way I engage with standard material. As our perfor-
mances have demonstrated, it is possible for a “standard event” – i.e. a per-
formance of a “jazz standard” to occur independently of—or at least without
direct reference to—the “original.” The privileging of difference over identity
serves, in this case, to liberate the musician from the notion of “hierarchical
chronology,” and thus freely engage in the “event.”
To sum up, once we turn our attention to difference in itself, the external—
whether conceived in terms of identity, resemblance, or difference—is of sec-
ondary importance compared with the fundamental differences operating
internally to the thing itself. Although—as Deleuze himself advised—the iden-
tity of the dark precursor will always remain indeterminate, perceiving the jazz
standard as a dark precursor ensures that engagement with standard repertoire
remains a relevant and active part of contemporary jazz practice.

4. Solo performance (Tromans)

Audio example 1.14.2.

170
 Alone/Together

5. Alone Together and the Deleuzian simulacral

(Tromans)
As highlighted at the head of this chapter, we are deliberately interposing our
two different approaches to jazz-standard practice (both discursively and in the
making of music), with the intention of utilising that difference productively
by means of an experiment in artistic research. That experiment is concerned
with foregrounding difference as a positive, creative force, above and beyond
its subjugation to the same and the identical that have long taken precedence
in our understandings of things in the world—things including, in the case of
our research, pieces from the canonical repertoire in jazz.
Take Alone Together: there was, of course, a song called Alone Together, co-com-
posed by Schwartz and Dietz, which debuted in the (not particularly successful)
show Flying Colors in 1932. Later that same year, Leo Reisman reached the top
ten in the US charts with Alone Together. Several years later, in 1939, and again in
1941, the clarinettist Artie Shaw made studio recordings of Alone Together; while
in 1950, and then in 1955, the trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis cut
their respective studio sessions—again, of a tune called Alone Together. In 1977,
Sun Ra gave the piece the Arkestral treatment on the album Mayan Temples, and
in 1997, Anthony Braxton and Ran Blake bounced their way through a particu-
larly playful rendition on A Memory of Vienna. There are, of course many other
recordings worthy of note (Ray Charles and Betty Carter in 1961, Paul Desmond
with Jim Hall in 1963, Mal Waldron in 1988, Brad Mehldau in 2000), not to men-
tion the countless performances undocumented. For each of these releases I
have highlighted, the music is credited as originating from the aforementioned
Dietz and Schwartz, and, given the chronology I have just sketched out, this of
course makes perfect, rational sense.2
Such a chronology wends its linear temporal way through the last eight dec-
ades of jazz practice right up until 10 November 2015 (the date of our original
conference presentation), and, accordingly, would include the performances
given by Fletcher and myself as part of that long lineage. However, if instead
we focus our attentions on the differences that inhere in each of these music
performances—differences not conceived in negative relation to points of
divergence from an ideal, original source, but in their own creative, productive
terms—then there is a marked change of temporal/hierarchical perspective.
Not least is the way we approach the presentation of music-making in perform-
ance with jazz standards. I say “presentation” out of (academic) habit, but, fol-
lowing Deleuze into a simulacral world of differences upon (and in relation
to) other differences, I should rather stress the a-presentational heterogen-
eity of such music-making. In other words, there is not so much something pre-
sented, in jazz-standard practice, as there is a complex temporal process enabled,
wherein differences internal to each and every performance of a given stand-
ard enter into an event-heightened condition of resonance with one another.
For Deleuze (1994, 278), such resonance enables communication via “systems

2 The information for this chronology of recordings of Alone Together comes from Ted Gioia’s The Jazz
Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire (2012, 18–20).

171
 Steve Tromans and Mike Fletcher

of simulacra [that] affirm divergence and decentring” (my emphasis). And that
“affirmation,” here, is key to understanding the practical-theoretical usefulness
of Deleuze’s philosophy of difference, operating through systems of simulacra,
as opposed to the binary “either-or” of model and copy.
The term “simulacrum” (and its plural “simulacra”) is from Plato, for whom
it was the most degraded kind of copy, removed from the essential aspect of
the model by two whole degrees. The hierarchy ran thus: first and foremost,
the model; second, the copy; third, the copy of the copy—the simulacrum.
Deleuze, however, reversed Platonism on this point, writing how: “The simu-
lacrum is not a degraded copy. It harbours a positive power which denies the
original and the copy, the model and the reproduction” (Deleuze 1990, 262,
my emphasis). Affirming the creative differences operating at the heart of all
instantiations of Alone Together allows us to move beyond the linear-temporal
limitations of assuming a 1932 genesis (or 1939, 1941, 1950, etc.) for all that
unfolds on the stage of its performance and, instead, approach instances of its
actual expression on their own “differencial” terms.3 In other words, as events
in their own right, albeit in productive resonance with all such events across a
wide temporal field, construed in non-linear and complex relation. In such a
way, far from being the degraded copies of a long-past original essence, all new
performances of Alone Together are enabled to creatively “interfere” with our
(ongoing) understandings of what constitutes a performance of Alone Together.

6. Jazz standard as dark precursor: part 2 (Fletcher)

I previously postulated that we might interpret the “heterogeneous series,”
as conceived by Deleuze, in terms of our individual experience of a given jazz
standard. I would now like to revisit this concept to examine more closely how
the way that we musicians experience the difference in “standard events” is
implicated in jazz performance practice.
Tromans briefly outlined some of the recorded examples of Alone Together
that—at least in terms of the order in which the events first occurred—form a
chronological series: the discographical canon of Alone Together.
However, in reality, we—the performers—are highly unlikely to have engaged
with these events in such strict chronological order, and, as I alluded to in my
first discourse, they are equally unlikely to have experienced each one of them.
Furthermore, it is probable that we will have experienced more “Alone Together
events” than simply those on record. I, for one, have played this piece on count-
less occasions as well as having practised it alone in my studio. As a result, I have
been privy to manifestations that make my particular “event series” unique—as
is the case for each one of us.
Moreover, as well as the differences between the series themselves, the inter-
nal difference of a singular event is perceived by the musician in relation to the
differences already experienced via their “event series.” In his examination of

3 I am using the Deleuzian term “differencial” here to indicate what Paul Patton (1994, xi–xii) refers to as
the creative act of making or becoming different.

172
 Alone/Together

the act of artistic expression, Dewey (1934, 63) observed that “things retained
from past experience . . . become coefficients in new adventures.”
Every time we engage with a new “Alone Together event,” we contextualise its
internal difference in terms of the collated events we have previously witnessed.
Therefore, should Tromans and I listen to an erstwhile unexperienced record-
ing of Alone Together together, we each experience its difference differently.
What is common to us all, however, and what allows us to make sense of
these many differences, is the differenciator, the dark precursor—in this case
Alone Together. As Deleuze (1994, 119) explained, “by virtue of its own power,
it [the differenciator] puts them [the series] into immediate relation with one
another.” I would argue that, in the case of a musical performance, the differen-
ciator actually operates on two levels simultaneously. It serves to differenciate,
first, between series and, second, between the unfolding event in relation to
previous events.
When I played a solo version, I used music to make discursive the way I
related the current performance with my own “event series.” Of course, in that
instance, I was the only one in the room with the means to musically partici-
pate. In essence, I was playing “alone.”
When we play “together,” things get much more interesting. When two or
more jazz musicians engage in a “standard event,” we then have the situation
whereby each individual musician not only engages in the same process of
relating the real-time event to those previously experienced but also employs
his or her expert musicianship in the spontaneous dialogue between musical
voices. Inevitably, this phenomenon is not best served by language, so, to finish
our a-presentation, we will leave you with a final duo performance.

7. Duo performance
Audio example 1.14.3.

References
Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. The Logic of Sense. University Press.
Translated by Mark Lester with Charles Melrose, Susan. 2005. “Words Fail Me:
Stivale. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. Dancing with the Other’s Familiar.”
New York: Columbia University Press. Keynote address at Towards Tomorrow?,
First published 1969 as Logique du sens Centre for Performance Research,
(Paris: Minuit). Aberystwyth, 6–10 April 2005. Accessed
———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. 19 June 2017. http://www.sfmelrose.org.
Translated by Paul Patton. New York: uk/wordsfailme/.
Columbia University Press. First Patton, Paul. 1994. Translator’s preface to
published 1968 as Différence et répétition Deleuze 1994, xi–xiii.
(Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Roffe, Jonathan. 2010. “Simulacrum.” In The
Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience. New Deleuze Dictionary, edited by Adrian Parr,
York: Milton, Balch. rev. ed., 253–54. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
Gioia, Ted. 2012. The Jazz Standards: A Guide University Press.
to the Repertoire. New York: Oxford

173
 A Journey of Refrains,
Vibes, and Ambiences
Félix Guattari in Terms
of the Techno Party Scene
Toshiya Ueno, aka Toshiya the Tribal
Wako University, Tokyo

Philosophy is no longer synthetic judgment; it is like a thought synthesizer

functioning to make thought travel, make it mobile, make it a force of the Cosmos
(in the same way as one makes sound travel).
—Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 343)

A techno party is an event. Generally an event is never totally actualised. Or it

can always perform and actualise itself just partially. So the actual is in the act
virtually.1 The (techno party) event in the act is always transversed by repetitive
beats or plural rhythms. Each singular occasion involved within the party retains
tones, vibes, expressivities, atmospheres, and ambiences. Etymologically the
term “ambience” derives from the Latin ambo, which means “on both sides.”
Additionally it implies “oozy” surroundings and lazy mediations (see Morton
2012, 103), which carry nuances of the dark, solitude, silence, and quietism. “I”
cannot be separated from collective individuations and ambience as a proto-
subjectivity. The “I” (self, ego, ipse . . .) in crowds in the techno party scene is
built within infinite compositions or assemblages of individuating the world.
In this sense, “I” is, and occurs as, an event.
Refrains or repetitive beats, by definition, pass through the scenes and
milieus of varied parties. Thus, every techno party arises each time as a singular
event, not just as a merely unique one. ECDM2 genres are used in multiple ways
as recreational activities in consumer societies, but are always fragile, volatile,
weak, and ephemeral. This volatility also stems from the effect of the evanes-
cent terms that mediate and combine people (crowds, audiences, clubbers,
tribes), technology (sound systems, decorative installations, images used by
VJs), and artists. Taken as a daily routine, this activity might appear strange. All
the paraphernalia and equipment are dismantled and removed after the night

1 See Manning and Massumi (2014) and Erin Manning’s chapter in the present publication.
2 ECDM is an abbreviation of electronic dance music, which is totally different from the popular genre
called EDM and is more concerned with underground and experimental musics.

174
 A Journey of Refrains, Vibes, and Ambiences

of the party (or after a couple of days in the case of big festivals); all melts into
the air in a moment. A party as a singular event thus crystallises through quasi-
secret practices camouflaged in underground scenes. Thus we should consider
the initiatives of the party organisers as an attempt and chance to push reason,
which defines conventional consciousness, toward its limit, toward “an eclipse
of reason.” Such a party is not conceived as an exemplary site toward the re-en-
chantment of the world. On the contrary, it must be interpreted as a potential
actor in an alternative disenchantment of the world, if not even of a reposition-
ing of reason and rationalisation as defined in the Enlightenment.
Techno parties can certainly be understood as “the celebration of a great
void” (Rietveld 1998, 266). The void here doesn’t imply any metaphysical or
abstract nuance; rather, it conveys a more practical and pragmatic meaning,
despite carrying speculative nuances. In the context of the “institutional” (as
a germ of institutions) at the La Borde clinic, Guattari emphasised the signifi-
cance of an elastic “vacuole” that served to make flexible the operation of any
system by leaving a space or location empty (see Guattari 1984, 115–16). How can
one articulate this void in terms of cultural politics? This void in the dynam-
ics of institution is not merely an empty place that we expect the established
regime to fill. Democracy generally depends on the zero space, that is, an empty
place in which nothing can be inserted. Is the void in a party somehow similar
to the kernel of modern politics? Or, does it point to a completely new type of
politics or, at least, to a different horizon of sociality? The use of conventional
clichés about techno parties—such as TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone), a
cultural enclave or coming (virtual) community, and so on—are insufficient
to answer this question, even though these are adequate metaphors to articu-
late party scenes as such. Here Guattarian chaosmosis would like to posit the
“demo­cratic chaos” capable of delivering multiple vectors of resingularisation,
perhaps (Guattari 1995, 117). Thus, Guattarian ecosophy tends to conceive the
idea of virtual ecology and the politics of the not-yet.
The party is an incomparable and unsubstitutable reality that allows for the
experiences of techno tribes. It simply takes place, not only as an existential sin-
gularity of personal life but in the sense of a transition, a shift toward the other
potentiality of unknown assemblages from which it is no longer possible to
think in terms of conventional paradigms. In conventional sociology and cul-
tural studies, for instance, subcultures are always envisioned as having a certain
resistance. In that case, what is resistance in the context of a techno party? The
series of terms related to conflicts such as class, gender, race, and so on used
in the cultural studies approach are crucial factors in analysing the scheme of
“resistance” in subcultures. Nevertheless, it seems futile simply to apply such
terms to ECDM scenes, although this is possible to a certain extent.
Resistance is always related to power, as Foucault ([1978] 1990) explained in
the series of concepts folding, unfolding, and refolding. Where power is operative,
some resistance is already at work, even in an emergent manner. Resistance is
not a simple reaction or response to power; it is entirely part of power rela-
tions. Yet this understanding of resistance, akin to Foucault’s understanding
of power, does not bring cultural justice to techno parties. Another twist must

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be invoked. The resistance here should be conceived as an electrical resistance.

As we know, the flow of electricity cannot be set without some electric resist-
ance, which necessitates parts switching connections and electronic circuits.
In this regard, one could consider the vital activity within a techno party as a
kind of resistance, apart from its political implication. If power is prevailing
and enmeshed within the living world as a whole, then resistance is also always
already built within its microphysics of power. It is possible to posit the term
“resilience” as an alternative option to “resistance.” This term, like “stress,” orig-
inally comes from the field of physics and implies a force returning to an initial
condition after physical distortion caused by a material load. Subsequently, the
term was used in psychology in the sense of a capacity to recover from, or resist
against, a given mental issue: trauma, PTSD, shock, depression, and all kinds of
stresses. However, given that, unlike in psychiatry or psychology, the resilience
of cultural phenomena does not have an initial or “healthy” state, the implica-
tions of the term must be modified. It is still, of course, insightful to apply it
to the analysis of techno cultures. The term’s antonym, “vulnerability,” is often
used in anthropology or sociology and in cultural studies has been reapplied to
the interpretation of phenomena in popular cultures. Therefore, this terminol-
ogy seems to be more than just a conceit as it retains a real potential perspec-
tive, which we will examine in the latter parts of this essay.
DJs are sometimes compared to shamans. In recent subcultural studies (e.g.,
Muggleton and Weinzierl 2003), this analogy has already become common-
place. If, on an anti-war or anti-nuclear demonstration, one could feel a sha-
manistic vibe not combined with new age currents, then it might be possible to
imagine a different model of a (virtual) intellectual. For instance, rappers in the
hip-hop scene can be called “organic intellectuals” in Gramsci’s sense (2000,
304–5), insofar as they articulate the experience of oppression of their commu-
nity and in their music focus attention on the cause of resolving these issues.
In his influential book There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, Paul Gilroy ([1987]
2002) presents an interesting view of DJs or toasters as “organic intellectuals.”
He especially refers to some particular ways that black musicians and DJs talk,
rap, and toast in white Cockney dialects (ibid., 261–65). In studies of techno
parties as well, the DJ as shaman is envisioned as an embodiment of the organic
intellectual. In other words, a DJ can be a sort of mediator and catalyser of var-
ious tribes, from the (sub)cultural scene and politics to cut’n’mixing music and
sounds. Sound effects generate singular affects and tribal vibes, which allow
the radical transfiguration of terms such as “intellectual” and “party.” Parties
are assemblages of the various moments in which the double articulation
between bodily pleasure and playfulness with symbols or codes (the non-dis-
cursive figuration including noises and sounds) can be directly engaged. They
are assemblages composed of sounds, visual images, and performative dancing.
Drug use can also potentially allow crowds to become a hybrid body, between
technological prosthetics and/or a biological organism. The consumption of
drugs in the techno party scene cannot be reduced to mere hedonistic or rec-
reational use, because it is comparable with shamanistic, ritualistic, and festive

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practices in primitive societies and tribal cultures (see St John 2011, 2012). At
the same time, however, we should understand that drug use as a bio-politi-
cal experiment belongs entirely to contemporary society. While magicians and
shamans consume hallucinogenic substances to navigate the mind of tribes
and (supra‑)natural environments, the regime of bio-power and info-capital-
ism under neo-liberalism impose on us quasi-psychiatric formations—various
types of psychotropic substances, such as Prozac—which we consume in spe-
cific rituals that make us assimilate and confirm. Drugs are a pharmacological
technology that supplement our “reality” because they constitute an integra-
tive moment not only in the raving assemblage but also in everyday life.
Our everyday lives are surrounded by an infinite numbers of apparatuses that
we are all forced to use. Without them, modern life would simply disappear.
Such technology includes mobile communication devices, automated surveil-
lance and control of highways, street monitoring, and tagged segmentations
in HTML, all of which are at the same time entirely part of the mesh of techno
environments. Yet at techno parties, an apparatus is no longer merely a nucleus
of mediation or representation for ideology but rather subsumes and perme-
ates our very life by becoming each time a specific affect and mode of thought.
However, it is a great irony that at underground techno parties these devices
become useful to deliver and circulate event information. Of course, follow-
ing Deleuze and Guattari, we can call these apparatuses by different names:
abstract machines or machinic assemblages.
Techno tribes, or anybody who is unsatisfied with the conformism of society
and mass sensibility and has difficulties identifying with them, can then invent
and generate “alter-native”-type machines and apparatuses by exploring the
various possible combinations of tools and equipments. Techno tribes can
“become machine” through their own dancing affective bodies. The append-
ages of a sound system (PA) needed to create a sonic field, such as mixers, turn-
tables, visual and lightning equipment, and computers and electronic devices,
enable us to start an exodus from consumer societies or “the society of specta-
cle”—if only temporarily—or allow us to withdraw from these or within. While
modern humans constantly disavow the fluctuation of presence between real-
ity and technological means, primitive or tribal peoples attempt to restore and
control this very fluctuation by means of various ritualistic and magical prac-
tices. Shamans reject apparatuses that tend to transform a failed reality into the
possible (in any given language), and instead leave open-ended the potential
(or the virtual language not yet articulated) so that it unfolds into a real event.
This attempt, however, aims neither to patch the apparatus up through brico-
lage for better societies nor to celebrate the aesthetisation of the self. Shamans
swerve and absorb in an impersonal or ecstatic state. We could then argue that,
in a sense, DJs and artists on the techno scene also undo the repetition of what
shamans have practised.
The many different scenes of expressive culture no longer require charismatic
individual leaders or intellectual celebrities but rather rely on the anonymous

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process of virtual and “general intellect” or “general will”:3 such scenes include
DJs at parties, participants at carnival-style rallies and manifestations, squat-
ting, occupy movements, hacking, WikiLeaks, street graffiti, collaboration in
arts or performance, cooperation between entrepreneurs or activists (coopera-
tion of brain cells), and perhaps collective writings in late modernity (Deleuze
and Guattari, Tiqqun or the Invisible Committee, Adorno and Horkheimer,
and others), editing zines, and moderating the blogosphere.4
The same is true of the techno party scene: it is a site that liberates the poten-
tial of “general intellect.” At a techno party, all the participants—DJs, VJs, dec-
orators, sound engineers, jugglers, and crowds—work and cooperate in or
through “and” in the Deleuzian sense. It is possible to imagine an assemblage
through which even a single individual becomes a group, crew, tribe and organ-
isation: the group subject in the Guattarian sense (see Guattari 2015, 209).
What is important here is less that people are working together than the singu-
lar way of working between the multiplicities that make us. Locating oneself,
living, and doing “in between,” rather than merely co-working, are much more
significant than elaborating individual talent and potential skills. We should
not reduce this to a mere celebration of artistic collaboration, corporate alli-
ance, and groupware in general. What is at stake here is a more radical modula-
tor of “molecular connections” that proliferate in a series of conjunctions. For,
in everyday life, even the most “normalised” and conformist molar mode of
cooperation can assume a molecular process (in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense
[e.g., 1987, 243–44]), leading to an emission of deviant or freaky commitments
and affective alliances.
Individuality is not merely a re/source of collaboration, cooperation, and
co-working but rather is the result or effect of anonymous process of singu-
larisation of “generic intellect” (not just “general intellect”). At a techno party,
each individual intelligence, each participant’s will and form of expression,
operates within a pre-individualistic process woven by the series of flows or
streams of anonymity that, nevertheless, has always already appeared as or with
multiple singularities. Individuation is always a collective process. In other
words, a kind of puzzle or mosaic process of multiple virtues and characters
attaches itself to each individual during a techno party. The mode of working
together at a techno party is embodied through a system of mutual help; how-
ever, this is entirely distinct from modes of corporate business or social activity
and depends, of course, on the quality or policy of each party. The participants

3 In his Grundrisse, Marx had taken account of the transformation of labour induced by the implemen-
tation of machines. The utilisation of machines in industrial systems attenuates/alleviates the burden
of labour and changes the quality of labour. He argues then that certain communicative and collective
modes of intelligence take place because of the possible extension of usable time. This he called “gener-
al intellect,” which, in a more contemporary perspective, is comparable with the collective intelligence
in the era of network technology (Virno 2004). The notion of general will was invented by Jean-Jacques
Rousseau in his Social Contract (1.6, Rousseau 2012, 19–21), to designate a collective will as the “sum of
differences” within infinite small particular wills, rather than as a mere addition of particular wills and
interests. For Rousseau, society as such must be seen as a kind of fete and spectacle without any actually
constructed theatre.
4 The so-called sound demo in Japan, which begun at the time of the Iraq War and has then been popu-
larised especially after the nuclear crisis that followed the 3.11 earthquake.

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who organise the parties, who are often core tribe members and dancers on
the floors in the case of underground techno parties, each have their own skills
(administration, revenue accounting, electrical implementation, manufac-
ture of decorations and all the appendages of a party . . . not to mention DJ
practices) and weaknesses (careless posture, distracted behaviour, propensity
to overdose, crazy lazyness, slight paranoia, temporary depression or eupho-
ria, etc.). During the party, all those fragmentary individual life-parts (among
organisers and volunteers) are recomposed and posited in permutations to
achieve the desired objective—a successful party. Singular skills and character-
istics are strange (aberrant or queer) pieces of a puzzle that come to coincide
with one another for specific tasks. The process of collaboration itself plays a
similar role to practices of mutual collective therapy, in which participants can
always learn something from each other and can “unlearn” what they have been
taught in their daily lives and from the companies for which they work.
In conceptual terms, this stream or flow of affects and intelligences engulf-
ing our identities during the party is mobilised, as if it treated us as banal and
rudimentary parts of a given collaboration. It is only when one loses one’s own
identity (as if identifying with some instance of collectivity) that one’s own sin-
gularity can emerge. It is at the very moment when one strives to grapple with
a task through work, something anybody can achieve in a singular stream of
impersonal and anonymous procedures, that one’s own singularity flashes up.
In other words, certain narratives can be raised from the chaosmic operation
only by giving decomposed agencies the status of electronic date.
Dancing constitutes itself as a vital reservoir of resistance. Many philoso-
phers from Nietzsche to Bakhtin and Bataille envisioned dancing as the com-
ing mode of thought running against the grain of Western philosophy. In the
literature, the frequent turn to Victor Tuner’s conceptualisations, such as com-
munitas, liminoid, and marginality, complements these notions. Graham St
John’s groundbreaking Global Tribe: Technology, Spirituality and Psytrance (2012)
is a comprehensive work on the psytrance psychedelic techno scene in which
the author utilises Turner’s models and applies them to his own argument. My
essay “Unlearning to Raver” (Ueno 2003) in The Post-Subcultures Reader posited
critical remarks on St John’s thesis and offered another critical note from a
different perspective. As many works have claimed, the notions of liminality,
liminoid, and communitas (as an anti-structure) are helpful for understanding
and interpreting techno parties. A liminal reality is a kind of buffer zone and
safety device to eschew, or encounter via a detour, the chaos present in cultural
or social experience. In this framework, techno parties are defined as rites of
passage or transitional spaces through which participants go back and forth
between order and disorder, cosmos and chaos. The large European psy-fi
techno festival Boom has organised varied workshops in its Liminal Village.5
This shows how influential these ideas are, even for leading organisers of the
scene. And, despite not necessarily having backgrounds in sociology or philos-
ophy, most techno tribes can understand the significance of these ideas too.

5 See https://www.boomfestival.org.

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Shamans, hippies, gypsies, jugglers, clowns, ravers, and perhaps DJs too can all
enter this singular time zone that embodies the dynamics of moving between
different layers of the reality of life, the system structured and articulated in a
given order, and the anti-structure opening onto disorder. Techno parties thus
provide us with a passage to encounter and at the same time avoid the excessive
impact of chaotic experience.
However, both the liminal and the liminoid are caught in a particular freeze-
frame, especially if invented and elaborated to describe the dynamics of vital
activity.6 It is crucial not to posit the transitional space–time as a liminal or mar-
ginal zone. For the Guattarian ecosophy of rhythmic practices, the point is to
“never stop diving into an umbilical chaotic [or chaosmic] zone” (Guattari 1995,
111) in which one loses existential references and coordinates. Techno tribes
experience this diving in their lives and behaviours. Chaos is with us always,
just as it also resides in all objects and things. It is an immanent and relational
field that acts as a sieve for everyday life (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 42). In the
techno party scene, chaos takes many forms and vanishes with infinite speeds
and limited beats. In this rhythmic field, we play the role of partial enunciators,
while decorations and stage installations do the same for partial objects.
Techno parties allow us to experience and grapple with the struggle against
chaos in a multiplicity of modes. An experience always requires an affinity or
friendship with the enemy or the others as chaotic moments, just as Deleuze
and Guattari (1994, 203) have remarked that chaos is simultaneously our ally
and our enemy. This implies that beside euphoric, ecstatic, trancelike, and psy-
chedelic feelings, instances of depression, quasi-paranoia, and stress are also
part of the experience of a party. All these feelings are potentially part of the
processual enjoyment. However, Turner’s series of concepts cannot deal with
the process of resistance and resilience within the passage from or to chaos.
These concepts are still too static for a proper encounter with chaos, caused
by diving into the umbilical point of chaosmosis. It is unnecessary to turn back
from chaos to the order of everyday life; a certain resilience is always embedded
within life at infinite speeds. Resilience as resistance is thus aimed at the initial
state or original condition that is retroactively called everyday life.
Instead of such concepts as the liminoid and liminality, techno tribes
inspired by Deleuze and Guattari should use the notions of “chaoid” and vir-
tuality. Unlike the dialectic synthesis within the liminal, the concept of chaoid,
borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari, calls for a mode of relentless interac-
tion at infinite speed between chaos and cosmos, like a flashing: a chaosmosis
(chaos/cosmos/osmosis) (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 203–8; Guattari 1995,
82–83, 110–14). Everyday life is of course driven and loaded with finite speeds.
Yet our everyday life always causes or makes chaos outside any actual ritual,
fete, or carnival experience. Even within the order of our daily routine, singu-

6 To be precise, both notions should be distinguished from each other. Liminality concerns transitions
within time–space, while the liminoid addresses strangeness and outsider status in social position
according to the clarification by cultural anthropologist Masao Yamaguchi. However, given that both
concepts have been treated as synonymous by varied interpreters in this field over the past fifteen years,
this essay follows the current convention.

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lar chaotic moments flash up. Chaos is immanent to order, and techno parties
remind us that the virtuality of chaos already exists immanently in our everyday
lives. Thus, the following quotations by Deleuze and Guattari (1994) should be
perfectly understandable: “Concepts are events, but the plane is the horizon of
events, the reservoir or reserve of purely conceptual events” (36). “The event is
immaterial, incorporeal, unlivable: pure reserve” (156). The reserve or reservoir
is the field or zone of the potential of not-yet and in act.
In Turner’s model of analysis (and potentially for many researchers of party
culture as well), there is a need to identify a vulnerable personality: the mar-
ginal man, the stranger, or discriminated figures, and so on. But, rather than
vulnerability (in both physical and anthropological senses), a certain resilience
emerges and operates from within a techno party. Resilience has the capacity
both to be stable and to return to a prior condition. It is the virtual layer of
this reality, and also a resource for grappling with chaos and disorder in the
extreme experience allowed by music, specific locations, drugs, performance,
and dancing. Resilience through rituals such as a party or festival is another
form of resistance in the living world, a return to the (re)source.
This is the reason why dance by itself becomes constitutive outside everyday
life. No longer liminoid, it just exists as chaoid. What would dancing be if it did
not constantly confront chaos? As you might readily notice, this line quotes and
adapts Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? (1994, 208), simply swapping
the term “thinking” for “dancing.”
Dancing cannot by itself entirely describe or document the reality of the
world. It doesn’t necessarily imply an escape or flight from everyday life.
Certainly, ECDM is consumed as a time-killing distraction in the commodi-
fied world, but each fragment of action and behaviour in different music scenes
retains a singular or alter-native meaning (sense) as dancing without chore-
ography. Nevertheless, ECDM is able to offer its semblance or simulacra, its
relentless protean being, and open an environment in which participants are
absorbed in the depth of beats and vibes of tracks and come to envision a singu-
lar and incomparable meaning. Even if dance can exist without music, it cannot
generate itself without beats and refrains. Dancing allows us to give form to
something unarticulated in language yet intensively perceived, an un-nomi-
nated sensitivity. Insofar as dance is an expressive embodiment, it is not merely
imagined in our mind. It constitutes itself materialistically. A dance without
choreography becomes a vital moment induced by repetitive beats. Thus a
dance without choreography as a free body movement led by repetitive beats
(refrains) does not imitate or mimic reality, but transfigurates simulacra of the
living world to become a singular event: it is enabled by the process of “asigni-
fying signs” that Deleuze and Guattari have succinctly developed (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987, 8; see also Guattari 2011, 51).
What is a refrain? Although the concept of the refrain is an integrative
moment in Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, it seems to have been invented by
Guattari in the mid 1970s. Our living routines are always activated in the plural
and in different contexts and scenes. There are different kinds of environments
in the world (living or non-living), but when a person is in tune with his or her

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own vibes and rhythms of working, playing, and living, then existential territo-
ries and refrains are enacted in act. Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 313) say that
milieus and rhythms are generated from chaos. To be precise, a territory results
from the plurality or variety of environments (which, in Deleuze and Guattari’s
terminology, are called “milieus”), by bringing about refrains that emerge from
environments. Thus it can be said that the event of a techno party is engaged
with an ecology of refrains and practices: a rhythmic ecology that makes the
relational field of resonance.
This singular event does not emerge by imitating the reality of the living world
but by affording simulacra of it. Dancing might happen without any music as
such, but no dance is possible without the refrain of rhythms. Language retains
the operation of articulation that can cut and frame the living world into certain
“forms” by given grammatical regulations and verbal expressions, but dancing
grasps and comprehends the living world in an entirely different way. Whether
there is choreography or not, the logic is the same. A dance is the articulation
(of cutting, connecting, compositing, and framing) of the world in a different
way to ordinary language, yet it is provided with a potential vector for the semi-
ological articulation of the world.
A dance makes us (dancing subjects) approach and identify things and
objects. Through dancing, we become inanimate objects and things suffused
with sensitivity, affection, and emotion. These objects assume a sensitivity
despite the inanimate character that defines their materiality. To a certain
extent this is a metaphorical statement. No longer is the human posited a priv-
ileged position in this context. While dancing, human agencies are posited in
the horizon of objects. This experience has nothing to do with objectification
or reification in the traditional sense found in philosophy. Rather, by playing
with media ecology or organic cosmology, dancers as participants of a techno
party are envisioned as artists or performers. As we have already remarked,
“becoming both machines and objects” is the quintessence of techno parties
(and potentially all ECDM scenes). As Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 305) have
stressed, the concept of “becoming” has nothing to do with imitation, mim-
icry, or metaphorical imagination. At open-air parties in particular, one feels
the emergence of inter-objectivity with the living environment through dancing,
rather than presupposing a mere social inter-subjectivity. The whole ambience
is lived as the omnipresence and permutation of rocks, winds, birds, forests,
and elves. Ambient techno music relies on a similar dynamics of chaosmosis
experienced in dancing. Nature as a machinic assemblage operates here.
Statements such as “humans become things” or “treating humans as things”
sound bad and even carry negative connotations from the perspective of con-
ventional humanism. By contending that things are means to realise purposes,
while humans are the end goal of one another rather than a mere means,
Kant locates the moral law and practical reason in humanism and the human­
ities. The event just simply takes place, and through the event we can become
things or objects, or become indiscernible (imperceptible) from things or
environments.

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As Graham Harman (2005, 2013) and others in the field of object-oriented

ontology have remarked, tools and machines clarify or manifest the very context
or horizon of articulation, such as ways of using them, co-relations of senses or
functions of things, and uncover things (as beings as such) ontologically, exclu-
sively so when they become broken or useless materials. We unconsciously use
tools without comprehensively contextualising them, but when a tool is broken
we start to figure out the whole context or relation in which the tool is located
for our usage. In other words, only broken tools and ruined machines can cut
out the semantic or sensual articulations of the world. The objects in contem-
porary art are broken things and tools, while decorations for techno parties
are broken art objects and ruined machines or tools. In fact, most decorations
and installations at open-air techno parties are produced and manufactured
from waste and junk through the DIY practices of decorators, who are often
perceived to be ex-art students or dropout artist “wannabes.” If art objects may
lose their use and functions, then patchwork or juxtaposed objects in party
installations have fallen out of the context of art expressions. They doubly fail
to be artworks.
As John Cage realised when he visited an anechoic chamber, there is no such
thing as silence (see Cage [1989] 2000, 241, 243; Gann 2010). Silence always fails
to exist, because there are always tones and sounds in any kind of hush. Cage
elucidated the meaning and definition of silence by listening to the tone from
his own heart. The same holds true for techno tribes who feel the air pressure
from sound systems as if it were the wind. Silence is embedded in the living
world, and it is both parallel to and a virtual aspect of tones and sounds. Our
living world is “given” as murmurs and twittering from within. That is a move-
ment or operation of refrains. In such a machinic dancing, the complexity is
emancipated from discursive formations toward an unknown or unforeseen
a-signifying signification and communication.
As a tentative conclusion, this essay proposes the concept of the DJ as a
“generic intellectual.” Because DJs (and crowds of techno tribes as well) are
always moving, digging, and drifting in the transversal process of music genres,
where can the novelty or newness come from? This Whiteheadian question can
be asked by both Deleuze and techno tribes. Certainly the novelty of genre and
new creativity depend upon something prior. DJs can create and invent new
styles or forms of music by sampling and remixing or by making “contrasts”
within ready-made tracks and resources. Genres are generated through relent-
less repetitions.
Adhering to genres when enjoying ECDM is far too euphoric and very vain.
Music in this scene is always transversal within genres. There is no border in
itself, and a given track might be evaluated as both good and bad. The issue
of what criterion we can then use is very challenging. A critical discourse in
fact creates its own cutting-edge effect by eschewing over-generalised distinc-
tions in terms of genres. However, even if music lovers are beyond genres, it
cannot be denied that genres and categories facilitate navigation for audiences
and listeners. For example, casual explanations are always whispered on the
dance floor: “it sounds like house”; “this tone of strings reminds me of Detroit

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techno but the kick and baseline are very thick like in psy-trance”; “it’s electro
flavoured like new wave from the 80s with strong beats”; “it sounds like mini-
mal but in the end the tones are getting closer to industrial or electronic body
music”; and so on.
If no one cares to categorise genres, how is it possible to describe and con-
ceptualise the potentiality with which styles and genres are created or invented?
The term “generic,” as used in the pharmaceutical industry, can help us here.
Drugs whose term of license has expired are called by a general name. A generic
name is a universalised, unbranded name. It is a nuclei from which a new
genre can emerge, or a kind of asylum for the process of inventing unnamed
styles. New methods of music hide themselves in this expressive time–space.
Genres in music take flight or escape into zones without genres. The emer-
gence of unknown genres indicates both the Oneness of the living world and
the potential for a multitude of genres through division into two or a plurality
(binary opposition or proliferation of genres). Even though both the world and
expressions imply the presence of the One, they actually transmutate into a
multiplicity.
The generic (for music) as a locus of production of genres is a void offering
the occasion to define a new style, a new genre, from which some elements are
subtracted as nuclei in order for another universal thing (objects) to emerge.
The new or unfamiliar genre gradually approaches the universal by abandoning
the proper brand or generic name and claiming its own right to them. A new
genre of music consists of the recombination and redistribution of expressive
elements and methods by operations of subtraction rather than a mere add­
itional proliferation. The tastes and styles of a genre are compounded with
elements subtracted from other genres and induce something new by aban-
doning all genre names. This is what I call a generic effect. As such, the generic
is no longer aimed at the notion of the universal nor nominated as the One but
defined as an operation of supplementation. The generic in the ECDM scene
is a kind of asylum for new styles of music or a site for sharing divisions of het-
erogeneous expressive moments. Sayings such as “don’t be concerned with or
stick to genre but listen to the flow of the generic in music” should become
imperative for techno tribes. DJs and techno tribes are potentially set toward
the position of the “generic intellectual” each time they are tuned into their
sonic installation through a singular event.
After all, power hates and fears the Pied Piper, a figure that is actualised in
carnival-type rallies (demonstrations) and underground techno parties. The
modern equivalent of the piper of Hamelin’s pipe, as enabled by media tech-
nology, is not the loud speaker nor is it used as a tool of propaganda. Instead it
is the vibes and grooves of withdrawal from the society of “common sense” that
can be found wherever people dance to beats and melody or attain an ecstatic
state of mind. The spirit or the affects activated by beats and dances are at the
very core of the non-violence that power fears far more than policies or ideolo­
gies that prepare for future institutionalisation. Carnivals and parties are not
instruments for specific politics or ideologies, but, rather, in their very per-
formativity, are defined as a certain movement toward a coming or virtual com-

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munity within everyday life. A party is a singular event, but not a special event.
The singular can be repeated in each attempt and experience. Herein, despite
the eclipse of reason, dancing and resilience through rituals are enacted.

References
Cage, John. (1989) 2000. “An Indiana University Press. First published
Autobiographical Statement.” In 1992 as Chaosmose (Paris: Galilée).
John Cage: Writer, edited by Richard ———. 2011. The Machinic Unconscious: Essays
Kostelanetz, 237–47. New York: Cooper in Schizoanalysis. Translated by Taylor
Square Press. Chapter written 1989 and Adkins. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). First
first published 1991 (Southwest Review, published 1979 as L’inconscient machinique:
Winter). Book first published 1993 (New Essais de Schizo-analyse (Paris: Éditions
York: Limelight Editions). Recherches).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. ———. 2015. Psychoanalysis and Transversality:
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Texts and Interviews, 1955–1971. Translated
Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian by Ames Hodges. Los Angeles:
Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Semiotext(e). First published 1972
Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as as Psychanalyse et transversalitae (Paris:
Mille plateaux (Paris: Minuit). Maspero).
———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated Harman, Graham. 2005. Guerrilla Metaphysics:
by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things.
Burchell. New York: Columbia University Peru, IL: Open Court.
Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que ———. 2013. Bells and Whistles: More
la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Speculative Realism. Alresford, UK: Zero
Foucault, Michel. (1978) 1990. The Will Books.
to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality 1. Manning, Erin, and Brian Massumi. 2014.
Translated by Robert Hurley. London: Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology
Penguin. First published 1976 as Histoire of Experience. Minneapolis: University of
de la sexualité. 1: La volonté de savoir Minnesota Press.
(Paris: Gallimard). This translation first Morton, Timothy. 2010. The Ecological
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Gann, Kyle. 2010. No Such Thing as Silence: Muggleton, David, and Rupert Weinzierl,
John Cage’s 4’33”. New Haven, CT: Yale eds. 2003. The Post-Subcultures Reader.
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Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Beats: Free Parties and the Politics of
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 Part 2
Writing and Staging
 Corpus Delicti #2 //
Untimely Precursors
Lecture Performance*
Arno Böhler
University of Vienna

Susanne Valerie
University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna

with
Film Soundtrack: Wolfgang Mitterer
Chorus: Max Reinhardt Seminar

Stage: Like a tongue or a phallus, a catwalk leads into the first rows of the auditorium,
which is arranged like an arena. A simple wooden chair at the front of the stage; at the back
to the right, a bathtub. To the left of the catwalk, an empty music stand.
Arno: The voice of philosophy as a kind of philosophical desire. He is sitting on the chair.
In his hand he holds a postcard; he is reading it. He is almost naked, wearing only a cloth
around his waist.
Chorus: The voice of power. Seven choristers wearing uniforms: grey overalls. They are
wearing black, anonymising hoods, as if they are on a police operation.
Susanne: At the beginning she is one of the voices of the chorus. Later she leaves the chorus,
finally to become the voice of affirmation, the voice of friendship and love, mating with
philosophy. It is philosophy she gives her heart to.
Music: Expressing the mood. It oscillates between law-maker, judge, hangman, aid, and
friend.

At the beginning Arno’s voice is heard from the off. He reads the text of a postcard Franz
Overbeck wrote to his friend Friedrich Nietzsche. Simultaneously, the text is projected onto
the stage wall in the background. After some time Arno starts reading the text live:

* This text has been realised in the context of the PEEK project “Artistphilosophers: Philosophy as Arts-
Based Research,” sponsored by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): AR275-G21.

193
 Arno Böhler and Susanne Valerie

FILM ON

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE POSTCARD TO FRANZ

OVERBECK
“I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor!
I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired
by ‘instinct.’ Not only is his over-all tendency like mine—making knowledge
the most powerful affect—but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize
myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in
these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world
order, the unegoistic, and evil” (Nietzsche [1954] 1977, 92).

“Incidentally, I am not at all as well as I had hoped. . . . Already six severe attacks
of two or three days each! The intensity of my emotions makes me shudder
and laugh—several times already I have not been able to leave my room, for
the ridiculous reason that my eyes were sore—from what? Each time, the day
before I had been weeping too much on my wanderings, and these were no
sentimental tears but tears of joy; . . .
“Alas, my friend, sometimes I’ve got an idea that after all I live a highly dan-
gerous life, for I am one of those machines, which might burst!
With affectionate love,
your friend [F. N.]” (Nietzsche 2003, 111–12, our translation).1

FILM OFF

ARNO LIVE
Dear enigmatic friend!
Now it has been six severe migraine attacks. I am very worried about you.
However, I am also much astonished that in the midst of such a torture you
shed floods of tears: not tears of pain but, as you write to me, tears of joy.
Dear friend, you write it was an “instinctive act” that made you long for him
right now, in the midst of your physicality bursting in all directions—made you
long for Spinoza.

Arno turns the chair and lays the postcard down.

Spinoza and you.

What kind of noteworthy connection is being announced here?
Making thought the strongest affection!
Making philosophy the most powerful affection!
Learning how to read it,

1 Montage of two letters by Friedrich Nietzsche, written on 30 July 1881 to Franz Overbeck and on 14
August to Heinrich Köselitz.

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 Corpus Delicti #2 // Untimely Precursors

philosophy,
As a kind of desire,
as a process of an event
in the course of which desire starts becoming aware of itself,
becoming self-reflective.
I of myself. You of yourself. We of ourselves. You of yourselves.
Feeling-thinking.

Dear friend!
Perhaps here I may recommend you to read a young thinker whose writings
have become very important to me—Gilles Deleuze.
Recently he has written a book about you—Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983).
Also he is a Spinozist, like we are.
He explicitly named you next to philosophy as such—Nietzsche and Philosophy—
because you,
as he believes,
have placed yourself next to it by your whole corpus.
Next to the classical tradition of philosophy as such.
He says that you have come from it and have been raised by it.
However, at the same time, you have outgrown it.
After all, he says, you have become its most radical foreign substance:
Its decline and its transition—and thus also its new beginning.
You conceived your thoughts to be the Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future.
Therefore it is significant,
he thinks,
to read your work as the precursor of thought events
still waiting for us to be discovered,
and called into being,
posthumously,
even in the aftermath of your life.

Such a futuristic, or, let’s say,

avant-garde-like mode of thinking and doing philosophy,
says Deleuze (1983, 107),
“has an essential relation to time.”
It is fundamentally untimely, that is to say,
“always against its time, [a] critique of the present world . . .
in favour . . . of a time to come” (ibid.).

I think, my friend,
this Gilles Deleuze was probably the first one who really understood
the importance of the concept of untimeliness in your work.

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 Arno Böhler and Susanne Valerie

Philosophy has always been untimely in each of its epochs,

precisely because philosophers are—like artists—inventors!
They are inventors of new concepts, which are
“neither eternal nor historical but untimely,” says Deleuze (1983, 107).

Therefore philosophy and the arts appear, necessarily,

as “dark precursors,”
as a sudden break-out of well-established power,
addressing their thoughts to untimely friends
able and willing to let the times arrive,
they are starting to invent in a promising manner.

Is this not the very reason

why you,
my philosopher-friend,
were forced to create a new conceptual personae:
the conceptual personae of artist-philosophers?

Of somebody, being pregnant with an untimely future . . .

Deleuze thinks that you had this new species of philosophers,

of artist-philosophers, in mind, when,
in Beyond Good and Evil,
you alluded to a new category of philosophers,
whose “tastes and inclinations [are] opposite to and different from those of
[their] predecessors” (Nietzsche [1973] 1990, 34).

Tell me, my friend!

What surprising trinity am I constructing here at the moment:
Spinoza, Deleuze, and you!

Spinoza. The artist-philosopher?

Nietzsche. The artist-philosopher?
Deleuze. The artist-philosopher?

Three desiring machines,

longing to produce an untimely future.

Susanne enters sideways into the auditorium, wearing a uniform-like grey overall and a
neat black hood that shows only her face. She carries an oversize book, the “score of the
law.” She places the book on the music stand and opens it:

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 Corpus Delicti #2 // Untimely Precursors

SUSANNE LIVE
Michel Foucault, Part 1: Discipline and Punish, the control of activity.

Snapping her fingers

SOUND ON CHORUS
It is about the body being forcibly tied to the ruling production apparatus. The
instrumental coding of the body is what this torture is about. “Time measured
and paid must also be a time without impurities or defects, . . . throughout
which the body is constantly applied to its exercise” (Foucault 1977, 151).
“How can one capitalize the time of individuals, accumulate it in each of
them, in their bodies, in their forces or in their abilities, in a way that is suscep-
tible of use and control? How can one organize profitable durations?” (ibid.,
157).
“‘Constant supervision’ and ‘pressure’ by the ruling relations of produc-
tion—efficiency, increased efficiency, transfer of economic principles of organ-
isation on all aspects of life, global domination of the economy—through this
permanent coercion, one tries to ensure ‘a totally useful time’” (ibid., 150).

SOUND OFF

SUSANNE LIVE
Michel Foucault, Part 2: Discipline and Punish, the control of activity.

Again snapping her fingers.

FILM ON CHORUS
“‘It is expressly forbidden during work to amuse one’s companions by gestures
or in any other way, to play at any game whatsoever, to eat, to sleep, to tell sto-
ries and comedies’ . . . and even during the meal-break, ‘there will be no telling
of stories, adventures or other such talk that distracts the workers from their
work’;” (Foucault 1977, 150–51).
“In the correct use of the body, which makes possible a correct use of time,
nothing must remain idle or useless” (Foucault 1977, 152). Only a well-disci-
plined body, shaped by the ruling powers and adapted to them, can be an effec-
tive carrier of such a rigorous code that governs a body from tip to toe.
“It is question of extracting, from time, . . . ever more useful forces . . . toward
an ideal point at which one maintained maximum speed and maximum effi-
ciency” (ibid., 154).

Over time, the body will be permeated by all those meticulous power controls.
Such an organism becomes an executive body of the ruling power. It becomes

197
 Arno Böhler and Susanne Valerie

its agent. Visible place of its representation. Reproduction of a power-repro-

ducing power.
This way, the enforced regulation of activity imposed by power, the latter’s
demand for discipline and disciplining the bodies, becomes the innermost
construction law of its material manifestation.

FILM OFF

SUSANNE LIVE
University Law 2002, §14, Sect. 1 (montage): The University Law of 2002 com-
pels the development of a quality assurance management. Furthermore, §14
refers to external and internal evaluation. . . . Apart from the efficiency and
effectivity of performance, also the latter’s quality is a fundamental idea of
public management. Quality assurance systems emphasise in particular the
steering and control of quality. . . . There is an international trend towards the
issue of if and how quality assurance systems might be implemented at univer-
sities and which elements of “total quality management” might be relevant (cf.
Mayer 2010, 31–33, our translation).
Total Quality Managements Total Quality Managements Total Quality
Managements Total Quality Managements . . .

Susanne stays on the stage with her legs slightly straddled and her arms crossed. She is the
guardian, witness, imaginary observer, and later prosecutor of a text that is not according
to the law.

ARNO LIVE
What happens,
once our desiring machines have started to revolt against being disciplined and
controlled by the might of power?
All might of power naturally wants us to become one of its agents?
It wants us to become timely.
The established powers are no friend of rebellious, protesting, untimely
desires?

Arno rises from his chair and walks along the catwalk. He addresses his thoughts to the
audience.

Do you remember what I told my philosopher-friend Friedrich Nietzsche

yesterday
while reading his postcard?
What differentiates this species of artist-philosophers from the ancient ones is the
way
in which this new species of philosophers values the desiring machine,
unconsciously at work in human nature and the work of nature as such.

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 Corpus Delicti #2 // Untimely Precursors

Being the precursors of a philosophy of the future,

artist-philosophers resist the conceptual personae of classical philosophers,
because they don’t follow the ascetic ideal of doing philosophy anymore;
that is to say, the self-denying force, at work in a life,
longing for another life different from the corporeal, earthly, immanent one
that one has been given by virtue of somebody’s birth.

On the contrary!
Artist-philosophers have discovered the productive force,
more or less unconsciously at work in nature.
This “discovery of the unconscious,” says Deleuze (1988, 19),
“of an unconscious of thought just as profound as the unknown of the body”
is part of the new image of thought Nietzsche and Spinoza have already started
to invent.

Ever since,
philosophers are no longer concerned with analysing the realm of their con-
sciousness only,
but, like artists,
are also concerned with the pre-reflexive life of their desiring machines,
channelling and
often directing their thought processes in a significant way
even before and beyond the control of somebody’s ego, will, and self-discipline.

Becoming an artist-philosopher therefore entails something like “a voyage in

immanence”; because to Deleuze (1988, 29), “immanence is the unconscious
itself, and the conquest of the unconscious.”

Arno sits on the chair again. He now addresses his thoughts once more to Nietzsche.

Dear Friedrich,
In Beyond Good and Evil
you developed almost the same image of thought, when writing:

“Having kept a close eye on philosophers and read between their lines for a suf-
ficient length of time, I tell myself: the greater part of conscious thinking must
still be counted among the instinctive activities, and this is so even in the case
of philosophical thinking; we have to learn differently . . .” (Nietzsche [1973]
1990, 35).

Why?
Because “consciousness” is scarcely opposite to instincts but is secretly guided
and channelled into particular tracks by instincts (see ibid.).

199
 Arno Böhler and Susanne Valerie

In your late notebooks I found a marvellous expression for this, when you said,
“Thoughts are symbols of a game and fight of affections: they are always con-
nected to their hidden roots” (Nietzsche, [1885] 1980, 29, our translation and
emphasis).

In this sense I would like to send you my affectionate love,

your friend, Franz Overbeck

FILM ON CHORUS
Michel Foucault, Discipline and punish. Discipline. Normalising judgement
(montage): The penal system of discipline covers any deviation from the norm.
That is why at the heart of all disciplinary systems there is a mechanism of pun-
ishment at work which, with its own laws, offences, sanctions and courts, is
somewhat legally privileged.

With such a hierarchised and constant surveillance for the sake of increasing
productivity, disciplinary power becomes an “integrated” system, which is from
the inside connected to economy and the purposes of the respective institu-
tion (cf. Foucault 1977, 176–79).

University Law 2002 §13 III.4, Knowledge Scoreboard (montage): According to

certain economic categories, the knowledge scoreboard must serve to take a
kind of knowledge “inventory.” “. . . This kind of ‘scoreboard’ is supposed to take into
account that for universities knowledge . . . is a crucial production factor” (cf. Mayer
2010, p. 21, our translation).
The law, §13 III.6, does not define what is meant by intellectual capacity,
human, structural, and relational capital, as well as performance processes and
their output indicators and effects. These are business management terms,
which here are for the first time transferred to the realm of universities (ibid.,
22, our translation).

During the chorus’s final passage Susanne has left her place behind the music stand where
the large book of law is lying. She starts opposing the law, takes a small, yellow book out of
her pocket and joins the audience, starting to read from the book. It is The Trial by Franz
Kafka.

FILM OFF

SUSANNE LIVE
Kafka: The Trial. “In the Empty Courtroom”: “‘Oh, I see,’ said K. and nodded,
‘they’re probably law books, and it’s in the nature of this judicial system that one
is condemned not only in innocence but also in ignorance’” (Kafka 1998, 55).

200
 Corpus Delicti #2 // Untimely Precursors

FILM ON CHORUS
Foucault. “Hierarchized, continuous and functional surveillance . . . owed its
importance to the mechanisms of power that is brought with it. . . . It was also
organized as a multiple, automatic and anonymous power; for although sur-
veillance rests on individuals, its functioning is that of a network. . . . The power
in the hierarchized surveillance of the disciplines is not possessed as a thing, or
transferred as a property; it functions like a piece of machinery. And, although
it is true that its pyramidal organization gives it a ‘head,’ it is the apparatus as
a whole that produces ‘power’ and distributes individuals in this permanent
and continuous field. This enables the disciplinary power to be both absolutely
indiscreet, since it is everywhere and always alert” (Foucault 1977, 176–77).

FILM ON SUSANNE
Kafka: The Trial. “Try to realize that this vast judicial organism remains, so to
speak, in a state of eternal equilibrium, and that if you change something on
your own where you are, you can cut the ground out from under your own feet
and fall” (Kafka 1998, 119–20).

FILM ON CHORUS
Foucault. “The perfect disciplinary apparatus would . . . [be] a perfect eye that
nothing would escape and a centre towards which all gazes would be turned”
(Foucault 1977, 173). “‘Discipline must be made national,’ . . . [Such a state] will
have a simple, reliable, easily controlled administration. It will resemble those
huge machines, which . . . produce great effects” (ibid., 169).

FILM OFF

SUSANNE LIVE
Kafka: The Trial. “Lawyer” (montage): Stop being so unyielding,—or whatever
may be your name—there’s nothing you can do to defend yourself from this
court, you have to confess. . . . There’s no mistake there. Our authorities . . .
don’t go out looking for guilt . . . it’s the guilt that draws them out, like it says in
the law. So confess to them as soon as you get the chance. . . . “And what if I don’t
confess . . . ?” asked K. or whoever (Cf. Kafka 1998, 106–7).

Exit Susanne. Music stand and book of law stay with the setting.

ARNO LIVE
Arno brings the chair to the other side of the catwalk, sits down, and again addresses
Nietzsche.

201
 Arno Böhler and Susanne Valerie

Dear Friedrich!
What an amazing discovery.
Deleuze’s Spinoza book, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, in fact starts with your
name.
“Nietzsche understood,” Deleuze (1988, 3) writes, “having lived it himself, what
constitutes the mystery of a philosopher’s life. The philosopher appropriates
the ascetic virtues—humility, poverty, chastity—and makes them serve ends
completely his own, extraordinary ends that are not very ascetic at all, in fact.”

Maybe we face now,

probably for the first time in history,
a cultural dispositive
in which philosophers, at least in some parts of the globe,
do not have to hide themselves anymore
behind the mask of the ascetic priest to do philosophy and make a living.
Shouldn’t we call this an amazing privilege of our times.
Deleuze thinks that Spinoza’s life is a good example of what it means
to live a life that is, in the best philosophical sense, untimely.
Because, due to his “triple discrimination” of the image of thought, widely sup-
ported at his times, the oeuvre of his philosophy became a corpus delicti:
first, due to his discrimination against “consciousness,”
second, due to his discrimination against “values,”
and third, due to his discrimination against “sad passions.”

This triple denunciation is for Deleuze the very reason why Spinoza’s philoso­
phy, in general, has been judged as a scandal and crime against the well-estab-
lished values of his times. As a criminal way of thinking. Without surprise, living
his philosophy therefore started with “an excommunication and an attempt on
his life” (Deleuze 1988, 6).

Deleuze is convinced that the major resemblance of your work and his lies pre-
cisely in this “triple denunciation” (ibid., 17): the denunciation of conscious-
ness, of values, and sad passions.
I will tell you more about it later!
Ida is waiting.
With affectionate love,
your friend, Franz Overbeck

FILM ON MUSIC WOLFGANG

The music fades out. Enter Susanne, who is now wearing a blood-red overall. She is still
wearing the same black hood. She goes to the music stand and opens another page of the
book of law.

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 Corpus Delicti #2 // Untimely Precursors

FILM ON SUSANNE
On 27 July 1656, the Talmud Torah congregation of Amsterdam issued a writ
of cherem against Baruch de Espinoza: “The Lords of the ma’amad [the supreme
community council], having long known of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch
de Spinoza, have endeavoured by various means and promises, to turn him from
his evil ways. But having failed to make him mend his wicked ways, and, on the
contrary, daily receiving more and more serious information about the abomina-
ble heresies which he practiced and taught and about his monstrous deeds, and
having for this numerous trustworthy witnesses, who . . . [all] became convinced
of the truth of this matter; and after all of this has been investigated in the pres-
ence of the honourable chachamim, they have decided . . . Espinoza should be
excommunicated and expelled from the people of Israel” (Nadler 1999, 120).

FILM OFF

SUSANNE LIVE
“By decree of the angels and by the command of the holy men, we excommuni-
cate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, with the consent of God, […]
with all the castigations that are written in the Book of the Law. Cursed be he
by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed
be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when
he comes in. . . . the anger of the Lord and his jealousy shall smoke against that
man, and all the curses that are written in this book shall lie upon him, and the
Lord shall blot out his name from under heaven” (Nadler 1999, 120).

FILM ON SUSANNE
The Lords of the Supreme Community Council herby announce that “no one
should communicate with him, neither in writing, nor accord him any favor nor
stay with him under the same roof, . . . nor shall he read any treatise composed
or written by him” (Nadler 1999, 120).

FILM ON CHORUS
370 BCE, Plato, Republic, Ban on the Poets. Third Book:
“We must control those who shamefully tell of death and horror, who arouse
fear and make us shudder from the underworld. The more they reach back to
poetic means in doing so, the less they may be listened to. We will thus abandon
all moaning and whining. Also all risibility. For, also all exaggerated risibility
is harmful. All too easily it may turn into its opposite. Thus in our Republic
we must not allow any depiction of people being overwhelmed by laughter or
moaning. Or stories about lack of self-control, such as, Zeus the Olympian, due
to lust at the sight of Hera, losing his self-control to such an extent that he did
not even want to enter the bedroom but started mating with her right on the

203
 Arno Böhler and Susanne Valerie

floor. In our Republic it is forbidden both to be mad and to depict anything

mad. We will ban anybody from saying all this. Perhaps even more than this”
(translated and adapted by the authors from excerpts from Plato, Republic 386–
90, see Plato 1961b, 630–35).

FILM OFF
The image fades out. Spot on Susanne. She opens another page of the book of law and
starts reading.

SUSANNE LIVE
Socrates, 399 BC: “With a 361 to 501 vote of the jury, one of the courts of the
Athenian democracy condemned Socrates to death. Thus, you judges, the
sworn accusation is this: Socrates . . . behaved sinfully by corrupting the young
people and by not accepting the gods accepted by the state, while instead
accepting something different, new, demonic.
“After the verdict, Socrates was handed over to those eleven men whose task
was to supervise the execution of the death verdict. In the prison, he was offered
the beaker with the already prepared drink. He took it without hesitation. . . .
Earlier, he had received information about the course the poisoning would take.
[Most of all due to coniine, hemlock causes spinal cord and brain paralysis. The
respiratory centre is the first to stop working. The poisoned person suffocates,
while the consciousness is the last thing to die.] ‘You’ve got nothing to do,’ the
man in charge of the poison told him, ‘except, having drunk, walking around
until your legs become heavy and then lying down.’ When Socrates noticed that
his shanks were becoming heavy, he lay down straight on his back. Then the
executor touched him time after time and examined his feet and shanks . . . and
he asked him whether he felt them, to which he said no. And then he examined
his knees, and in this way he went ever more upwards and showed those around
how Socrates became cold and stiff. When they uncovered him, he was dead”
(translated and adapted by the authors from excerpts from Plato, Phaedo, see
Plato 1961a).

Susanne closes the book of law, takes the stand and the book, and exits.

ARNO LIVE
Arno is sitting on the chair, once again addressing his speech to Nietzsche.

Dear Friedrich,
Let me continue from where I abruptly finished my last letter.
As you can imagine, it comes as no surprise
that the first denunciation at work in
the triple denunciation of (1) consciousness, (2) values, and (3) sad passions,

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 Corpus Delicti #2 // Untimely Precursors

the denunciation of consciousness, is accompanied by a new model of the body;

And, even more generally,
with a re-evaluation of the significance of the material conditions
one needs to perform one’s actions in space and time.

Deleuze assumes that you and Spinoza have declared a new materialism
by using the body as the fundamental model of a new, almost artistic image of thought.

According to him,
the false, unsound image of thinking,
promoted by rational philosophers,
lies in the wrong assumption that
the rational plateau of our existence functions entirely separately from our desiring
machines.

Kant’s concept of the nature of the aesthetic,

as desireless intuition,
perfectly attests his ascetic image of thinking.
He tries to think—as all classical philosophers did, at least since Socrates—
separately from his desiring machine.
Everybody, since then,
is called to dominate one’s instinctual activities
by virtue of subordinating them to the faculty of reason
to produce a hierarchy, or an assemblage of instincts and forces, governed and
ruled by reason.

I was laughing aloud

reading your sentence about Kant
in “On the Genealogy of Morals”
that Kant’s “categorical imperative smells of cruelty” (Nietzsche 1989, 65).
Deleuze would say it smells sadomasochistic,
a hidden pleasure in producing pain by hurting oneself and others.

Spinoza—Deleuze calls him the Prince of Philosophy,

what an honorific title—
challenges this so called “rational” image of the body
by simply throwing the seemingly innocent question against his opponents:
“No one has yet determined what the body can do” (Spinoza [1994] 1996, 71).
In Spinoza’s Ethics the question of what the body can do almost functions like
a mantra,
cast against his opponents
as a poisonous weapon,
questioning the very foundation of their mode of thinking.
As if the body would just be a passive mechanical instrument,
ready at hand to be used by a disembodied (spiritual) subject
as a tool, needed to perform somebody’s actions.

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 Arno Böhler and Susanne Valerie

Of course,
Spinoza throws this sentence,
this rhetorical question,
against the philosopher of his times, René Descartes,
to bring him back to the raison d’être.
That is to say,
to the sense of our earthly, bodily lives.

You said it yourself in On the Genealogy of Morals:

We are so used to “stand[ing] amazed before consciousness,
but ‘the truly surprising thing is rather the body . . .’” (Deleuze 1988, 18).
The body is no instrument, but a toy!
A playful, productive factory of dynamic forces,
in Latin terms, fabrica,
ready to produce something different in comparison to somebody’s inherited
nature.

In line with such an image of thought one has to accept

that our “first” person position is always already a second or third one.
A way of responding toward a pre-subjective form of life
that acts in us and upon us rather than we would act upon it,
at least in the first place.

I is another! Said Rimbaud.

We do not know, what a body can, because it does not say I, but does I,
as you expressed it in Thus spoke Zarathustra.

Arno addresses the last lines directly to the audience.

Neither could I be here and speak to you,

nor could you hear, sense, and reflect on what I am saying
if we were not here corporeally.
Whenever I want to speak on bodies,
I can do this only by actively operating my body,
making use of my voice, my brain, my arms, my legs, my senses.

FILM ON DELEUZE ABC

* * *
Letter: D
* * *

FILM OFF

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After the film has been played, Arno goes to the bathtub via the catwalk,
sits down on its rim and starts speaking from there.

ARNO LIVE
The second denunciation,
at work in the triple denunciation of (1) consciousness, (2) values, and (3) sad
passions,
is the denunciation of the values of good and evil,
replacing them with the values of good and bad.
While the terms good and evil relate to free will and its responsibility,
good and bad are terms referring to the assemblage of desires
actively at work in the body.

But,
and this is the crucial point that
links this second denunciation of values with the first one:
a body is no thing,
and in no sense a thing in itself;
rather it is a local value of a relational field:
a form of being-with,
being-with-others.
Bodies are relational beings,
due to their very nature of fleeing from themselves to contact others and relate
to them already on a bodily, physical level.
Good and bad are just modes of sensing the relation of one body toward others.
Good and bad are just modes of affecting and being affected by others,
a mode of being in contact with,
a value, produced in relation to others, and not by a single subject . . .

A body is therefore a field of encounters,

a passage—one is in touch with others:
an “and,” an (und), an et cetera, an access,
generated by virtue of the way one body relates to other bodies.

What unites you and Spinoza, says Deleuze (1988, 25),

is the portrait of the resentful man,
“for whom all happiness is an offense,
and who makes wretchedness or impotence his only passion.”

Such people feel joy in establishing fearful relations,

and thereby compose the nihilism-machine that feels pleasure in making every
body suffer.

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 Arno Böhler and Susanne Valerie

Such people feel guilty in order to finally draw our lives toward transcendent,
supernatural values.
The resentful man is an essential part of the tyrannical machine,
driven by hatred of life in general.
He or she eats the energies of others in a vampiric manner,
separating everybody from the creative, life-affirming capacities of a life.

On the contrary.
Gay Science is the name of an ethic,
concerned with the question of how we can build milieus in which,
let’s say, bodies have stimulating encounters with others.

And is this not the very meaning behind a symposium on Deleuze and artistic
research?
Of arts-based philosophy in general?
That we are creating spaces for creative encounters,
stimulating our bodies to become ecs-static,
which literally means,
opening themselves toward the external world,
the field the body physically shares with others.

Untimely encounters.
From now on, good means becoming untimely . . .

Arno undresses, taking off even the head-set, takes a hand microphone, and gets into the
bathtub.

FILM ON DELEUZE ABC

* * *
Letter: J
* * *

FILM OFF

ARNO LIVE
The third denunciation,
at work in the triple denunciation of consciousness, values, and sad passions,
is the denunciation of sad passions.

From the perspective of his times,

Spinoza was interpreted as a dark precursor.
And indeed,

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he was one for “the moralist trinity”;

namely, the trinity of slave mentality, the tyrants, and the (ascetic) priest . . .

Spinozist, Deleuzians, Nietzscheans are regularly criticised

for attempting to achieve an affirmative relation toward life.
But this is a misunderstanding.
A characteristic, a highly symbolic misunderstanding,
typical of our times.

Affirmation,
in the sense in which these three thinkers understood this term,
is resistance itself.

Why? Because, Spinoza said it already,

a “tyrant needs sad spirits in order to succeed,
just as sad spirits need a tyrant in order to be content and to multiply” (Deleuze
1988, 25). “Excommunication, war, tyranny, reaction,
men who fight for their enslavement as if it were their freedom—
this formed the world in which Spinoza lives” (ibid., 13).
This is happening not far from the global village, or global slum, of our times.
Deleuze almost becomes passionately heroic when saying
that Spinoza had “enough confidence in life,
in the power of life,
to challenge death,
the murderous appetite of men,
the rules of good and evil,
of the just and the unjust” (ibid.).

It is joy that heals us from hatred and lets us affirm this earthly life together.

This is also the very reason why Nietzsche’s amor fati is a practice of political
resistance.
It resists the very conditions of the tyrannical machine.
Therefore only “an ethics of joy,” says Deleuze (1988, 28), “is worthwhile,”
because only “joy remains, bringing us near to action, and to the bliss of action.”
With affectionate love,
Your Franz Overbeck.

FILM ON MUSIC WOLFGANG

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 Arno Böhler and Susanne Valerie

FILM ON CHORUS

Enter chorus. Now the chorus also wears blood-red overalls. This time they have mem-
orised the text they are speaking; the books of law are no longer needed, they have been
internalised. The ruling law has successfully coded the bodies. It has become the innermost
construction law of their physique.

Kafka: The Trial. “The End”: “The men sat K. down on the ground, propped him
against the stone, and laid his head down on it. . . . Then one man opened his
frock coat and, from a sheath . . . drew forth a long, thin, double-edged butcher
knife, held it up, and tested its sharpness in the light. . . . K. knew clearly now
that it was his duty to seize the knife . . . and plunge it into himself. But he didn’t
do so. . . . he could not relieve the authorities of all their work. . . . His gaze fell
upon the top story of the building adjoining the quarry. Like a light flicking on,
the casements of a window flew open, a human figure, faint and insubstantial at
that distance and height, leaned far out abruptly, and stretched both arms out
even further. Who was it? A friend? . . . Somebody who cared? Somebody who
wanted to help? . . . Was there still help? Were there objections that had been
forgotten? . . . Where was the judge he’d never seen? Where was the high court
he’d never reached? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers.
“But the hands of one man were right at K.’s throat, while the other
thrust the knife into his heart and turned it there twice. With failing sight K.
saw how the men drew near his face, leaning cheek-to-cheek to observe the
verdict” (Kafka 1998, 230–31).

Darkness. Exit chorus.

FILM ON MUSIC WOLFGANG

FILM ON DELEUZE ABC

* * *
Letter: R
* * *

FILM ON MUSIC WOLFGANG

While the music is playing Susanne, still wearing her blood-red overall, appears in the
auditorium. She hides her face behind a Nietzsche mask on a rod. The music goes on play-
ing, gently mingling with the text.

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FILM____ON____SUSANNE____LIVE
Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Night Song”: “Night it is: now all springing fountains
talk more loudly. And my soul too is a springing fountain. Night it is: now all
songs of lovers at last awaken. And my soul too is the song of lover. Something
unstilled, unstillable is within me, that wants to become loud. A desire for love
is within me, that itself talks in the language of love” (Nietzsche 2005, 91).
“Night it is: now like a spring my desire flows forth from me—I am desirous
of speech. Night it is: now all springing fountains talk more loudly. And my soul
too is a springing fountain. Night it is: now all songs of lovers at last awaken.
And my soul too is a song of lover” (ibid., 92–93).

“O man! Take care!

What does Deep Midnight now declare?
‘I sleep, I sleep—
From deepest dream I rise for air:—
The world is deep,
And deeper than day had been aware.
Deep is its woe—
Joy—deeper still than misery:
Woe says: Be gone!
Yet all joy wants Eternity—
—wants deepest, deep Eternity!’” (Nietzsche 2005, 284).

Susanne places the Nietzsche mask on the ground, takes off her shoes and blood-red overall
and is now wearing a short, black tank top. On the ground there is a white parcel. She
opens it and takes out a big gingerbread heart whose icing reads “Amor fati.”

A love poem by Catullus is projected onto the stage wall in the background. Simultaneously
and from the start, Susanne’s voice is heard reciting the poem.

FILM On Gaius Valerius Catullus Carmen 5

“We should live, my Lesbia, and love

And value all the talk of stricter
Old men at a single penny . . .
Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,
Then another thousand, then a second hundred,
Then still another thousand, then a second hundred;
Then, when we’ve made many thousand,
We’ll muddle them so as not to know
Or lest some villain overlook us
Knowing the total of our kisses” (Carmen 5, Catullus [1990] 1998, 7).

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 Arno Böhler and Susanne Valerie

BOLLYWOOD SOUND WOLFGANG

Susanne goes to Arno, places the heart on the ground, takes off her top and joins him in the
bathtub. On the stage wall in the background there appears a laughing Nietzsche mask:

GREAT LAUGHTER

HAPPY END

References
Catullus, Gaius Valerius. (1990) 1998. The “Nachgelassene Fragmente Herbst
Complete Poems. Translated by Guy Lee. 1885–Herbst 1887.” In Werke: Kritische
Oxford: Oxford University Press. This Studienausgabe Bd. 12, edited by Giorgio
translation first published 1990 (Oxford: Colli and Massimo Montinari, 29.
Oxford University Press). Munich: DTV; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1983. Nietzsche and Philosophy. ———. (1954) 1976. “Postcard to Overbeck
Translated by Hugh Tomlinson. New (Sils Maria, July 30, 1881).” In The Portable
York: Columbia University Press. First Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter
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(Paris: Presses universitaires de France). first published 1954 (New York: Viking
———. 1988. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Press).
Translated by Robert Hurley. San ———. (1967) 1989. On the Genealogy of
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1970 as Spinoza (Paris: Presses and R. J. Hollingdale. In On the Genealogy
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Spinoza: Philosophie pratique (Paris: Minuit). Kaufmann, 3–200. Vintage Books: New
———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. York 1989. First published 1887 as Zur
Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Genealogie der Moral: Eine Streitschrift
Columbia University Press. First (Leipzig: Neumann). This translation first
published 1968 as Différence et répétition published 1967 (New York: Vintage).
(Paris: Presses universitaires de France). ———. (1973) 1990. Beyond Good and
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future.
The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. London:
Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage. First Penguin. First published 1886 as Jenseits
published 1975 as Surveiller et punir: von Gut und Böse: Vorspiel einer Philosophie
Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard). der Zukunft (Leipzig: Neumann). This
Kafka, Franz. 1998. The Trial. Translated by translation first published 1973 (London:
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Books. First published 1925 as Der Prozess ———. 2003. Sämtliche Briefe: Kritische
(Berlin: Verlag die Schmiede). Studienausgabe Bd. 6. Edited by Giorgio
Mayer, Heinz, ed. 2010. Kommentar zum Colli and Massimo Montinari. 2nd ed.
Universitätsgesetz 2002. 2nd edition. Munich: DTV; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Vienna: Manz Accessed 30 June 2017. ———. 2005. Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
https://www.parlament.gv.at/PAKT/ Translated by Graham Parkes. Oxford:
VHG/XXI/I/I_01134/fname_000643.pdf. Oxford University Press. First published
Nadler, Steven. 1999. Spinoza: A Life. 1883–91 as Also sprach Zarathustra
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Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1885) 1980. Fritzsch).

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Plato. 1961a. Phaedo. Translated by Hugh University Press.

Tredennick. In Plato: The Collected Spinoza, Benedict de. (1994) 1996. Ethics.
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Huntington Cairns, 40–98. Bollingen London: Penguin. First published 1677
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———. 1961b. Republic. Translated by Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works,
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Series 71. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

213
 Deleuze’s Expressionism
as an
Ontology for Theatre
Zornitsa Dimitrova
Independent researcher, Berlin

This chapter proposes an “expressionist” ontology for postdramatic theatre

and an adjacent poetics. In doing so, it offers a new role for mimesis within
the ontological texture of non-dramatic works for the theatre. Herein mi­mesis
becomes a constitutive principle that supplies continuity between pre-rep-
resentational regions of ontological constitution and the already constituted,
between infinite indetermination and finitude. Mimesis is similar in form
and function to Deleuze’s concept of “expression” within Spinoza’s sub-
stance–essence–attribute and attribute–mode–modification triads described
in Expressionism in Philosophy (Deleuze 1990a). Just as Deleuze’s term “expres-
sion” carries the transition from the infinite to the finite whereby the express-
ible (substance) becomes expressed (sense), so mimesis assumes the role of a
generative intermediary in the composition of worlds in postdramatic thea-
tre. Deleuze’s concept of “expression” captures this very motion within what
Thacker (2010, 144) defines as a regime of “a radical Neoplatonism without a
center.” One begins to notice how non-dramatic or postdramatic works for the
theatre follow a quasi-causal logic whereby “nonsensical” infusions expose the
work of an expressed (sense) within a play’s ontological texture. While grap-
pling with the consolidation of an event of sense within the flux of expression,
plays are at pains to recompose and incorporate the supernumerary within
their fabric.
In scaffolding a form of Deleuzian expressionism for postdramatic theatre,
this chapter seeks to explore one possible facet of a generative and non-actional
ontology for postdramatic plays. An expressionist poetics finds the specificity
of postdramatic theatre in its ontological grounding, that is to say, by delving
into its very ontology. Postdramatic plays are interesting not only in terms of
the cognitively challenging realities they scaffold but, more fundamentally,
because they put on display a type of “non-dramatic” drama. This type of drama
is self-organising, retains an openness toward its constitutive processes, and
exposes the texture of what philosopher Gilles Deleuze takes to be an event of
sense or a “sense-event” whereby an event, with its very positing, already expli-
cates its sense: “We will not ask therefore what is the sense of the event: the
event is sense itself ” (Deleuze 1990b, 22). One such drama ontology remains
grounded in motion (kinêsis), but this is now a motion without entelechy and
without action. Mimesis, too, changes shape. Rather than gesturing toward

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 Deleuze’s Expressionism as an Ontology for Theatre

a reality extrinsic to that of the drama, mimesis attests to the very auto-
generative quality of a postdramatic world and to the genesis of sense itself. An
expressionist poetics thus turns to the ambiguous question of the expression of
sense within one such world. Mimesis becomes a constitutive principle work-
ing from within a world and enabling its unfolding. This principle becomes
manifest with the help of a generative procedure that can be best described in
terms of Deleuze’s concept of “expression.” The concept of expression and the
concept of sense are shown to be intimately related. The concept of expression
attests to the generative motion out of which a literary world comes to be. The
concept of sense, on the other hand, exposes the relation of a produced literary
world to the constitutive virtual region.
Herein, then, we do not speak in terms of “plot” or “a work,” but in terms
of “a world,” or, better still, “worlds,” continually on the brink of being consti-
tuted. The entwinement of expression and sense, of a constitutive force and a
supra-representational constituent within representation, carries the unfold-
ing of worlds in postdramatic theatre. The flux of expression at once enables
the genesis of representation (expression becomes expressed sense and thus
a world is constituted) and opens up to a supra-representational region (a flux
of constitutive motion). Assuming this vantage point, one begins to notice
that postdramatic plays exhibit a quasi-causal logic that allows them to shift
between the constituted and the constitutive, and ever reshuffle anew. Rather
than perceiving these plays in experiential terms, the present chapter assumes
the stance that they expose the work of an event of sense within their onto-
logical texture. The manifested event of sense is not congruent with the lit-
erary world that surrounds it. It rather carries the imprint of the constitutive
supra-representational region—a field of forces and relations out of which
representation congeals.

The work of expression

Deleuze’s concept of expression alludes to a type of ontology that sees being
as auto-generative and self-propelled. One such view is reinforced in Deleuze’s
Expressionism in Philosophy (1990a), a book that deals with the individuating
motion of substance from infinite to finite modes toward ever-finer distinc-
tions. Within this motion, substance unfolds while remaining in itself. The
expression of substance becomes manifest as an event of sense, that is, sub-
stance expressed in finite modes. At the same time, sense remains entwined
with and ever gesturing toward the supra-representational region of ontologi-
cal constitution.
Deleuze introduces the concept of expression as part of a triad that illustrates
the transition from substance to finite modes in Spinoza’s Ethics. In Spinoza,
we speak in terms of attributes expressing the essence of substance. This transi-
tion can be understood as a gradation, a series of thresholds leading from infin-
ity to a finitude. According to Deleuze, this triad allows us to discern between
“what expresses itself ” (substance), “the expression itself ” (attributes), and
“what is expressed” (sense). This arrangement exposes the paradoxicality of

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 Zornitsa Dimitrova

the concept of expression. The expressed has no existence independent of its

expression, and yet remains radically different from it.
According to Deleuze, attributes (expressions) become the relation between
substance and modes, that which expresses itself and that which is expressed.
In positing the concept of expression, Deleuze puts on display the external
character of relations as constituting the sum of the capacities of a body and
alludes to a co-determinative ecological practice whereby a body is shown
as co-constituted by an environment. A relation is not pre-established but
encounter-dependent. It is only through the establishment of relations that a
body is exposed to its own power—that is, its ability to explicate an essence—
and other bodies. Behind the concept of expression we have the idea that a
relation is the originary constitutive principle of a substance. Rather than turn-
ing to a concept of expression as “the internal made external” (Abrams 1953,
22), then, we work with a concept of expression that has overcome the division
between an outward and an inward side. Even more so, the term “expression”
is defined entirely by its relating capacity in the generative motion from a sub-
stance to finite modes, or constituted entities from a representational region.
Assuming this vantage point allows us to think of a literary creation that can
be attributed to the work itself. That is to say, one such concept of expression
allows us to see works for the theatre as auto-generative, as evolving out of their
own resources and on their own terms, irrespective of human intervention.
Such plays do not only work from within the regulative order of representa-
tion but are also continually open to a host of supra-representational forces. In
being such, plays can undergo a variety of morphisms and can refashion their
ontological texture in a cosmos composed of constellatorily linked relations,
with and without their things.
Sarah Kane’s Cleansed (1998), for instance, presents us with a gradual trans-
morphosis as we witness a process that is very much reminiscent of a morphing
claymation. The play appears to recompose its ontology several times through-
out its course, forming ever-newer creatures and relations between them. In
Kane’s play, two lovers are thrown into the play as if into an ingenious torture
machine. Grace and Carl are subjected to a variety of mutilations and surgi-
cal interventions. Cleansed, thus, can be said to scaffold a spectacle of love in
three “trial” stages whereby Tinker, a doctor figure, orchestrates these acts of
violence in a misguided effort to extract the love out of the two bodies. In a
final scene, Grace is moulded into the body of her dead brother whereas Carl
is reunited with his lover Rod. As subjectivities intertwine and traverse their
prefigured boundaries, the play begins to generate fantastic creatures, a flower
bursting open out of the floor, and chirping rats. As it progresses, the play con-
tinues to recompose its ontological portrait—as if in an effort to cope with the
onslaught of violence and readjust, to not break but instead to reach toward a
conceptual territory allowing for the complete redefinition of a substance.

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 Deleuze’s Expressionism as an Ontology for Theatre

From expression to sense: the extra-ontological

In Expressionism, Deleuze (1990a, 330) articulates a division between representa-
tional “designation” and regimes of supra-representational “expression.”
Another of his books, The Logic of Sense (1990b), replicates this arrangement in
introducing the linguistic proposition as an amalgam of three representational
components (denotation, manifestation, and signification) and a supra-
representational one, sense. As the expression of a proposition, sense envelops
the proposition’s three representational components and makes representa-
tion complete (ibid., 17). And all the while, sense is the one radically non-
representational constituent within representation. If we have a chain of
propositions, the sense of a first proposition becomes the designatum of the
second, itself having a new sense. The chain, then, goes on indefinitely whereby
sense is always displaced and fugitive (Deleuze 1990, 28–31), perpetually
shifting to a next proposition and thus perpetuating the chain.
This becomes the basis for Logic’s linguistic paradoxes of dry reiteration
(1990, 31) and indefinite proliferation (28–30). If a proposition is to remain of
sense, its sense should never be explicated. Therefore, sense remains elusive
and on the move. A sense cannot be petrified and extracted from a propos­
ition—doing so will cause the brittle order of representation to collapse. By
extracting a proposition’s sense, one lays bare something extra-logical, some-
thing habitually described as “nonsense”: “a smile without a cat” (125). These
paradoxes show how a proposition never discloses the expressed as one such
disclosure would break the chain of sense-making that builds up the given.
One such nonsensical inherence is Deleuze’s “impossible object” (1990: 35).
In The Logic of Sense, impossible objects pertain to propositions whose denota-
tion cannot be fulfilled and which are without signification. They are “without
a home” and outside of being. Martin Crimp’s Fewer Emergencies confronts us
with one such Deleuzian “impossible object” that readily sabotages the play’s
progression. A song traveling between humans and across the separate tableaus
of the triptych play obstructs the narrative. The few performances of the song in
the course of the play expose moments in which the three individual tableaux
begin to falter, putting on display an undercurrent of violence and aggression
beneath the “pictures of happiness” the play’s narrative laboriously constructs.
Here the play’s song, a Deleuzian circulating component, becomes destructive,
causing the narrative to dissolve as it is continually at pains to “trick” the play
into stating its own sense. The triptych play’s circulating component, an ono-
matopoetic song that Deleuze would call “an impossible object,” “an empty
square,” and “an occupant without a place,” has no existence separate from its
inherence in the serial movement that propels the play. At the same time, it still
leaves its mark on the representational region, bringing forth havoc and confu-
sion. The “impossible object” alters the ontological fabric of the play. It reshuf-
fles the play’s components in a way that allows us to witness how the idea of
clear world boundaries that is part of the poetics of the representational region
is effectively undermined. Infusions from another logic and of a different onto-
logical texture flow into the narrative, ultimately causing it to disintegrate.

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 Zornitsa Dimitrova

The movement of sense within a chain of propositions never stating their

own sense replicates the motions of attributes-expressions from Expressionism
in Philosophy. While substance expresses itself in attributes, its essence being
the expressed (substance/expressive > attributes/expressions > essence/
expressed), each attribute perpetuates this motion of substance to finite modes.
The pattern repeats itself on another level (re-expression) inasmuch as now
each attribute expresses its modifications in the modes (attribute/expressive
> modes/expressions > modifications/expressed). This is how the distinction
between expressed sense and designated object unlocks a generative motion in
which expression opens up to a re-expression. Once this arrangement reaches
the level of the linguistic proposition, it becomes clear that the role of sense as
a fourth dimension within the proposition simultaneously propels the circle
of denotation, manifestation, and signification—that is, sense “breathes life”
into the circle of the proposition’s representational components—and also has
the capacity to “break” representation as its sole supra-logical constituent.
While an ontologically “primitive” entity (Bowden 2011), sense simultan­
eously appears to be prior to the formation of the representational region and
manifests itself as an effect generated by the proposition’s mixture of rep-
resentational components (denotation, manifestation, and signification). It
is through the inclusion of sense within representation that states of affairs
become palpable and it is through sense, a non-entity, that entities become
available to recognition. Rather than a graspable (a visible or a thinkable
object), sense remains ever-moving on the interface between ideality and cor-
poreality. Similar to expression, which is both constitutive and productive, the
pre-personal and impassive field of sense conditions and produces the order
of representation. Yet sense ceases to be immediately graspable within the
propositional structure once the order of representation is established. From
the perspective of representation—once its ontological region has become
solidified—sense becomes a fugitive constituent that is incongruent with rep-
resentation’s prevalent ontological texture. The order of representation works
with the products of the work of sense—here we have a recognisable world,
a case of “constancy and homogeneity” (Deleuze 1997, 245)—without delving
into the processes that enable its very emergence.
The genesis of sense, then, also vicariously conditions formations such as
those of “subjectivity” and “language.” What becomes manifest in the propos­
ition is subjectivity and the strong logicality of a language; what enables the
emergence of a proposition is pre-propositional and supra-subjective sense.
The regions of representational language and subjectivity are the effects of
the work of sense. And even more so, the entire region of representation itself
is constituted and conditioned by a genesis of sense (Hughes 2008). In post-
dramatic theatre, the representational region remains open to a sense, that
is, toward the self-propelled flux of the constitutive region. Ultimately, such
forms of maximal openness show us how Deleuze’s expressionist ontology
carries within itself the possibility of a new, non-dramatic type of dramatic
theory.

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 Deleuze’s Expressionism as an Ontology for Theatre

Reshaping dramatic theory: toward an expressionist

poetics
Classical dramatic theory accounts for arrangements that traditionally deal
with a region of language and already constituted subjectivities. Deleuze’s con-
cepts of expression and sense allow us to articulate a different take on the mat-
ter of being. Within an expressionist ontology, the region of representation is
continually informed by a region of ongoing ontological constitution. Rather
than focusing on the products of this constitutive motion—solid entities from
the representational region—one takes a plunge into the constitutive
motion itself. We encounter a paradoxical component that captures an extra-
representational dimension, that of sense.
Caryl Churchill’s Far Away ([2000] 2009) sketches out one such surface for the
explication of sense whereby the constituents of the play’s flat world—humans,
natural forces, and artefacts—have already, with their very positing, become the
full explication of their sense and thus “nonsensical.” These creaturely forms
are shown to be generated out of a unified plane as figurines in a claymation.
No vertical distinction in being is made. Upon this surface, the explication of
a being is already an explication of a being’s sense. In Churchill’s Far Away, we
thus encounter a surface of sense that operates as a horizon in all directions
but also a surface that is profoundly disturbing in its unfamiliarity. Creatures
formerly known as “humans” are posited as non-actantial things among things
in a scenario wherein the given is scaffolded upon a flat perpetual foreground.
Such entities operate without a “background” order that would donate signifi­
cance and inform the order of the given. As such, they become “impossible
objects,” the very expression of their own impossibility.
But what are the stakes in one such take on the generation of literary worlds
in plays? This glimpse into Deleuze’s cosmology offers some access to a con-
ceptually pre-personal and supra-representational region in works for the the-
atre whereby we can witness their very constitutive processes. An expressionist
poetics, then, sees plays as responsive non-teleological movements composed
of series of encounter-dependent motilities. One result of this change of van-
tage point is that a supra-agentive model replaces that of the classic model of
drama based on action and drawing on the perennial definition of tragedy as
the “mimesis of an action” (Poetics 1449b24, Aristotle 1995, 47). If there ever
remains one such actional reality, this is the reality of expression qua such. That
is to say, an expressionist poetics no longer perceives realities as having to do
with human subjectivity and language. Rather, both human subjectivity and
language are seen as the by-products of a constitutive impersonal movement
that is the genesis of sense itself. An expressionist poetics also denies that lit-
erary worlds in drama are the result of intentionality. An expressionist poet-
ics, instead, sees worlds in drama as ongoing, utterly contingent, unmotivated
impassive movements. Such worlds in the making become the playground of
potentialities and extra-personal forces. Such potentialities and forces contin-
ually bend a world’s fabric by reshuffling the given and by causing its constitu-
ents to reform to incorporate the ever newer.

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 Zornitsa Dimitrova

A drama of non-purposive ongoing constitution is found on the fault lines

between actuality and that which is yet to come. We have a co-determination
of the representational region of the constituted and the region of ontological
constitution. The fabric of plays itself becomes a field of ongoing individuation
that does not cease and is seldom final as its constituents can always reshuffle
anew. Here it is the inclusion of a constituent that Deleuze calls “an event of
sense” that guarantees a constant inflow of chance within the given. This vant­-
age point uncovers dimensions in drama that are non-entelechial, constella-
tory, not necessarily based on action, not necessarily presupposing human sub-
jectivity, extra-temporal, and even indifferent to spatiality. From the vantage
point of an expressionist ontology, the composition of literary worlds in drama
becomes a genesis. Worlds take shape and dissolve because of the world-
making and world-dissolving capacity of sense. And the work of expression
attests to the ground of the transmission between the disparate regions of
potentiality and determination.

Conclusion
This chapter began with the assumption that the very ontological texture of
plays accounts for the work of supra-representational forces in theatre. Here
an expressionist poetics envisions a concept of expression that carries a
world-making capacity within itself. Expression is two-fold: it co-shapes the
very region of finite entities and provides accounts of the work of an evental
constituent within the representational region. This evental constituent func-
tions as an extra-being within a play’s ontological texture, providing access to a
dimension that enables a break from the representational region, yet without
invalidating it.

References
Abrams, Meyer H. 1953. The Mirror and the Deleuze, Gilles. 1990a. Expressionism in
Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Philosophy: Spinoza. Translated by Martin
Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Joughin. New York: Zone Books. First
Press. published 1968 as Spinoza et le problme de
Aristotle. 1995. Poetics, edited and translated l’expression (Paris: Minuit).
by Stephen Halliwell. In Aristotle: Poetics; ———. 1990b. The Logic of Sense. Translated
Longinus: On the Sublime; Demetrius: On by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale.
Style, 2nd ed., 27–141. Loeb Classical Edited by Constantin V. Boundas.
Library 199. Cambridge, MA: Harvard London: The Athlone Press. First
University Press. published 1969 as Logique du sens (Paris:
Bowden, Sean. 2011. The Priority of Events: Minuit).
Deleuze’s Logic of Sense. Edinburgh: ———. 1997. “One Less Manifesto.”
Edinburgh University Press. Translated by Eliane DalMolin and
Churchill, Caryl. (2000) 2009. Far Away. In Timothy Murray. In Mimesis, Masochism,
Plays: Four. London: Nick Hern Books. and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in
Play first published 2000 (London: Nick Contemporary French Thought, edited by
Hern Books). Timothy Murray, 239–58. Ann Arbor:
Crimp, Martin. 2005. Fewer Emergencies. University of Michigan Press. First
London: Faber and Faber. published 1979 as “Un manifeste de

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 Deleuze’s Expressionism as an Ontology for Theatre

moins,” in Carmelo Bene and Gilles Kane, Sarah. 1998. Cleansed. London:
Deleuze, Superpositions (Paris: Minuit), Methuen Drama.
85–131. Thacker, Eugene. 2010. After Life. Chicago:
Hughes, Joe. 2008. Deleuze and the Genesis of University of Chicago Press.
Representation. London: Continuum.

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 Space and Sensation
Zoé Degani’s Art of
Pluralising Signs Onstage
Lindsay Gianoukas
Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (PPGAC-UFRGS); artist and theoretician, Brazil

This chapter illuminates key concepts from philosophies of difference related

to a specific practice of composing spaces for performing arts.1 Athleticism, as
noted by Deleuze in reference to Francis Bacon’s paintings, requires the human
body in its becoming. This analysis takes becoming as an operation that could
be found in scenic pieces understood as machines for athleticism: objects that
aid such machinic performances. In all dimensions, these machines are related
to the promotion of new movements and add new varieties to the scenes they
compose. “A singular athleticism, all the more singular in that the source of
the movement is not in itself. Instead the movement goes from the material
structure” (Deleuze 2003, 14), and is pluralised as an affective and physical
athleticism that is reared from the material structure, which acts as a gear for
the movements. This time, the perpetual variation that grounds Deleuze and
Guattari studies is observed from the perspective of creating with and for con-
crete materials and structures. “The athleticism of the body is naturally pro-
longed in this acrobatics of the flesh” (ibid., 23), which is developed through
a double perspective from the performers’ flesh and that of the artist, whose
oeuvre provides the objects for analysis. In addition, when Deleuze focused on
Carmelo Bene’s theatre he pointed out how critical and political Bene was on
the stage, going beyond representation, acting in such a way that only what he
did concerning elements of power in the representation were visible.
Considering all the spaces set up for dance or theatre by Degani, it is inter-
esting to observe that they all aim to promote sensation; although, “it is diffi-
cult to say where in fact the material ends and sensation begins” (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994, 166), since there is a coupling of movements between the mate-
rial and the sensation, it will be material that gives “sensation the power to exist
and be preserved in itself in the eternity that coexists with this short duration” (ibid.,
166) of the material and the scenes. Furthermore, this study also delves into the
submission of forms to velocities and their variations, and the subordination of
subjects to intensity, to the intensive variation of affects, as noted by Deleuze
in his analysis of Carmelo Bene’s work. These concepts not only ground the

1 The research presented in this chapter grew out of my master’s thesis (Gianuca 2013), which was super-
vised by Dr. Silvia Balestreri and was funded by CAPES.

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 Space and Sensation

analysis, they cross it and feedback on it in a swinging movement between the

observation of a practice and the movement of the concepts.
Thus, this chapter presents the relation between the creation of performa-
tive spaces and the emergence of sensation, which is illustrated by the visual
aspects, structures, and signs placed on spaces in the exacting work of Brazilian
fine artist and scenographer Zoé Degani. Excerpts from Degani’s oeuvre were
selected to demonstrate her molecular way of playing with signs within the
gear of affects and percepts (Deleuze and Guattari 1994) over extensive and
intensive matters. Such signs, in turn, compose open layers that are revealed by
the analysis. I expose some of the artist’s resources on the stage that corrob­
orate philosophies of difference. Alternatively, it can also be considered from
an inverse perspective, where the philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari con-
tribute to an understanding of this spatial and sensitive work. Some approaches
investigated here can be seen as machines for athleticism that expose the fig-
ures rather than the characters and confront fiction in a manner that is simi-
lar to what Deleuze (2003) observes in Bacon’s paintings. Meanwhile, some of
the operations that enable the processes of continuous variation underlined
by philosophy in literature, painting, cinema, and, to a lesser extent, theatre,
are developed from the perspective of the spaces of performing arts. This study
aims to elucidate how components of heterogeneous systems collide within
Degani’s work. Therefore, the goal of this investigation is to highlight how
Degani’s creation denies representation in particular operations within this
representative field.
This chapter is divided into three sections, which are based on fragments
from research on philosophies of difference and Degani’s atelier, developed
over more than ten years. The sections below provide an overview of the com-
plex arrangements that are intended to exhibit some of the forces at work in
the artist’s work and thinking.
First, I introduce the artist, but I put greater emphasis on her movements
than on her identity. Second, I contrast the machines for athleticism through
selected objects from her theatre designs and explore their potential to cross
languages as well as the coupling of bodies when both are varied. Then, devel-
oping my argument from the consequences of the objects/machines, I draw
connections between their creations and the artist’s use of elements of her
own life, facing the inextricable relation that reveals some of the composing
forces. Finally, these particular ways of “reading” dramatic texts and the world
also illustrate the coherence between the philosophy and the oeuvre on which
this study focuses.

The artist: Zoé Degani

Who is Zoé Degani and what is special about her work when compared with
other aesthetic pronouncements? Key to this investigation will be the resources
and operations she engages. Clearly, there are links between Degani’s actions
and Carmelo Bene’s operations, or to Francis Bacon’s resources; my philo-
sophical perspective on them reveals the ways that representative and non-

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representative elements within these fields operate. Yet, the distance between
their “molecularities” might also allow us to unfold concepts rather than merely
to expose their similarities. Thus, more than simply presenting the artist,
perhaps it is better to show the movements proposed by her creations, as sug-
gested by Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 175): “it is these beings of sensation that
account for the artist’s relationship with a public, for the relation between dif-
ferent works by the same artist, or even for a possible affinity between artists.
The artist is always adding new varieties to the world.”
Overlapping fragments that refer to an oeuvre tell us much about the oeuvre’s
creator. Therefore, this section will be short; however, a brief contextualisation
will provide clues as to who Degani is before we move on to analysing her artis-
tic thinking on the stage. Zoé Degani is simultaneously an accepted and a mar-
ginalised artist. On the one hand, her career spans more than thirty years, in
which time she has accumulated many awards as a scenographer and costume
designer for theatre, dance, and music and as a fine artist. Her works often do
not fit into just one field or language, but range between video, painting, draw-
ing, installations, and performance, appearing in galleries and museums, on
streets, and in public and private spaces. In the performing arts, her work has
been seen on both traditional and alternative stages. Nevertheless, she largely
hides from interviews, preferring the focus to be on her work rather than her-
self. In challenging academic practices and institutional systems, she can be
seen as a marginal artist who has sought to find her own ways of escaping insist-
ent legitimation.
In her practice, Degani collects discarded items and useless objects from con-
sumer society; these objects are manipulated and changed through her theatre
designs and installations. A peculiar characteristic of her practice is that she
preserves something of the objects’ original appearances while transforming
other aspects of them. Working in southern Brazil, in a challenging context of
scarce funds and precarious theatres, she built a career by gathering scrap as a
strategy to continue creating. Whether from necessity or from her environmen-
tal awareness, this resource ended up reinventing her practice, preserving some
aspects of the objects’ past and imposing new forces on them during the artistic
creation processes. A molecular way of dealing with representation is thereby
revealed, one that always subverts its own state. “A method is needed, and this
varies with every artist and forms part of the work” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994,
167). Degani’s methods reveal a rebellion against the classic procedures of con-
ceiving theatre designs. As we will see in the following sections, she does not
decorate, change, or instrumentalise the scenes. Instead, she invents her own
ways of composing scenes where signs are made relevant by pluralising them-
selves and the sensations they promote. This can also be observed in Proust’s
literary practice, which caught Deleuze’s attention due to the particular way
Proust treats signs in À la recherche du temps perdu. Carmelo Bene’s philosophy
is also close to this minor theatre, as Cull (2009, 40–41) suggests: “Whereas in
much conventional theatre, the tendency is to submit the speeds and slow-
nesses of performance to the organizational forms of plot and dialogue and to
emphasise characters over transformative becomings that sweep them away, a

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minor theatre seeks to affirm the primacy of perpetual variation over the fixed
representation of subjects, objects and a coherent fictional world.”
Particular events from the artist’s life could also be discussed to point out
possible relations between the subject and the way of performing spaces. This
can be seen, for instance, in the associations between motion and form, which
are insistently presented in Degani’s work. These relations may have devel-
oped from her experience as an athlete,2 which led her to investigate qualities
of movement, risk, and speed and affected her plastic experiences of forms,
colours, textures, weight, lightness, and so on. Her emphasis on these relations
runs throughout her work and their operation requires precise mathematics.3
The methods by which the artist proceeds work together, before linking but
not separating. The tuning between movement, variation of speeds, and forms
(geometric or not) seems to contain a “‘pre-existence’ of the scene, its raw
material” (Kantor 1975), in this case concerning the poetic coupling of things
and bodies.
To sum up, perhaps the artist’s words could say more about her than this brief
introduction can. In a personal communication to the present author in 2011,
Degani discussed her aversion to leading classes or workshops: “I can teach
how to make a hole in a wall. However, there is no recipe to be an artist because
life is what makes you an artist when you create work from it.” “Self-taught,”
“idealist,” “subversive”, and “plural” are all words that could define Degani,
at least in part. However, she dislikes the definitions conventionally applied
to artists, especially these kinds of fugitive artists. Researchers and critics in
Brazil have already compared Degani’s work to those of artists Joseph Beuys,
Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, and Christo, although the possible links between
her works and those of other artists will not be developed in this chapter. Above
this, Degani’s aesthetic pronouncements provide direction to the analysis.
Considering that the operations within the scenes expose the artist’s relevance
for this study, the important question is whether and how she can realise new
functions within representative contexts.

Machines for athleticism

This section focuses on two pieces of work using objects created by Degani in
order to compose scenes of dance and theatre that are defined as machines
for athleticism. The reason to connect these scenes conceptually is not their
appearance but the way in which they couple bodies and the consequences.
Although, other related concepts are applied in the operations promoted by
the machines, these will not be developed in the present study. The scenes were
chosen for what the fragments of the works could expose about “perpetual vari­

2 She was a practising athlete between 1976 and 1982. In this period, besides being an athlete, Degani was
also developing her artistic skills.
3 For example, the weight of a body is a fundamental fact, whether an actor or dancer is suspended by an
object or just interacting with it. The agility of the action or the “character” is also an important consid-
eration, as are the height of an actor or dancer and other similar structural and material factors involved
in the composition of the work.

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 Lindsay Gianoukas

ation” and plurality uncovered by the artist’s resources. “Deleuze advocates

a theatre in which hindrances to movement onstage are not circumvented;
instead, they merely negotiate with the constituent elements at the disposal
of a movement’s speed, that is, its ‘fastness’ or ‘slowness’” (Kowsar 2001, 34).
I believe it is possible to observe this theatre through the scenography that
invades the choreography, performances, and direction and which reorders
not only the supposed hierarchy of joined professionals but also and especially
the hierarchy inside the elements that constitute the work. If Deleuze is the
“lawyer,” Degani here figures as the “criminal” in such a theatre, while the tools
from her stage creations are often the weapons of the crimes. Thus, if “gestural
variation is likewise a matter of speed” (Kowsar 2001, 23), spatial variation is
supposed to be a matter of visual, structural, and sensitive arrangements that
do not contain the matter and the arrangements themselves in their borders.
The consequence is the constant movement of variation. The “crime” scenes,
The Bath (fine art, 1997–2001; dance, 2001) and The Lesson (theatre, 2010) are
all detailed below; they provide examples of these operations in order to avoid
representing the performers and the scenes and to pluralise the layers of signs
within them.

The Bath
Even when Degani worked principally as a fine artist, before she began practis-
ing scenography, her work already had a quality that attracted bodies.4 In par-
ticular her scenic objects are understood as potential machines requiring an
assemblage of bodies and athleticism. Further, The Bath provides an interesting
opportunity to observe processes of variation operating in the same work, by
comparing the work before and after it was updated and pluralised.
The Bath was shown and recreated between 1997 and 2001 until finally it was
presented as a dance play. Conceived first as a series of installations, it was
presented in many Brazilian cities, each time made from the same objects and
materials,5 which were placed differently depending on the location and the
resources and facilities offered by the spaces.
Through her idea of a bath (or shower) lacking even a single drop of water,
Degani manipulated the sensation of dryness as well as memory to investigate
the imminent depletion of potable water since the 1980s. A singular apprehen-
sion of the artist’s world was then drawn onto the space by tracing lines, creat-
ing environments, forms, and textures from concrete materials with recourse to
the general flexuous appearance rather than the appearance or meanings of the
materials, texts, scenes, and so on, as is described by Kuniichi Uno (2012, 125):
“to discover in each object the particular way in which a certain flexuous line
which is, so to speak, its generating axis, is directed through its whole extent,

4 For more details, see the first chapter of “The Scenic Ocean of Zoé Degani: For a Plural Scenography”
(Gianuca 2013), in which Degani’s installations and their consequences are considered in detail.
5 Coconut soaps and aluminium basins were adapted according to the possibilities; on another occasion,
the work was composed by an acrylic shower. Behind these main objects there were many white towels
studded with thousands of pins. The work titled Towels of Pins resided inside the major work, The Bath.

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like one main wave which spreads out in little surface waves. Commenting on
these words, Bergson says: ‘It is possible moreover, that this line is not any-
one of the visible lines of the figure. It is not in one place any more than in
another, but it gives the key to the whole. It is less perceived through the eye
than thought by the mind.’”
However, Degani’s use of space is incisive to the eye and at the same time
arranged by thought. Although it can be seen as a conceptual work, this is not
the key point. Rather, it is better to think of her use of space as a work that
makes concepts flow. What Bergson says about the lines of figure and what Uno
describes as a generating axis, Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 172) express, using
the words of Virginia Woolf, to answer the question, “How can a moment of the
world be rendered durable or made to exist by itself ”: “‘Saturate every atom,’
‘eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity’ . . . made transparent.” Any of the pro-
cedures that create variation refer to a condensation of the matter that Degani
develops through the world’s colours, textures, forms, lines, and so on, draw-
ing spatiality with numerous concrete materials. Carmelo Bene talked about
“the mass of my atoms” (Deleuze 1997b, 252), which is the kind of condensing
operation that “no longer operates with combinable atoms but with blendable
flows” (Deleuze 1997a, 156). The most interesting thing here is to observe how
this is exercised: moving from viewing The Bath as fine art to observing it as a
dance play allows us to perceive that the work (its language and concrete space)
seems to expand inversely as its matter is condensed or its atoms are saturated.
In 2001 Degani took her work from galleries to the stage. Working with
a dance company she also began developing a video art that re-presented
onscreen scenes of oceans and showers, submerged ampules, and rain and
fish, among others, that composed a plural spectacle: “The Bath goes beyond a
dance spectacle. It proposes the union of dance, theatre, fine arts, and video.
The project is idealised from research by fine artist Zoé Degani about potable
water as a finite resource. . . . It is a serious investigation of the movement, unit-
ing dance and fine art, in search of a new way of showing itself in the theatri-
cal scene” (Albuquerque and Degani 2001, my translation).6 The artist created
the space for the dance work, spending a year renovating an old harbour ware-
house, which was transformed from a space that was completely abandoned,
dirty, and caked in a thick black layer of grease into one that was huge, clean,
and white. The Bath in its stage version offers this study many forces of variation
observed from spatial propositions. The objects in the scene were placed in
such a way as to require a particular attitude from the performers—“acting” in
the real meaning of the word.
This is especially true of one particular object, “the wave” (figure 1.18.1),
which was a giant tube that danced with performers while putting their bodies
at constant risk of falling. It also operated as the presence of dry pipes from a
civilisation without water. The object simultaneously sustained a representa-

6 “O Banho vai além de um espetáculo de dança, propõe a união de dança, teatro, artes plásticas e vídeo.
É um projeto idealizado a partir da pesquisa e investigação da artista plástica Zoé Degani sobre a água
como bem finito. . . . É um projeto de séria investigação do movimento, unindo dança e artes plásticas,
em busca de uma nova forma de se mostrar a cena teatral.”

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 Lindsay Gianoukas

tive role and acted as evidence of what it in fact was. Its presence was more
powerful than its apparent meaning. Besides dancing with the performers, the
tube also crossed the stage by itself. The same was true of other scenic objects,
which danced in the space as giant fish carcasses, aerial supports, basins, or old
extinguishers from ships. The cast of the show was multiplied by the “dancing
bodies of the objects” while the performers’ bodies were necessarily trans-/
de-formed by their actions. Thus, the wave was a single piece that represented
its truly functional use (a passage for water flowing) while preserving its real
role in the world. Nevertheless, its relational consequences enhanced it when
it required machinic performance from dancers. The scrap was now a scenic
object that corroborated sensation. Revealed as a useless object dancing alone
or with the performers, it crossed into the perceptions and affections of the
audience, who at this point were sharing a real sensation of dryness. Here the
audience should be understood as witnesses of the facts (Deleuze 2003) that
emerged from the scenes. The audience experienced dryness while sat over
tonnes of coarse salt: spatial sensations rather than the representation of a
fiction made the lack of water real.

Figure 1.18.1.

In the same sense, Degani’s scenic objects commonly deny fiction to the bene­
fit of the presence of bodies or objects. Within her scenography, performers
are not there to represent, but rather to make an effort that will save them from
falling, for example, and thus from interpreting. This resembles a situation
“when the body submits to a force of coupling, a melodic force” (Deleuze 2003,
84). In this case it is not the pictorial figures from Bacon’s paintings but the
performer’s bodies that submit to coupling through the objects’ forces. There
was a real risk and the contrast between bodies and objects promoted a sensi-
tive poetry as well: the live bodies reacted and the interaction brought the dead
objects to life.
However, the area of knowable references is invaded not only by the move-
ment but also by the lack of it, and this destabilises the signs involved in the
spatial composition. For example, a waterfall, usually conceived as the constant
movement of water, was static and petrified in the spectacle (figure 1.18.2).

228

Figure 1.18.1. The wave (The Bath). Dancers “surfing” the wave during a rehearsal,
discovering movements coupled to the tube.
 Space and Sensation

Figure 1.18.2.

In addition, the choreography danced by two performers suspended by part of

a human gyroscope, which was manipulated by Degani, made the performers’
duo turn into a trio, with the object becoming not a support but a machine that
constantly derived their movements and danced with them (figure 1.18.3). The
object required athleticism from the performers’ bodies, varying their qualities
of movements and making their movements impossible to predict. Degani also
seems to act on the scene, merging choreography and her performance as an
operator, though in a very different way to that of Carmelo Bene. Here, spatial
and visual operations reverberate causing a combustion of forces and displace-
ment of the layers.

Figure 1.18.3.
229

Figure 1.18.2. Petrified waterfall (The Bath).

Figure 1.18.3. Transformed gyroscope (The Bath).
 Lindsay Gianoukas

The work also comprised the video artwork Which Song would You Sing in Your
Last Bath?, which included a documentary about “memories” of water, aquatic
images, and replies to the titular question gathered from passers-by on the
street. The replies to the question added reality to the video’s soundtrack,
revealing the songs normal people interviewed in everyday circumstances
would choose when imagining taking the final bath of their lives. A coupling of
languages broadly corroborated the sensation, but it also opened the languages
that were rewritten by their coupled composition. In this sense we see clearly
how “theatre is real movement, and it extracts real movement from all the art
it employs,” as Deleuze (1994, 10) puts it. For Degani, theatre is “only forces,
dynamic lines in space,” created through her objects that are both useless
scrap and sculptures, though they no longer fit with either category. In addi-
tion, coupling the pieces with the performers’ bodies promoted movements
of potential becomings, which stopped the pieces from being representa-
tional and removed from them the possibility of being interpreted, thereby
filling the space with intense forces that covered the “old” significances of the
pieces.
Some of the artist’s other resources bear similarities to the ones Deleuze
observed in Bacon’s paintings and in Bene’s theatre, though they operate in
a distinct dimension—for example, when she adds prostheses to performers’
bodies, as in The Baby’s Family (dance, 1999).7 The legs (and sometimes the
arms) simultaneously exhibited their material (pipes), which became confused
with the bodies. The manipulated forms of the bodies rescued their fragility.
The pieces required an intimacy of bodies that emphasised their present con-
dition and, in this way, the quality of their bodies in becoming. Once again, the
movement depended on the scenography, which was paradoxically limited and
expanded by the “prostheses.” All these matters were operated upon, changing
the forms and substances of things so the intensive movements could prolifer-
ate from the execution to the relations of the pieces. Developed by the forces of
the encounter with the dancing bodies in their athleticism, since they extrapo­-
lated the representation to arrive at their expression by the displacement,
the forms were what impelled the movement and had the power to resize the
human.
Ever-present, Degani’s scenic objects dealt with bodies in multiple ways:
crossing choreographies or coupling the objects to the bodies, as she did
with the tube-wave or the transformed gyroscope; making performers more
important than characters; denouncing facts instead of decorating fiction; and
changing bodies with leg, arm, or head prostheses. Above the performativity
of the space, Degani rescues forces that instantly redirect into other forces,

7 The structure, costumes, scenography, and objects for this spectacle were all made from recycled
materials. The prostheses were made from pipes, which were placed on the dancers’ legs and arms.
Appearing alongside giant spiders made from plastic bottles, the performers’ legs and arms caused con-
fusion between animal and human bodies, making them very similar in certain scenes. The prostheses
also created new qualities of movement in the performers.

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contaminating not only the performers’ actions in the athleticism required

from them but also the whole traditional understanding of scenography’s role
and the audience’s zones of perceptions and affections. “As Deleuze notes,
the terminal characterization is not important. The in-between process (the
speed, the intensity, the becoming) is all” (Kowsar 2001, 39). In a similar sense,
Degani’s scenography acts, requires actions, and consequently creates blocks
of present sensations.

The Lesson
Were we only to include examples of Degani’s dance works, the analysis would
be weakened due to the single perspective; thus, we will now turn to a theatri-
cal work. The Lesson (2010) was built from opposite spatial conditions to those
employed in The Bath; consequently, in The Lesson the qualities and forces of
the space were promoted. Performed in an arena, Degani worked from the
restrictive impossibilities of the space (a governmental building with mini-
mal maintenance and resources), to create possibilities for coupling signs and
agencies.
The Lesson was based on the drama of the same name by Eugène Ionesco,
which takes as its theme the oppression of a pupil by a teacher. The images
conceived for the scenes conveyed the teacher’s subjugation of the pupil
through knowledge wielded as power and the sensation of being oppressed.
Distributed over walls and columns, the images subverted the building’s struc-
ture in favour of sensation. Nevertheless, the main machine was undoubtedly
the chair where the drama ended: an old school chair8 transformed by Degani
into a chair of torture. This object led to one of the ten most powerful scenes
of the performing arts year in Rio Grande do Sul state, according to critics. The
object’s power resided in the dramatic manipulation of its structure: the place
to put notebooks and pens was duplicated and placed lower down the side of
the seat, where they became clamps for the student’s legs; pieces were added to
hold the neck and arms (figure 1.18.4). Another reason for the great impact on
the audience/witnesses was the sound produced by the iron bars. This sound
was reminiscent of the noise of a swing (metal pieces rubbing together when
a child goes backwards and forwards), as well as by a dilacerating soundscape
that brought together childhood and annihilation in the same object. The
resulting impression expressed by the student’s chair of torture, reminds us
that works of art “make perceptible the imperceptible forces that populate the
world, affect us, and make us become” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 182).

8 This type of chair is very common in Brazilian classrooms and thus easily recognisable.

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 Lindsay Gianoukas

Figure 1.18.4.

Under the chair of torture was a basin. After the pupil’s murder at the end of
the drama, “blood” dripped constantly into the basin, dissolving the suffering
onto the space and dilating time as if dropped by a pipette.9 In this way, the
same object bridged the soundtrack, the performer’s action, and the audience’s
sensation, while conjoining a school chair and a chair of torture that composed
a struggling relation. It is interesting to note that the impact of the chair was so

9 The image of a pipette was one possible image produced by the sound. This scene happened right
at the end of the play; the drops kept dripping until the last spectator left the space, massacring the
personal chronology of the play, which had ended even while it preserved its terrible aura as an acoustic
reference.

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Figure 1.18.4. The student’s chair of torture (The Lesson).

 Space and Sensation

powerful that the actress playing the pupil was horrified when she encountered
it for the first time. The appearance of the metal pins that covered the chair
seat (actually made from rubber simulating metal), meant she could viscerally
feel the fear of her character; later, she expressed this fear with great intensity
in the final scenes of the play. Furthermore, the considerable physical exertion
required from her body, which was tied, trapped, and subjugated by the chair,
allows us to perceive the operation of this object as a machine that could bring
about intense forces both in the cast and in the audience by pluralising the gear
of the performativity and its reverberations. “The whole apparatus of repeti-
tion as a ‘terrible power’” (Deleuze 1994, 10) invested through the spatial and
through objects reorders the apparatuses of power suggested by the original
drama. “The theatre of repetition is opposed to the theatre of representation”
(ibid.). In this way, the power of the insistent drops was allied to all the mechan­
isms engaged in the scenography; the representation was made relative to the
ambience and the pieces.
Elsewhere in the space were to be found mutilated dolls wrapped in band-
ages with their heads studded with screws; and the columns sustaining the
building were dressed in metal corsets that oppressed the very spatial structure
itself so that nothing could breathe. Instead of a metaphor, this represents a
particular way of creating sensations in all corners of a space. That is to say,
the scenery of The Lesson worked as a big machine that required the physical
athleticism of the cast’s bodies and an affective athleticism in the audience,
who shared in the pluralised signs and sensations evoked. It seems to uphold
what Cull (2009, 41) points out about Deleuze, for whom “the idea of life [is]
constituted by becomings rather than beings, process rather than substance.”
The machines for athleticism impel bodies to a condition of becoming. Instead
of helping the characters, they physically and intensively extract the human
condition from them.

An analysis of the living knowledge

The overarching question then is, How can we understand the examples above
through perspectives of difference concerning the movements between inten-
sive and extensive matters? Besides what we have already observed through her
spatial and signal operations, the artist’s practice and life and her specific way
of creating are also important.
An example of this coupling of life and oeuvre is precisely the scenic objects
from Degani’s works, which are onstage machines for athleticism. We might
imagine that the ability to create such objects—which require bodies and are
a trigger for machinic performances—derives, for example, from her experi-
ences as a motorcyclist. Just as one needs to become one with a motorcycle,
Degani’s scenic objects require the same of performers. They must be inextric­
ably related more to their exercises than to their representation. In addition,
the fact that she had been an athlete influenced her perspective of velocity vari­
ation, movement qualities, weight, and other factors that are frequently rele-
vant to her work.

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In variation, what counts is the relationship between fastness and slow-

ness, the modifications of these relationships, in as much as they carry the
gesture, following variable coefficients, along a line of transformation (Bene
and Deleuze 1979, 113). Through the specific examples of her scenic machines
(the wave to be surfed, legs and arms that extend bodies, the school/torture
chair that required the actress to exercise, the gyroscope that danced with
bodies, among many other possible examples) it is possible to perceive how
the machines could modify the relations between fastness and slowness in the
bodies’ movements. Moreover, it is also possible to observe how lived experi-
ence can enable a reinvention of itself, taking both these as examples of Degani
collecting knowledge derived from her real life. As a motorcyclist, she needed
to become one with her motorcycle and, as a runner, inextricably adhere to her
spiked running shoes. This is the quality that her scenic objects or machines
for athleticism require from the performers: a non-distance between them that
composes a single body by coupling the objects and the performers’ bodies.
For the scenes, Degani aims to offer new possibilities for movement derived
from her aesthetic creations in ways that can vary in their speed and qualities of
motion and fill the spaces with dynamic forces. This simple but not simplistic
approach between parts of the artist’s life and the objects and spaces created by
her sustains a knowledge at the edge. Exposing specific examples of her opera-
tive resources on the stage reveals a coupling of life and creation that does not
respect borders. The artist is the motorcyclist, the athlete, the fine artist, the
woman, and all other faces of her experience condensed to become an operator
on the performing arts.

On the one hand, knowledge is not opposed to life, because even when it takes as its
object the dullest chemical formula of inanimate matter, the atoms of this formula
are still those that enter into the composition of life, and what is life if not their
adventure? And on the other hand, life is not opposed to knowledge, for even the
greatest pain offers a strange knowledge to those who experience it, and what is
knowledge if not the adventure of the painful life in the brains of great men (which
moreover look like pleated irrigators)? (Deleuze 1997a, 19)

Lived experiences can be viewed as a material with which to rehabilitate

Degani’s spatial compositions.10 For instance, we could see the artist injuring
her right hand as the motivation to put each of the thousands of pins in the
towels that composed The Towels of Pins inside The Bath, which she did alone
using only one hand. With each flinch felt by the injured hand, with the other
hand she placed a pin in a white towel, as the artist reported in one of sev-
eral interviews on her processes. This piece featured in The Bath, where a giant
white towel replete with very small pins covered a large white wall, composing a
highly controversial image among all that dryness. Her ways of saturating atoms

10 Among the items that are part of her regular cast of objects, and can act as an exemplar of them, are
basins. These basins, which the artist calls “urban shells,” probably acquired this special place in her
artistic thinking because of the years she spent as a girl and young woman living at the Cassino beach
in the city of Rio Grande, Brazil, which is one of the longest beaches in the world. We understand the
experiences lived as impregnating (with forces) the objects that go along with her practice.

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seem to reside in a substance “in between” where the forces are rescued and
where they are dispersed, contaminating the spaces of sensation. Resignifying
the pain, the facts, and the spaces by saturating their atoms, by composing aes-
thetic pieces from the world’s general axis through a perpetual overlapping of
life and oeuvre, “in fact, the artist . . . goes beyond the perceptual states and
affective transitions of the lived. The artist is a seer, a becomer” (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994, 171). The example above was chosen for its power of condensing
life and work and their fundamental variability, as well as for its non-separation
between art and life or aesthetics and ontology, marked in Deleuze’s project
by seeing that “lived experience is not more real than aesthetic experience”
(Cull 2009, 41). This is denounced by the composition of the towels, where
their great impact grew from the concrete image, which was derived from lived
experience.
Thus, whether by the wave, which was the dry tube with its past and its pres-
ent combined, by the ubiquitous classroom chair transformed into a chair of
torture, by the compressed columns of a building as in The Lesson’s space, or
even by the emergence of a 1000 m2 bath without a drop of water, the layers
of signs installed are both unmistakably denounced and in need of decipher-
ing. In doing so, she pluralises the scenes’ casts to include not only human per-
formers’ bodies but also a wide cast composed of body and basin, body and
wave, body and waterfall, body and chair, body and thing, and so on. Therefore,
the relations that develop between movements and forms expand the human
bodies, subtracting from them that which they usually bring to scenes, which
is what leads to the emergence of unavoidable actions. The useful and com-
municating status of objects and performers are precisely managed to benefit
intensities rather than representations. Pluralising signs and playing with their
layers in each object, in each scene, the artist causes a true combustion of forces
over objects and spaces, which requires both performers and audience to act by
exercising or deciphering. It is a creation, implicated from a molecular practice
over objects and spaces, that condenses matters, making life cross them con-
tinuously. These possible couplings of life and practice perhaps provide some
reason for and underline the artist’s statement that it is impossible for her to
teach “how to be an artist because it is life that makes you an artist when you
create work from it.” Above all, she is an artist who is actually an operator within
the performing spaces, choreographies, scenes, and performers’ actions, who
proceeds by inserting constant movements from ordinary life. Her spatial sig-
nature is her use of tubes, soaps, towels, pipes, chairs, and useless objects and
spaces that are precisely managed for their colours, textures, and shapes. This
seems to be the way that the artist sees the world’s objects: by the possibility of
aesthetic derivations that promote movements, that “add . . . new varieties to
the world,” as defined by Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 175).

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Reading the text or re-reading the world

To conclude this analysis, I discuss the relations between text and scene to
illustrate the condensation of the subjects and the saturation (this time) of the
words, resignifying the space and once more criticising representational status.
In this section, the indeterminism and multiple faces of the creative act that
inhabit its germination reveal an instance of staging that comes from outside
the text (Pavis 1992).

The theatre is not an apparatus of reproduction of literature.

The theatre has its own autonomous reality.
The dramatic text is nothing but an element
which presents itself
totally closed
and indivisible
is a reality of high “condensation”
Which has its own particular perspective,
its own fiction,
its own psychophysical dimension.
It is a foreign body in reality that is recreated. (Kantor 1993, 85)

To better glimpse the chaotic environment that exists in the transubstantia-

tion of words into things, we will illustrate a possibile way in which the art-
ist manipulated language, deriving meanings from shapes and varying both.
Degani usually reads dramatic texts focusing more on their potential images
than on the situations per se. Whereas Carmelo Bene subtracted parts of texts,
Degani in turn pinches specific words to make them objects/sculptures or, as
we have seen, machines. This resarch goes back to a text from Brazilian drama-
tist Nelson Rodrigues, All Nudity Shall Be Punished: Obsession in Three Acts (1965),
and tracks the following excerpts from the play (Rodrigues [1965] 2005, my
translation):

Lights up side stage. The three aunts listening at the door. (18)
Herculano (embittered): What I said came in one ear and went through another! He
did not pay any attention. (31)
Patricio: If you do not want to hear me, I’ll leave. (33)
Serginho: . . . Mother listens to me! No answer, but listen! And at night, come into
my room. (43)
Herculano: My son, listen.
Serginho (fanatically): I want the oath!
Herculano: Listen, Serginho . . . (45)
Geni: Listen. Are not we going to get married? Comes! In your car! (55)
Delegate: Enough! Now you will hear me! You must listen to me! I am an authority
and not a clown! (73)

From Degani’s report, it is clear that the characters that frequently clamour
to be heard in the dramatic text, and also scream and require attention, had
acquired a special relevance to her composition. As she decided upon the

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objects that would inhabit the stage, she created an object that could hear
those characters. She wanted people to hear them, since they did not do it for
themselves. “We are all deaf to each other,” the artist reiterated.
On a traditional stage, Degani sculpted the relief of the forces, more over the
objects than over the space itself. She created a singular universe for the play
that, at times, made the characters almost into figures in pictures. By assigning
things to the space of the scene she composed images on the stage in an aes-
thetic precipitation through her scenography and costumes that only worked
when allied to the lighting and the performers’ actions. It cannot be deter-
mined exactly how or when the characters’ inability to listen to one another
took the form of a payphone (a typical public telephone box in Brazil looks like
it has giant ears. In Brazil the audience would find this object as instantly rec-
ognisable as a London audience would find a red telephone box). Shifted from
its usual context, coloured in black, and lying horizontally rather than standing
in its original position on the streets, the object was amplified in the web of
senses. As a scenic object, the public phone box turned again into a machine
through the scene. Converted, inverted, modified, it gained wheels and could
migrate between the cradle and the bath, becoming defined by the actors’ uses
of it.
Now a bathtub, it becomes the object in which the aunts bathe Serginho
(the nephew) or where Geni (the prostitute) collapses at the end of the play. It
explodes in a kaleidoscope of constantly changing significances. The irony was
evident: our incommunicability acquired an absurd status. In the scenic frame
composed by the actions of the characters, the movement of bodies in space,
their costumes, the incidences of light, and the public’s point of view, the sce-
nic object acted like a scalpel, cutting an aesthetic incision when renewing
the senses and messing up the zones of references. The combustion of forces
exceeded the meanings, the metaphors, or the ironic actions: the sensation of
our society (family?) being deaf emerged between the words said by the per-
formers and the evidence of the object in its irrefutable wide-open shape (fig-
ure 1.18.5 and 1.18.6).

Figure 1.18.5.

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Figure 1.18.5. Geni (All Nudity Shall Be Punished).

 Lindsay Gianoukas

Figure 1.18.6.

To sum up this section, in another theatrical play, Your Desires in Fragments

(2006) written by Chilean dramatist Ramón Griffero, the columns that Degani
composed for the space were also mobile. On the one hand, what she arranged
through the space was precisely the fragility of life and its supports and a
phallic character, all of which permeated the whole text. On the other hand,
the columns provided the actors with a flexible structure that allowed them
to discover in interactive movements the adverse reactions of the structure,
requiring them to be alert all the time. Thus, the artist developed soft columns,
manipulated by the actors who served to construct several scenes.
These brief examples of Degani’s ways of reading dramatic texts and the
world corroborate Carmelo Bene’s requirement for “words [to] stop making
texts” (Deleuze 1997b, 240). Thus, we can understand that in between Degani’s

238

Figure 1.18.6. The nephew (All Nudity Shall Be Punished).

 Space and Sensation

work resides a matter that does not stop to corrupt representation in order to
make sensation emerge from movements derived from the texts, the images,
and the performers’ actions through the spaces.
As she deals with a language to be transformed, the signs chosen by the artist
to inhabit the scenic space pluralise the text and its meanings, once more creat-
ing material to be deciphered rather than interpreted. Her scenic objects relate
to the fictional lives of the characters, to the true lives of the actors, and to her
own life, while the audience act as witnesses. Thus, Degani’s works can be seen
as a molecular way of reading and confronting signs in order to pluralise and
condense them as well as to saturate the objects or spaces.

Space and sensation

On the basis of this chapter, it is possible to perceive that Zoé Degani’s crea-
tions are like a constant transubstantiation of extensive and expressive matter
and the intensive and impressive forces over it. Underlined by the thought of
Gilles Deleuze, developed with Félix Guattari or particularly with and about
Carmelo Bene, the spaces we considered were subscribed by a “line of varia-
tion” composing a “theatre of immanence” (Cull 2009, 74, 78). I believe that
through the selected examples from Degani’s work it is possible to realise how
she acts as an operator inside the performing contexts. “The theatre maker is
no longer an author, an actor, or a director,” or even a scenographer, “[he or
she is] an operator” (Deleuze 1997b, 239). Beyond serving the scenes, her work
constantly promotes a perpetual variation that often denies representation to
particular resources. This could be a tube to be surfed, a student’s chair that
causes an actress to suffer, a rearrangement of bodies through prostheses, or a
reading of the text that captures sensations instead of situations. Moreover, I
think that what is vital for scenography is also vital for the characters in novels,
about which Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 188) wrote: “What matters is not, as in
bad novels, the opinions held by characters in accordance with their social type
and characteristics but rather the relations of counterpoint into which they
enter and the compounds of sensations that these characters either themselves
experience or make felt in their becoming and their visions.”
The objects turned into machines requiring bodily athleticism refer to that
kind of theatre made from perpetual movements, from the destabilisation of
the places of power and the combustion of signs. Whether it condenses objects
in their useless functions by covering them with their scenic roles or combines
textual images with the colours and textures impregnated on the objects, or
even changes the structure of pieces and spaces, the resources Degani develops
always cause sensations for performers and audiences. Representation through
Degani’s work is regarded as illusory since facts are more powerful than fic-
tions, signs are pluralised from their significations, and spaces are converted
into giant machines engaged in making forces that cross them continuously.
“An infinite field of forces” made perceptible (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 188).
Coupling bodies and objects to derive performing machines, joining life and
oeuvre as the only way to be an artist, reading the world and spaces to add new

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 Lindsay Gianoukas

varieties over them: through Degani’s work, the systems of language, expres-
sion, and daily utilities, and the spaces of dance, theatre, audience, bodies, and
objects, among others, are all collapsed and engaged in spreading sensations
freely. In this chapter, we focused on a small part of Degani’s work to highlight
how forces travel along paradoxically concrete and fleeting matters of analysis.
Thus, her work can be thought of as a plural scenography that does not fit in its
own place, that mixes languages, and that composes for itself new ways of being
and expanding.

References
Albuquerque, Carlota, and Zoé Degani. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1994.
2001. Programme for The Bath. Porto What is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh
Alegre, Brazil. Tomlinson and Graham Burchell.
Bene, Carmelo, and Gilles Deleuze. 1979. New York: Columbia University Press.
Superpositions. Translated by Jean-Paul First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la
Manganaro and Danielle Dubroca. Paris: philosophie? (Paris: Minuit).
Minuit. Gianuca, Lindsay. 2013. “The Scenic Ocean
Cull, Laura Katherine. 2009. “Differential of Zoé Degani: For a Plural Scenography.”
Presence: Deleuze and Performance.” Master’s thesis, Federal University of
Phd thesis, University of Exeter. Rio Grande do Sul, UFRGS, Brazil.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Accessed 4 July 2017. http://hdl.handle.
Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New net/10183/77888.
York: Columbia University Press. First Kantor, Tadeusz. 1975. The Theatre of Death.
published 1968 as Différence et répétition Translated by Piotr Graff. Warsaw:
(Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Galeria Foksal PSP.
———. 1997a. Essays Critical and Clinical. ———. 1993. A Journey through Other Spaces:
Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Essays and Manifestos: 1944–1990. Edited
Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: and translated by Michal Kobialka.
University of Minnesota Press. First Berkeley: University of California Press.
published 1993 as Critique et Clinique Kowsar, Mohammed. 2001. “Deleuze on
(Paris: Minuit). Theatre: A Case Study of Carmelo Bene’s
———. 1997b. “One Less Manifesto.” Richard III.” In Deleuze and Guattari:
Translated by Eliane dal Molin and Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers,
Timothy Murray. Mimesis, Masochism, edited by Gary Genosko, 30–46. London:
and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Routledge.
Contemporary French Thought, edited by Pavis, Patrice. 1992. Theatre at the Crossroads of
Timothy Murray, 239–58. Ann Arbor: Culture. London: Routledge.
University of Michigan Press. First Rodrigues, Nelson. (1965) 2005. Toda Nudez
published 1979 as “Un manifeste de Será Castigada: Obsessão em três atos [All
moins” in Bene and Deleuze 1979, 85–131. nudity shall be punished: obsession
———. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of in three acts]. Rio de Janeiro: Nova
Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. Fronteira. First performed 1965.
London: Continuum. First published Uno, Kuniichi. 2012. The Genesis of
1981 as Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation an Unknown Body. São Paulo: N-1
(Paris: Éditions de la Différence). publications.

Artworks
All Nudity Shall Be Punished (theatre), from costumes by Zoé Degani. Brazil, 2001.
a text by Nelson Rodrigues. Directed The Baby’s Family (dance), by Zoé Degani
by Ramiro Silveira. Sceography and and Terpsi Company. Choreography by

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 Space and Sensation

Carlota Albuquerque. Scenography and Ionesco. Square Theatre Company.

costumes by Zoé Degani. Brazil, 1999. Directed by Margarida Leoni Peixoto.
The Bath (installation), by Zoé Degani. Brazil, Scenography by Zoé Degani. Brazil, 2010.
1997–2001. Your Desire in Fragments (theatre), from
The Bath (dance), by Zoé Degani and Terpsi a text by Ramón Griffero. Company
Company. Choreography by Carlota Stravaganza. Directed by Adriane
Albuquerque. Scenography and costumes Mottola. Senography by Zoé Degani.
by Zoé Degani. Brazil, 2001. Brazil, 2006.
The Lesson (theatre), from a text by Eugène

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 Journey into the Unknown
Romeo Castellucci’s
Theatre of Signs
Oleg Lebedev
Université Catholique de Louvain

The aesthetic always uses a mask that, at one and the same time, affirms and negates.
It is only in the intermittence of revelation that we have access to works of art.
Theatre and art do not represent a space in which to live: here, the laws and values
of this world are not valid. Theatre and art are not intended to solve problems: they
must add new ones.

—Romeo Castellucci (2015)

The theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio

Fundamental doubts on the nature of representation constitute the essen-
tial theme of the work of Romeo Castellucci, the co-founder of the Socìetas
Raffaello Sanzio. This chapter analyses how, through very specific scenic
devices, Castellucci confronts spectators not only with the power of theatre but
also with its tremendous darkness. Exposed to violent attacks on the senses,
the spectator is forced to see beyond the image and to think the unthinkable.
The chapter argues that the key elements of such a theatre are constituted by
what Deleuze, and before him Artaud and Proust, called “signs.” Signs testify to
the power of nature and spirit, working at a deeper level than words, gestures,
characters, or represented actions. Far from being linked simply to a signifying
expression, the content, or an alteration of the consciousness, they are above
all a manifestation of forces, of a differential of intensity. In that regard, on
the one hand, signs are always accessible to the senses, already part of a pro-
cess of actualisation; however, on the other hand, they already point towards
the virtual system of relations, the ideal coordinates of a problem. This is the
reason why signs are always to be interpreted, and why they put our thought
in motion. There is a great danger in this interpretation, however, since signs
hold a disruptive potential not only when they are lost in the distance (they do
not touch us, they do not reveal the nature of the issues at stake) but also when
they strike us with full force (they abruptly reveal the unbearable abyss, and
lead the one they have confronted to madness or death) (Deleuze 1994, 23).
Castellucci’s art (originating as it does from Greek tragedy) consists precisely

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in tearing his spectators apart between these two ways of being lost in the dark
forest of signs.
The questions we would like to ask about the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio’s the-
atre are, therefore, very straightforward: What is the origin of those signs in
which one finds the maximum drama in the least possible information? Why
do they make such a deep impression on us? Or, as Castellucci himself puts it
about his experience of listening to Schubert, “Where do my tears come from,
void of content and so far removed from the sentimentality I loathe?” (2014).
Paradoxically, isn’t it because signs withhold force that they express their
potency, beyond any theatre of representation, any explicit content, and any
meaning? Therefore, I believe that Castellucci prominently displays the same
new image of thought Deleuze promotes in all his works: the will no longer to
have the choice, to have the spirit forced by sensation, to need thought to go as
far as the tremendous darkness, but also the need to interpret signs, to elevate
ourselves from this darkness to light.

A sign from the gods

ὁ ἄναξ οὗ τὸ µαντεῖόν ἐστι τὸ ἐν Δελφοῖς οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει ἀλλὰ

σηµαίνει. (Diels 1903, 79)
The God whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks plainly nor conceals, but indicates
by signs. (Patrick 1889, 86)

The ninety-third fragment of Heraclitus brings us to the core of the problem.

Gods communicate with diviners (chrosmologos) or seers (mantis) by giving them
signs.1 Since the time of ancient Greece, our fate, but also our tragedy, has been
that gods provoke humans. The fundamental nature of a divinatory sign is that
(1) it is enigmatic and obscure; (2) it can be dangerous, even deadly, when it
reaches the level of human knowledge; (3) its cognitive content is futile, the
solution to the enigma is, in the final analysis, extremely simple.2 Therefore,
Gods cause men to lose balance—not because they are deliberately elusive,
vengeful, or irascible, but because the oracle, by nature, is evasive. Gods never
lie, and can never be guilty of leading us astray. What the prediction indicates,
however, is something men cannot understand immediately. This is the reason
why the riddle of the oracle is, according to Deleuze, always the enigma of time:
if there is revenge, it is only that of time.3 When Oedipus is confronted with his
own destiny, he does not understand it suddenly but is destined to understand
only later.4 The revelation arrives when the human subject is already trapped

1 For an in-depth study of the way in which classical antiquity treated and developed considerations of
the sign, and the application of these theories to the spheres of divination and astrology or to the art of
navigation, see Manetti (1993).
2 Castellucci is greatly influenced here by his fellow countryman Giorgio Colli, who compiled an extraor-
dinary anthology of aenigmata in La sapienza greca (Colli 2005, 339–69).
3 Deleuze explicitly mentions these topics in a lecture given at Vincennes on 7 February 1984 (see
Deleuze 1984). See also Châtelet (1962, 1:144–48).
4 On the difference between fate and determinism, see Deleuze (1994, 83).

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 Oleg Lebedev

in time. The position of the one who receives the sign is essentially passive,
the position of the seer and no longer that of the agent. Oedipus and Macbeth
record rather than react. They are prey to a vision, pursued by it or pursuing it,
rather than engaged in a sensory-motor scheme.5 Too soon or too late, how-
ever, they fall into the trap of this divine (or rather devilish) gesturing, in such a
way that the solver of riddles becomes a riddle to himself that he cannot solve.
“Who am I?” is Oedipus’s one and only question, the horror of his fate. His ina-
bility to interpret is not a simple transitory lack of understanding, since obscu-
rity is the very mode of being of this grandiose revelation.
A sign from the gods merely drops a hint and alludes. Its meaning does not
suddenly emerge, sparing us the need to search; but it is not absent, it does not
confine our lives to absurdity. With the revelation of signs, in short, nothing is
immediate and nothing is out of reach. Everything is there, but in the shadow,
en filigrane (implicit) as Rosselet (2004, 41–42) says. “Neither the problem nor
the question is a subjective determination marking a moment of insufficiency
in knowledge. Problematic structure is part of objects themselves, allowing
them to be grasped as signs” (Deleuze 1994, 63).

The sign as food for thought

“The sign is coming” (Nietzsche 2006, 265). Castellucci brings back to the the-
atre this fundamental lesson of Attic tragedy. He has an extraordinary capac-
ity for treating every figure onstage as an answer to an unknown question. “In
a tragic perspective,” claim Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1988, 38), “man and
human action are seen, not as things that can be defined or described, but as
problems. They are presented as riddles whose double meanings can never
be pinned down or exhausted.” In line with this description of the problem-
aticising nature of tragedy, Castellucci’s stage productions not only interpret
and not only emit signs to be interpreted; they also produce signs by particular
procedures.
So what is a sign? Signs, as we know, were Deleuze’s main concern, insofar as
they mobilise the problem of the relationship between sensibility and thought.
Signs force us to think. The sign is the object of an encounter, but it is precisely
the contingency of the encounter that guarantees the necessity of what it leads
us to think.
Deleuze’s Proust and Signs ([1972] 2008) and Difference and Repetition (1994)
deal with this issue. Deleuze’s intensive theory of signs links the ideal synthesis
of the difference and the asymmetric synthesis of the sensory, the two parts
of the system: the actual and the virtual. The fulguration of a sign is akin to
lightning:6 it is within the actual, it has physical properties, it is a phenome-

5 One recognises here a central element of what Deleuze called “the time-image” (on hallucinatory pos-
session in Visconti see Deleuze 1989, 3; on somnolence, dreams, and troubles of attention, see 55–56; on
fate and time, see 96–97).
6 The dark precursor only takes place within these dissymmetrical systems where disparate elements are
communicating: “The phenomenon that flashes across this system, bringing about the communication
between disparate series, is a sign” (Deleuze 1994, 222).

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 Journey into the Unknown

non, an event . . . and yet the imperishable, the impassive part of the virtual,
of the problem, or of the Idea continue to insist, to persist, beyond actualis-
ation. The sign, by its very constitution, aims at an evasive thing that deprives
us from common-sense understanding. In other words, it is when we do not
recognise things that we are finally able to think them. We need something
that does violence to thought, which wrestles it from its natural stupor and its
merely abstract possibilities. The domain of thought is not the clear and dis-
tinct idea of good sense and of common sense anymore, but the domain of dis-
tinct and yet obscure Ideas, present in an enveloped state, implicated in signs.
Dream-like experiences of paramnesia—where memory is blurred and recog-
nition doomed to failure, forcing the spectator to return to immemorial times
(Human Use of Human Beings)—are at the heart of Castellucci’s aesthetics. The
sign has come, like a morning sun coming out from behind dark mountains,
bearing with it the contradictory character of sublime clarity and darkness.

Figure 1.19.1.

For Castellucci, elements onstage are only important inasmuch as they dissem-
inate signs for decipherment. A priest walks out of a church and with his steps
goes the whole light of the universe (The Minister’s Black Veil), a woman draws the
floor towards her crying body (Schwanengesang D.744), a terrifying technological
device (Le sacre du printemps), a baby playing in a huge golden room (Tragedia
Endogonidia), a crowd endlessly walking towards the audience (Parsifal): the value
of each scene is based only upon what it imparts to us. Castellucci’s strength is
always to negate both the idea that the object being represented onstage holds

245

Figure 1.19.1. Schwanengesang D744. Credit: Christophe Raynaud de Lage.

 Oleg Lebedev

the secret of the sign it emits, and the idea that the meaning merely lies within
the subjectivity of the spectator. An artist, in that regard, really is a tyrant, since
in front of a work of art I never think what I want to think. The significance of
signs is that they avoid the danger of objectivism and subjectivism and indicate
why object and subject are very bad approximations for thought indeed. There
is always something inhuman, involuntary, impersonal, and supra-logical in the
imperative to decipher signs. This is the very reason why signs give thought to
what Deleuze and Proust call “claws [griffes] of necessity” or “claws of authentic-
ity” (Deleuze [1972] 2008, 61, translation modified). Thus, demonstration and
intentionality, personal expression and artistic style, are equally expelled from
such a physical, energetic theatre. Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio achieves this task
through flawless technical mastery, and yet a perfect grasp on the call of the
“problem,” enabling its spell to be communicated, in other words transmitted
to the viewer.

To lose myself in form

I believe such signs are the crucial elements of Castellucci’s theatre: no longer
a theatre of meaning or representation, but a theatre of forces, intensities, and
drives, where the sign plays the role of the instrument through which thought
is activated. The Idea makes the sensation meaningful, while the sensation, in
its turn, expresses the Idea. Or, put another way, the problematic, the Idea, has
to be dramatised by specific sensations for it to be expressed on the stage, which
is conceived as a field of energies and intensities.
For such a dramatisation to occur, it is obvious that the main task is to abol-
ish representation and the pretentious ambition to depict the world. This war
against mimesis can only be won when we realise to what extent the diminution
of images is actually positive. The general implication is that the destruction
of clichés (the “white noise” produced by media culture) becomes a great figu-
rative operation. Iconoclasm is closely related, although in a paradoxical man-
ner, to unbridled production of art. One cannot even conceive this gesture as
still being negative. Thus, the images the spectators are exposed to are diluted
as soon as they have appeared, which gives Castellucci’s theatre an essentially
fragmented, nightmare-like character. Perfect figures are destroyed by the art-
ist himself before anyone else does it, in order to attain the highest possible
tension between creation and destruction. What is at stake here is the affir-
mation of the terror of plenitude, and the correlative abolishment of the great
power of publicity.
Rather than creating meaningful, complex, original figures, Castellucci
thus tries to empty out and disturb his images. His aesthetic forms are always
rather simple and abstract: circles, squares, identifiable cultural figures (Julius
Caesar, a police officer, a little girl, a cleaning lady, a horse). Castellucci elim-
inates details to obtain unpretentious, undecomposable forms. But because
of their place within the temporal chain of the play, their radical simplicity is
experienced as a surprise and creates an emotive tension in the viewers. The
movement towards essence is only possible where there are no stable realities

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that could be placed, defined, and judged, but where sensory signs are the
cause of problems, unanswerable questions, and riddles whose double mean-
ings still have to be deciphered. The problem or the enigma persists over and
above every solution. In Difference and Repetition, the objective structure of the
problem consists in retaining explicated extensities within the original depth
(instead of cancelling it), so that the problem continues to persist and to resist,
and to be unleashed within signs. Let’s turn to the use of animals onstage, for
which Castellucci’s company is well known: a horse is not a horse at all, but a
figure that is captured standing out: a white shape on a black background. If
we follow, in all confidence, the burning power of such an image, we experi-
ence the dynamics of menace and opportunity contained within it. When we
see such a shape, not only do we not see anything stable, but we realise that
we are also being seen, pushed back to the void that looks at us, moves us, and
constitutes us.
Such is the power of the sign: if we find the thing we were looking for in the
right place, then it is false. We have to look where there is nothing to find: the
task is to search. This melancholy is the condition of thought. When I’m con-
fronted with a figure that forces me to change my manner of seeing, it is not I
anymore who is the viewer: I’m also being viewed by the figure as if a gaze was
directed upon me out of darkness. In that sense, tragedy is an intrusive power;
above all, it should be thought of as something that sees me, strips me naked,
and makes me uncomfortable (see Didi-Huberman 1992). To experience a
Castellucci performance is to experience the striking passivity imposed by signs,
but also to be reawakened in this condition.

Figure 1.19.2.

247

Figure 1.19.2. Parsifal. Credit: B. Uhlig/La Monnaie De Munt.

 Oleg Lebedev

There is indeed something very cruel, in the sense Artaud gave to this word,
in such a theatre of intense liberation of signs: gestures and attitudes acquire
an ideographic value, figures constitute hieroglyphs to be deciphered, every
pronounced word becomes physical, and it is the acoustic power of speech
that has the most immediate impact upon us. There is no illustrative, psycho­
logical dimension whatsoever, no need to “stage” a classical text, only to extract
material impressions and pure rhythms from it. Texts inherited from culture
here play the role of a material among many others (light, body, space, sound).
This is a fundamental principle inherited from Artaud, who conceived theatre
as something that must act upon the nervous system and address the senses
rather than the intellect, thus avoiding the tedious necessity of storytelling.
This emphasis on sensibility was also the valuable lesson of Deleuze’s Proust
and Signs: logical and commonsensical truth is less profound, less necessary
than the truth that reaches us through the senses. The outline is as follows: (1)
intelligence is placed under the pressure of signs; (2) sensibility, in the presence
of that which can only be felt, finds itself confronted by its own limit; (3) our
organs become metaphysical, so that both sides of aesthetics are reunited (the-
ory of art and theory of sensibility).7 Through signs, we feel what must be the
mark of their authenticity.
We also begin to understand why the antiphrastic character of an image is
central to the work of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. Castellucci constantly uses
extraneous and violent material elements to convey an opposite meaning. The
following entries from his notebook provide a good illustration of this anti-
phrastic nature of all signs:

A metal thread that leads from the mouth of a man to the ear of a little girl. The
man whispers something. The thread starts to heat up, to smoke and finally glow
incandescent red. (Castellucci 2007, 263)
A black flag swinging through the space succeeds in “extinguishing” the lights on the
stage by capturing the light within its folds. One light after another goes out until
they are all extinguished. Darkness. (ibid., 64)

These notes (pure visual and aural images) are constellations of appearing/dis-
appearing signs. Here we find once again one of the basic features of riddles:
their capacity to connect atomic elements in completely unexpected ways (just
as a kiss can signify a betrayal). The viewer may feel a hallucinatory impact, like
an animal trapped at the very bottom of its burrow. “There is a great differ-
ence,” claims Romeo Castellucci, “between a surreal image and an enigmatic
image. In the enigma, there is always a system, like a bomb that needs defusing,
although there is a logic to it. The surreal image is an automatic image, a deco-
ration for the spirit; its shock is a pseudo-shock” (Castellucci et al. 2007, 255).
This beauty, this ray capable of reaching the most hidden corner within me,
gives me no intellectual consolation, no recognition of what I already know,

7 On the being of the sensible, see Deleuze (1994, 139–40).

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but preserves, with reservation, my anxiety intact. Such signs necessarily bear
characters of the kind of latency or withdrawal that Heidegger (2013, 127–28)
described: “The work [of art], as work, should point toward that which is not
yet available to mankind, toward the concealed, so that the work will not just
repeat whatever we already know, understand and do. Should the work of art
not keep silent about that which remains concealed, that which as concealed
awakes modesty in the human being, insofar as it here confronts whatever can-
not be planned nor controlled, neither calculated nor manufactured?”
In the final analysis, the dimension of risk present in signs leaves us with-
out a map to orient ourselves: signs act like radioactive, dangerous elements—
precisely the reason why they avoid decorative and illusionistic dullness. This
inhuman darkness and this void present deep inside my gaze is the reason why
Castellucci declares that theatre, to be beautiful, must act like a poison, like
a black mirror reflecting our human condition, sending back the riddle we
mortals are to ourselves (Les métopes du Parthénon). This nightly gift is the most
dreadful, and yet the most comforting. We have to dive into the inhuman to
find a fragile human touch in art.
Unfortunately, discussions of Castellucci’s work have recently become highly
mundane, often conceiving his work from the viewpoint of the outrage it
aroused among conservatives or the overestimated value of his artistic project.
However, let us not think that Castellucci is concerned with reflecting on social
reality, fame, or political provocation. His work cannot be reduced to its appar-
ent content or its political impact, but should be grasped from (1) its physical
attempt to emit signs and (2) the affirmation of opacity peculiar to thought.
Provocation is always excessively intentional, and always takes the form of a
specific communication-oriented project; whereas, in Castellucci’s work, we
always have the impression it was made by a non-human entity, a deity or an
extraterrestrial.
Moreover, the only political task of art is precisely to get rid of communica-
tion, to create images that make commercial reappropriation difficult—that
is to say, to put spectators in a condition where they see something that has
not been thought for them. We can appreciate and enjoy a theatre piece on
the basis of common affinities, a certain shared culture (my studies, my know­
ledge of the adapted text, my Western culture); however, very different from
this mundane conversation is the journey into the unknown, the contact, through
sensibility, with signs that force us to sense differently and penetrate the world
of unfamiliar evaluations.8 The aim of art in not to reproduce the world, but
to produce it as it has never been seen before. Once again, we should stress
here that the sign is the only object worthy of encountering. That is to say, only
signs (always problematic for the empirical exercise of our senses) are bearers
of problems; thus, they lure us into dangerous zones where the human sub-
ject no longer has any absolute criteria and we are projected outside ourselves.

8 On the difference between contact and conversation, see Zourabichvili (1997).

249
 Oleg Lebedev

In reducing the σκάνδαλον9 of theatre to mere provocation, we have already

favoured the facility of recognition (with its double characteristic of good sense
and common sense) to the expense of the exploration of encounters (a passion
to think). Art should remain the interrupter of reality, able to create feelings
that get into our flesh and nervous systems.

Pilgrimage within matter

In conclusion, this article demonstrated how Castellucci’s theatre of signs
confronts something bigger than “me,” which escapes. The sign is the cause of
problems; that is to say, it is the cause of a discordant exercise of our faculties,
of an exploration of Ideas, of an arousal of thought. The theatre of signs is a
theatre linked to matter and fear within matter, where the implementation of
thought takes place materially.
To achieve this, Castellucci questions the extent to which I genuinely cannot
see without being seen in return, why that which is worth being represented
is always the unrepresentable; ultimately, by means of art, he addresses the
main philosophical problem Deleuze was obsessed with: the sensory origin of
thought. “A sign envelops another ‘object’ within the limits of the object which
bears it, and incarnates a natural or spiritual power (an Idea)” (Deleuze 1994,
22–23). Thus, it is with the sign that we assist the aberrant nuptials of pure mater­
ialism and the most perfect spiritualism. Even if the body is being addressed,
the mind is affected, making it necessary to penetrate the image, to search for
the secret of its assemblage. This theatre is made for the nervous system, not
for the consciousness, and yet every image is a wake-up call. Castellucci redis-
covers the most basic, non-intellectual form of communication, which is linked
to the nervous system, passes directly through sensation, and directly touches
the mind. Directly means it is outside all representation, without interposition;
that it substitutes direct signs for mediate representations.10
“Go Down, Moses”: this title of a Castellucci production is also an imperative
made to the prophet by God. Onstage, a line of visions: blood, a loud turbine,
boring policemen, a medical scanner, a prehistoric cavern, and, finally—like
a reminder about our destiny—written on the barely noticeable translucent
screen that has been separating the audience from the stage, these simple
words: “Save our Souls.” It is as if a spell was cast upon time. In The Dream of a
Ridiculous Man, Dostoevsky (1995, 112) wrote, “When she was tugging and call-
ing out to me, a certain question had crossed my mind and I had been unable
to answer it.” The feeling viewers get from this riddle, coming to themselves
after such a performance, is that our destinies will be decided later, in an unsaid
third time.

9 Etymologically, the skandalon is a stumbling block or the trigger of a trap, here a trap of time and a trap
of the gods.
10 On this immediacy, see Deleuze (1994, 8).

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 Journey into the Unknown

References
Castellucci, Claudia, Romeo Castellucci, Heidegger, Martin. 2013. “The Provenance
Chiara Guidi, Joe Kelleher, and Nicholas of Art and the Destination of Thought
Ridout. 2007. The Theatre of Socìetas (1967).” Translated by Dimitrios Latsis
Raffaello Sanzio. London: Routledge. with Ullrich Haase. Journal of the British
Castellucci, Romeo. 2007. “Entries from Society for Phenomenology 44 (2), 119–28.
a Notebook of Romeo Castellucci.” In First published 1983 as “Die Herkunft
Castellucci et al. 2007, 261–69. der Kunst und die Bestimmung des
———. 2014. Programme for Schwanengesang Denkens (Vortrag in der Akademie der
D.744. Théâtre Royal de La Monnaie. Wissenschaften und Künste in Athen
———. 2015. Programme for The Parthenon 4. April 1967)” in Distanz und Nähe:
Metopes. Art Basel. Reflexionen und Analysen zer Kunst der
Châtelet, François. 1962. La naissance de Gegenwart, edited by Petra Jaeger and
l’histoire: La formation de la pensée historienne Rudolf Lüthe (Würzburg: Königshausen +
en Grèce. 2 vols. Paris: Minuit. Neumann), 11–22, and in Denkerfahrungen:
Colli, Giorgio, ed. 2005. La sapienza greca, 1910–1976, edited by Hermann Heidegger
I: Dioniso, Apollo, Eleusi, Orfeo, Museo, (Frankfurt: Klostermann), 135–52.
Iperborei, Enigma. 4th ed. Milan: Adelphi Manetti, Giovanni. 1993. Theories of the Sign in
Edizioni. Classical Antiquity. Translated by Christine
Deleuze, Gilles. (1972) 2000. Proust and Richardson. Bloomington: Indiana
Signs. Translated by Richard Howard. University Press. First published 1987
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota as Le teorie del desgno nell’antichita classica
Press. First published 1964 as Proust et (Milan: Bompiani).
les signes (Paris: Presses universitaires de Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2006. Thus Spoke
France). Translation first published (1972 Zarathustra: A Book for All and None.
New York: G. Braziller). Edited by Adrian del Caro and Robert B.
———. 1984. “Gilles Deleuze vérité et temps Pippin. Translated by Adrian del Caro.
cours 55 du 07/02/1987.” La voix de Gilles Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Deleuze en ligne. Accessed 7 July 2017. First published 1883–91 as Also sprach
http://www2.univ-paris8.fr/deleuze/ Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen
article.php3?id_article=330. (Chemnitz: Ernst Schmeitzner; Leipzig:
———. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Fritzsch).
Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Patrick, George Thomas White. 1889. The
Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Fragments of the Work of Heraclitus of
Minnesota Press. First published 1985 as Ephesus on Nature. Baltimore: N. Murray.
Cinéma 2: L’image-temps (Paris: Minuit). Rosselet, François, “La lecture des signes et
———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. l’émergence du sens.” InfoKara 19: 41.
Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Vernant, Jean-Pierre, and Pierre Vidal-
Columbia University Press. First Naquet. 1988. Myth and Tragedy in Ancient
published 1968 as Différence et répétition Greece. Translated by Janet Lloyd. New
(Paris: Presses universitaires de France). York: Zone Books. First published in part
Didi-Huberman, Georges. 1992. Ce que nous as Mythe et tragédie en Grèce ancienne (Paris:
voyons, ce qui nous regarde. Paris: Minuit. Maspero, 1972) and in part as Mythe et
Diels, Hermann. 1903. Die Fragmente der tragédie en Grèce ancienne 2 (Paris: Éditions
Vorsokratiker. Berlin: Weidmannsche La Découverte, 1986).
Buchhandlung. Zourabichvili, François. 1997. “Qu’est-ce
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 1995. “The Dream of a qu’un devenir, pour Gilles Deleuze?”
Ridiculous Man.” In A Gentle Creature and Lecture given on 27 March 1997. Accessed
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 From Schizoproduction
to Non-standard
Artistic Research
Tero Nauha
Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies

Introduction
Operating within a framework of artistic research, this chapter departs from
schizoanalysis towards an alignment with the non-standard philosophy of
François Laruelle. My aim is to articulate this alignment through an explo-
ration of performance art as artistic research. The chapter investigates how
practice in the world, which is determined in the last instance of economy,
may be regarded differently if the last instance is replaced by the Real, which
would rebuke events in the world not through economic relations but through
the Real being something unilaterally foreclosed from human thought. This
notion of the “last instance” was developed by Louis Althusser (2005, 112–13),
from the expression by Friedrich Engels, as the determining force of capital-
ist economy. However, for Laruelle, determination-in-the-last-instance is the
Real where “everything philosophy claims to master is in-the-last-instance
thinkable from the One-Real” (Smith 2010, xvi). The determination-in-the-last-
instance is an “identity without difference, and without synthesis but not without
transcendental priority or duality, of philosophy and of science for example—
not against all their possible relations, but against the unitary spirit of phil-
osophical and epistemological hierarchy in these relations” (Laruelle 2013a,
23–24). Practice determined in the last instance of the Real would be radically
immanent, where practice would not be about the Real but only from the Real.
I propose a shift in performative thinking, by which practice in the world is
regarded through “fictioning,” in contrast to “fiction,” which always resembles
the real. Through abstractions of creating “conditions for thought,” philoso-
phers always return to the world, which is their “proper gesture” of thought;
likewise, fiction has the same relation with the world. However, fictioning does
not return to the world but remains abstract and in a strict sense does not
exist. The fictioning is radically futuristic in that it “is not in motion, the radical
future is a-temporal” (Laruelle 2015a, 111). In a radical sense, fictioning is not an
intellectual act, but may appear in the world only through cloning, which takes
place in these discursive acts. It is axiomatic and abstract.
From the standpoint of late capitalism, and situated within the context of
schizoanalysis, a body is regarded as potentiality. In contrast to this, a body
considered as radical immanence does not “perform.” The proposition for

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 From Schizoproduction to Non-standard Artistic Research

non-standard performance is an inquiry into the possibility of practice, which

regards agencies and objects as indeterminate mattering that are not limited
to the apparatus of economies. It is an experimental practice that begins from
schizoanalysis, as presented in my doctoral research (Nauha 2016). This prac-
tice emerges as an experiment on the limits of thought. The schizoanalytic ges-
tures of thought are determined in the last instance by economy. In applying
non-standard thought my aim is to develop performance as research towards
a practice that is not about the Real as radical immanence but is a practice from
the Real or a practice as an effect of the Real.

Schizoanalysis determined by the economy

Schizoanalysis reflected on how the assemblages were affected by psychologic­al,
social, and environmental fields. Alongside Jean Oury (head of the La Borde
institute), Félix Guattari developed his semiotic and theoretical understand-
ings of schizoanalysis in various publications. Schizoanalytic Cartographies (2013)
offers the most elaborate picture of Guattari’s “metamodel.” Mental illness is
an expression of an arrangement of various machinic disjunctions and conjunc-
tions. Institutional psychotherapy is an analysis of the productions of and link-
ages among mental, social, political, affective, and environmental expressions.
In short, the world is not regarded as a construction, but rather as an expression
of productions. These productions constitute the world through machinic sep-
aration from flux, in relation to a universe of reference as virtual values.
Schizoanalysis is not clinical psychotherapy as “science,” but rather a form of
production, a machinic apparatus itself. Schizoanalysis focuses on the “articu-
lation of collective speech” or “enunciation,” which makes possible the produc-
tion of subjectivity within particular apparatuses (Holmes 2006, 421; Guattari
1984, 43; 1995, 8–9). Collective speech produces subjugated groups with fixed
refrains. Alternatively, it may find new “lines of flight,” or “escape,” to allow the
group to become a collective of subjects. This articulation of collective speech
is machinic production (Guattari 1995, 9). Instead of drives, schizoanalysis
speaks by way of machines, flux instead of libido, territory instead of self, uni-
verses of reference instead of complexes or sublimation. To this end, Guattari
(ibid., 126) writes, “conceptual tools open and close fields of the possible, they
catalyse Universes of virtuality.”
There are already books on schizoanalysis as practice and theory, notably the
series edited by Ian Buchanan (Buchanan and MacCormack 2008; Buchanan
and Collins, 2014; Buchanan, Matts, and Tynan 2015); but for my specific inter-
est the writings of Simon O’Sullivan (2012, 2015) have been particularly useful.
Another significant line of thought has been the practice of the Brazilian the-
atre ensemble Ueinzz, and Peter Pál Pelbart’s (2014) work with it. My point of
interest lies in the path towards the schizoanalysis of practice and production
in the context of neo-liberal capitalism. However, my departure from schizo­
analysis toward the articulation of non-standard performance is located in the
processuality of artistic practice; yet, I have still approached schizoanalysis as
being bound with the economies of the world, a life determined by economy.

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In the apparatus1 of late capitalism, the management of collaborative capaci­

ties and processual production are central. In my doctoral research, this appar­
atus is named “immanent capitalism” or “schizoproduction,” which signifies
how practice is a production of knowledge from heterogeneous matter through
mutation and modulation. However, this production is never fully actualised,
and immanent capitalism is rather a schizophrenic immanence of distributed
processes. Schizoproduction is capitalism turned into immanent capitalism
through a gesture of thought, where capitalism has become a philosophy of life
in that it has a firm belief within a sufficient thought about whatever capitalism
encounters in the world (Smith 2016, 30). If the network is where the general
intellect is put into relation with value production, then in schizoproduction
these relations are turned into positions of the world. This apparatus of schizo­
production, however, is not fixed, but perpetually open to rearrangements,
entanglements, and diffractions in positions (Nauha 2017).
My purpose in naming the apparatus immanent is to express the position­ality
of such an apparatus, where immanence is posited as such—in a gesture of
thought. Late capitalism is an immanent production of the world in a gesture
of thought.
Schizoanalysis regards late capitalism and its functionality as a form of pro-
duction without a necessity of meanings. In other words, it manages the con-
ditions and relations, where meanings may appear only when needed. The
management is digital. In late capitalism, where “techno-capitalism” is digi-
tal, there is the capacity to distinguish, differentiate, and separate. The digital
creates relations so that things may be productive, yet remain without mean-
ing. For Deleuze and Guattari, the production is correlated with signification
and collective assemblages are correlated with machinic a‑signification. This
occurs through a-signifying semiotics, which frees the desiring-production of the
collective assemblage; that is to say, abstract machines act in conjunction with
intensities without signification (Genosko 2002, 170). The desiring machine
is the function of immanent capitalism, where the expression of this machine
working is desire. The desiring machine is not a shattered or fragmented
entity, but creates chains with other forces, intensities, and weights (Deleuze
and Guattari [1977] 2003, 326). In the same way, the digital is management not
through signifying language but through axiomatic components.
The administration does not search for meaning. It is the “skill” of acquiring
wealth rather than knowledge. It involves maintaining properties and posses-
sions, and it employs a skill of digital decisionality.2 Immanent capitalism has
no purpose other than to produce conjunctions, disjunctions, and relations.

1 Here, I refer to “apparatus” as used by Guattari, where it is specifically collective religious, cultural,
economic, and aesthetic apparatuses of power and knowledge (Guattari 2013, 2–7). The term “inte-
grated world capitalism,” “which means to allow only those modes of expression and valorization that
it can normalize and put into its service to subsist on this planet,” would also be apt in this case (ibid.,
49). Guattari’s meaning can also be connected with the concept of “apparatus” as defined by Michel
Foucault, and more recently formulated by Karen Barad.
2 From Latin digitus, finger or toe. More importantly, digital is riven, like a channel between two banks of
the river (Galloway 2014, 54).

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The apparatus has a skill, a function, which posits the world as immanence
in a gesture of thought. However, thought needs to be seen as the act of deci-
sion, or cutting off, which is implicit in every reflective operation. That is to
say, capital forms of thought are operations at the most general level—hence
the arguments for cognitive capitalism’s connection with “general intellect.”
Cognitive capitalism is an apparatus of capture that aims to collect and man-
age processes. Collaborative capacities become central to industrial, affective,
and immaterial labour. Paolo Virno (2004, 261) writes how “general intellect
manifests itself without being incarnated into machines or products as living
labour, communication, self-reflection, thinking, competition and diversion.”
The production takes place in between, in the relation formed through co­-
operation between brains, and it is valid only when it is performed and shared
(Marazzi 2011, 57; Pasquinelli 2008, 97). The production is not the production
of “honey,” but the administration of the “act of pollination” (Moulier Boutang
2011, 189). Immanent capitalism administers, as a discursive apparatus that
constrains how meaning is distilled from relations, without a need for signi-
fying or implementing linguistic acts. Schizoproduction performs these rela-
tions through modulations or entanglements.

The decisional performances

The capturing of life is a process based on relation, co-operation, and capacity.
The artist—specifically in the case of this chapter, the performance artist—is a
function or producer of relation-as-commodity (Marazzi 2011, 81). Within this
apparatus, practice is predominately ruled by decisional operations of reflec-
tion, withdrawal, and reduction. However, since such operations function as
the processes of capturing a life as event, then the following schizoproduction
aims to axiomatise this process.
The apparatus supports discourses in a system of relations and, as such,
the apparatuses are translatable to other discourses (Foucault 1980, 194–95).
However, in the recent reformulation of the Foucauldian apparatus, Karen
Barad (2007, 128) regards the apparatus itself as a practice, or “intra-action,”
where divisions are constituted and where “measurements do not entail an
interaction between separate entities; rather, determinate entities emerge from
their intra-action.” The phenomena do not interact; however, in intra-action
phenomena remain indeterminate, as both “wave and particle.” The phenom-
ena and apparatuses of production are inseparable, they are “(re)configurings
of the world” (Barad 2003, 822). In the context presented here, the differential
or digital boundaries of immanent capitalism are dynamically reconfigured.
They don’t constitute an outside limit; there are no fixed boundaries. The “cut”
of the real remains indeterminate (ibid., 827; Kolozova 2014).

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 Tero Nauha

Instead of reflection or differential positioning, we regard the apparatus

through superposition and diffraction, where phenomena do not mix or leave
traces.3 Donna Haraway ([1992] 2004, 70) writes how diffraction does not map
differences but the effects of difference. From the standpoint of immanent cap-
italism, the apparatus functions as “speculative” and reflective, whereas super-
position is a mutating intra-action of the phenomena. Thus, we may regard
performances as complementary phenomena and not as a mixture of heteroge-
neous elements—a performance, where thought and matter intra-act. In other
words, gestures of thought do not mix with rendering, posture, and cloning,
but intra-act, where “waves” do not mix with “particles.” The performance does
not resemble the real, but it is a function of the real (Laruelle 2013a, 30). The
mixture and intra-action leave different traces (Barad 2007, 265).
Decision is implicit in reason and reflection, and it is essential for philoso­
phy, and for other gestures of thought also (Brassier 2001, 72). The decision
is a process, where reason penetrates behind appearances and transcends the
world. The decision is the apparatus of capture, where the world is produced
in a gesture of thought riven into differentials. The world is discursivity itself; it
is the world of interactions, relations, and positionality. The world is the econ-
omy, or, in the non-philosophical thought of Laruelle, it is determined-in-the-
last-instance of the economic (Laruelle 2015b, 41–43), where artist and artistic
practice receive function and meaning. It is in the world where the artist comes
into being (Bolt 2008).
I prepared for my performance at the DARE 2015 conference—“Schizo-
production and Artistic Research” given at the De Bijloke Rotonde on 10
November 2015—in the following way: The lecture was first read and recorded,
before being edited and pressed onto two vinyl records. These records were
played in the performance from two DJ turntables, where I scratched, slid, stut-
tered, repeated, and altered the pitch of the voice on the record. These records
were mixed with my live voice, which read the same text as was heard from
the records. The materiality of sound was central to this experiment. Sound
was created via the material track pressed into the acetate, over which a sty-
lus moved around. The experiment is material. At the same time, it intrigued
the audience in the same way that a performance involving a ventriloquist or
Mesmerian magnetism would. The “quack” nature of such a performance is
superpositioned with the conceptual gestures. The gesture of a performance,
similar to that of a magnetist is an act of exploitation, not a joke but a jest or
get. The performance is not only a conceptual framing but also a fictioning4 as
an enactment of the between. The artistic practice is not fiction, but rather an
indefinite fictioning; that is, it is not a narrative way of telling the same thing

3 “Under one set of circumstances, electrons behave like particles, and under another they behave like
waves” (Barad 2007, 29). “Bohr resolves the wave-particle duality paradox as follows: ‘wave’ and ‘particle’
are classical concepts (that are given determinate meanings by different, indeed mutually exclusive,
apparatuses and) that refer to different, mutually exclusive phenomena, not to independent physical
objects” (ibid., 120–21).
4 “The fictionale ‘presupposes’ the real in a non-thetic way and conditions it without ever positing it or
inscribing it in Being or the World. The Universe is on the hither side of the World or totally exceeds it”
(Laruelle 2013b, 232).

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 From Schizoproduction to Non-standard Artistic Research

differently. The idea of fictioning was evoked from the term fictionale, or philo-
fiction, coined by Laruelle, which does not position the real, but acts from the
real. In fictioning, facts and stories do not mix; but it is a practice with a super-
position. Fictioning is not a collection of things, administered by sufficient
reason; it is from the Real rather than being about the real. Performance as fic-
tioning is not a liminal state, but an enactment of the between. It is a form of
thought on the delivery, at the advent of thought. Fictioning is indeterminate,
which is where it differs from uncertainty. It does not function through resem-
blance, analogue, or similarity. Fictioning is superposition with the gestures of
thought, which function as “measurements” and which in turn function as dis-
positions for the particular questions. Fictioning is an indeterminate posture,
whereas gestures of thought measure knowledge. Positions change, whereas
postures mutate (Laruelle 2013a, 42); positions are transcendental, while pos-
tures are immanent and generic. The decision is a dislocation and withdrawal
into a position. In his non-standard thought, Laruelle calls posture a generic,
a priori dimension of man, whereas a position is founded on a decision of suf-
ficient reason. Posture is “immanence before all decision” (Laruelle quoted in Ó
Maoilearca 2015, 156).

Fictioning a body
An artist philosophising operates a decision; it is a positional form of thought.
Philosophising in artistic practice is a reflective apparatus of capture. Simple
heretical practice would be an anarchic conjunction with the hegemony of
philosophy—that is, a heretical relation and something to propose about
the Real. However, the real need not be mixed with the reality or the world.
It is completely indifferent to thought. In other words, the real is completely
opaque. How, then, would artistic practice be in unilateral relation, or from
the real? Towards this, Laruelle argues for the cloning of the performative
of non-philosophy as a radical heresy, which in Laruelle’s argument signi-
fies heresy without reason or relation. In a certain sense, practice is thought
which is “a force-(of)-thought, real through its cause, transcendental through
its essence” (Laruelle 2013b, 110), where the determination-in-the-last-
instance is the Real, and not the economic. The force-(of)-thought is the “tran-
scendental essence of the [One]” (ibid., 123). The Real manifests through the
force-(of)-thought. In this sense, “the real order and the order of knowledge
are identical, not opposed or circular but identical in-the-last-instance only:
knowledge does not determine the Real but the real order determines-in-the-
last-instance the order of knowledge” (ibid., 125). It has only a unilateral rela-
tion. The Real as “radical” immanence has no expression in thought, only as
cloning.
The cloning of the Real, performance as from the real, has no relation with
the Real, but only with indifferential non-relation. This is the radical heresy
of such a practice. The apparatus of immanent capitalism produces a relation
with such a heresy only in the form of sectarianism or from an agonistic posi-
tion. Heretics are dragged into the world over hot coals, forced to look for a

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line of escape as “outsider artists.” The heretical outsider appears in the world
of decisions and positions in relation to this.
Nevertheless, in the process of cloning in force-(of)-thought, performative
practice flattens such an apparatus.5 It flattens out the exclusive positions of
philosophy and aesthetics. A force-(of)-thought is an effect of the Real, though
it does not unilaterally affect the real. Radical heresy does not reflect the world
or escape into the hinterlands of the world; rather, this heresy is a flattening
or cloning practice of the world. Practice is flattening as fictioning; it is an
opaque practice. It may be a paradoxical device since it aims to regard life as
“wave-and-particle”: real, not-real, and not-not-real—a “restored behaviour,”
where performance is not a veridical act of the real, nor does it exist as a copy of
the real (Schechner 1985, 35–37). Performance has a radical equality of fiction-
ing all representations, relations, or agents.
I think about a body; I speculate and reflect on this body. A body operates in
the world. Thinking is matter, but thinking is a malignant growth upon matter.
I perform this growth on transcendental and metaphysical figures of the body.
A body is an opaque and radical mattering, a flattening of thought, the advent
of thought. A body is not active, as is the Real, but it is thoroughly passive in
the task of the performative, “it is exerted without remainder and thoroughly
manifested as its operation (of description): it is what it does, it does what it
says by saying it” (Laruelle 2013b, 168). The world is active with bodies, but still
only as functions of the apparatus, a mélange of positions. An opaque body is
a full body without light—not even a metaphysical illumination. A body is not
a void or pure nothingness, but is indeterminate to the apparatus of the world.
Non-philosophy’s view of the body is not a new position or an alternative—a
new gesture of thought or apparatus of capture.
A body is opaque and indifferent to my positions, relations, processes, and
collaborations. The positions, relations, processes, and collaborations are
flattened in the force-(of)-thought. Performance does not reflect on the Real
or the body. It is an entangled performance determined-in-the-last-instance
by the Real. Performance does not translate economy, philosophy, or art into
reflective representations. Rather, it clones thought in performance. A thought
is a thing, and not a representation. It does not aim for positions of thought,
or for any exclusive interpretations or reflections of reality (Ó Maoilearca 2015,
21). Everything thinks, but there are no positional gestures of thought. Only
superpositions remain, where “even the hallucinations or fictions of philoso-
phy are real” (ibid., 140). The non-standard performance on the one hand is
a generation of thought as indeterminate fictioning and not mere analysis or
representation of the world, which in my argument has a relation with schizoa-
nalysis; and then, on the other hand, performance as fictioning is a thought on
delivery—an advent of thought.

5
Laruelle’s term is distinguished from labour power and from the proletariat subject, just as the
unaliean­able is from the Real. It is flattened thought determined in the last instance of the Real,
and not the economy. This in turn leads Laruelle to propose the more radical concept of the Stranger,
instead of the proletariat (Laruelle 2015b, 45–60).

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 From Schizoproduction to Non-standard Artistic Research

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 Deleuze and Perversion
Catarina Pombo Nabais
Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT),
Centre for Philosophy of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (CFCUL)

The question of perversion in literature was highly important to twenti-

eth-century French philosophy. Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, Maurice
Blanchot, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes all recognised in the art of writ-
ing a privileged access to the universe of the problematisation of sex as pleasure
mixed with suffering. But in all these authors—in Bataille’s La Littérature et le
Mal or L’Érotisme, in Klossowski’s Sade, Mon Prochain, in Blanchot’s Leautréamont
et Sade, or lately in Foucault’s “Sade, sergent du sexe,” or even in Barthes’s Sade,
Fourrier, Loyola—perverse pleasure, as the model of the pleasure of the text and
as an instrument of entering the nature of literary fiction, is always approached
from the Marquis de Sade’s1 point of view.
Deleuze was the first to take Leopold von Sacher-Masoch as a starting point.
It was not a question of being against the dominant trend.2 Arguably one of
Deleuze’s most significant contributions to our understanding of the relation-
ship between literature and perversion derives from his understanding of that
relationship as being mainly a masochistic experience of denegation (dénéga-
tion) and suspension. But most surprising is that Coldness and Cruelty seems
to contain Deleuze’s most classical approach to the issue of literature. Right
from the start, the text researches the nature and the role of fiction. Sade and
Masoch are analysed as examples of what Deleuze calls “literary efficiency.”3
The erotic functions of language—negation in Sade, denial and suspense in
Masoch—and the narrative elements of institution and contract both derive
from the interior of an attempt to think about the violence that the erotic novel
inflicts upon thought.4
Sade’s and Masoch’s literary efficiency is shown by their ability to draw up
the clinical signs of universal perversions. According to Deleuze, to understand
the originality of Masoch, one needs to return to a point outside the clinical
where, for a long time, he has been misunderstood. If it is possible to underline

1 Deleuze pays great attention to the analysis of Sade’s work made by Bataille, Klossowski, and Blanchot
(see Deleuze [1971] 1991, 17, 39, 59, 63n16, 72, 119).
2 As Deleuze ([1971] 1991, 133) writes, “This is why it is necessary to read Masoch. His work has suffered
from unfair neglect, when we consider that Sade has been the object of such penetrating studies both in
the field of literary criticism and in that of psychoanalytic interpretation, to the benefit of both.”
3 “Coldness and Cruelty opens up with a Sartrean question: ‘What uses are there for literature?’ We must
take it at its word. Literature is useful for something; it has positivity, an illuminating force—it produces
something. In this text from 1967 Deleuze already takes a very strong position in favor of a function-
alism of writing, which stringently rejects the principle of literature as autonomous, or an enclosure
of the text. Art is not its ultimate goal, and it is useful for something, not itself, and not for nothing”
(Sauvagnargues 2013, 32).
4 As Ronald Bogue (2003, 15) explains, among Deleuze’s programme of the critical and the clinical, “liter-
ary critique is less his concern than is literary creation, which he treats as a mode of thought.”

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 Catarina Pombo Nabais

some of the literary effects of perversion from the work of Sade and Masoch, it
is because, first, they were writers, because they knew how to describe perver-
sion in an artistic and original way. In both Sade and Masoch, the relationship
between critical and clinical matter becomes very clear, almost transparent.
Their literary works express the force of two different types of sexuality, two
sets of signs or symptoms, which, according to Deleuze, medicine has misun-
derstood. Psychiatry considers these two types of sexual perversion—sadism
and masochism—as a unique syndrome, that is, as a sadomasochistic unity. “It
has been stated so often that sadism and masochism are found in the same per-
son that we have come to believe it. We need to return to the beginning and
read Sade and Masoch. Because the judgment of the clinician is prejudiced,
we must take an entirely different approach, the literary approach, since it is
from literature that stem the original definitions of sadism and masochism”
(Deleuze [1971] 1991, 14). Therefore, one must return to the point at which the
names led to the classification of an illness. One must challenge the medical
assumption that, according to Deleuze, has haunted these two separate modes
of sexuality. One must also reverse the presupposition that there is a sadomaso­
chistic unity. Understanding the specificity of masochistic and sadistic signs
means understanding that they designate symptoms and not syndromes—that
is, a perversion and not a disease.
Literary effectiveness as a critical problem concerns the clinical problem
of the phantasm doubling the world. However, this fictional process of the
maso­chistic writer returns to a broader clinical problem, that of anthropology
as the clinic of civilisation. More than being symptomatologists, more than
the connection of their own names with a set of signs of a perversion—that
is, more than the classification of two perversions—Sade and Masoch were
anthropologists.
Reclaiming Nietzsche’s thesis, Deleuze anticipates Essays Critical and Clinical
and its definition of literature as a matter of health. Coldness and Cruelty is the
first essay in which Deleuze uses one particular writer to consider the clinical
problem as being essential to all artists, in terms not only of literary criticism
but also of minorities. “His work is deeply influenced by the problems of nation-
alities, minority groups and revolutionary movements in the Empire, hence his
Galician, Jewish, Hungarian, Prussian tales, etc.” (Deleuze [1971] 1991, 9).
Sade and Masoch are therefore a laboratory in which we may better see and
understand literature as a matter of symptomatology. According to Deleuze,
through literature Sade and Masoch created new forms of life, new forms of
thinking and feeling.5 In their texts, language gathers meaning, becomes active,
literal, acting directly on the senses and on sensuality, affecting the senses.

5 Referring to “Mystique et Masochism,” an interview Deleuze gave on his essay on masochism, Bogue
stresses that Sade and Masoch are symptomatologists at a neutral point “where artists and philosophers
and physicians and patients can meet one another” (Deleuze quoted in Bogue 2003, 21). At such a “zero
point,” Sade and Masoch construct a very consistent system and “unlike patients . . . [they] articulate
a world in such a way that its forms and structures display their coherence. Like philosophers, they
engage in a mode of thought. . . . Sade and Masoch share with psychoanalysts an interest in perversions,
but it is fiction that should guide psychoanalysis, not the reverse” (Bogue 2003, 21).

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Sadism is the conflict between two levels, a negative one concerning the sec-
ond Nature and the Ego (Moi), and a second one that is the pure negation of
rules as the Idea of the first Nature. However, this first Nature can never be
given because it does not belong to the world of experience. Therefore, it can
only be an object of description or of demonstration. The big problem that
Sade puts forth is whether a pain in the world of experience can rightfully be
repeated to infinity in the world of the first Nature. Sadistic monotony is the
inductive demonstration of this problem—that is, the demonstration of the
possibility of personal pain being repeated in the sphere of the impersonal.
This demonstration is due both to acceleration and to the condensation of
movements of partial violence. Sadists live the absolute negation of the world.
They create a division between an original Nature that corresponds to their
requirements—that is, a Nature of pure negation as a reason’s idea—and a sec-
ond Nature where the negative replaces negation and arises as the opposite of
positivity and as a partial process of destruction. Sadists live in the gap between
these two Natures. They are permanently frustrated because they always con-
front themselves with the fact that the Nature they idealise is never found in
experience, and also with the fact that cultural Nature is less painful and less
cruel than the original one. “Hence the rage and despair of the sadistic hero
when he realizes how paltry his own crimes are in relation to the idea which
he can only reach through the omnipotence of reasoning. . . . The task of the
libertine is to bridge the gulf between the two elements, the element at his
actual disposal and the element in his mind, the derivative and the original, the
personal and the impersonal” (Deleuze [1971] 1991, 28).
Libertines create a system for knowing whether and how a pain in the second
Nature can be reproduced to infinity in the first Nature. This system requires
two procedures. On the one hand, acceleration or precipitation, which is the
multiplication and the continuing reproduction of victims and their pain. Sade
built a detailed mapping of perversions, of pain, and of victims, which must
be carefully observed.6 On the other hand, condensation or accumulation is
the requirement of the coldness of violence—that is, the requirement of a
rational, total, impersonal, amotivational violence that does not deviate from
any pleasure that would lead it to the second Nature. Sadistic violence derives
from the annulment of the second Nature, of the sentimental Me who only

6 As Chantal Thomas explains, “Six hundred passions, which in the ‘language of libertinage’ means six
hundred sexual manias, are thus listed and described according to the increasing degree of com-
plexity and the crossing of normative barriers. Between the beginning of November and the end of
February, the ‘quadrumvirate’ of gentlemen should have heard all there is to know about fornication
in the secret of alcoves. . . . For its declared concern for exhaustiveness and the classification on which
the storyteller’s narratives are based, One Hundred Days of Sodom has been considered a precursor of
Krafft-Ebing’s nineteenth-century sexology” (Thomas 1994, 116–17, my translation; six cents passions,
c’est-à-dire en “langue de libertinage” six cents manies sexuelles, sont ainsi répertoriées et décrites
selon une gradation qui va dans le sens d’une plus grande complexité et du franchissement de toutes
les barrières normatives. Entre le début du mois de novembre et la fin du mois de février, le “quatrium-
virat” des messieurs devrait avoir tout entendu sur ce qui se fornique dans le secret des alcôves. . . . Par
son souci déclaré d’exhaustivité et par l’énumération du catalogue sur laquelle s’alignent les narrations
des “historiennes,” on a pu voir dans Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome un texte précurseur des travaux de
sexologie de Krafft-Ebing, au XIXe siècle).

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knows violence within its limit of sensorial partiality. Extending, accelerating,

and condensing the partial pain in the second Nature is thoroughly descriptive.
Sadistic violence is a rational act, from which derives the pleasure of an almost
mathematical demonstration of repetition in the first Nature.
Repetition in Masoch is different. It is no longer the negation of the world
as second Nature and the infinite setting of pain in an original Nature, but the
denial of the world; that is to say, its suspension in an ideal phantasmé, the world
as phantasm. Denial is the operation that does not negate, nor even destroy,
any dimension of the experience but rather contests the solid foundations of
the state of affairs, of what exists. The centre of the denial is the woman’s fake
castration. In a first moment, masochists say that the woman does not miss a
penis; so they can produce the fetish, the image, or the substitute of a feminine
phallus in a second moment. Thus, fetish belongs essentially to masochism. It
transforms the woman, to whom the masochist denies the absence of a penis,
as an instance of protective and idealising neutralisation. The fetish constitutes
itself as an autonomous object. It is not a question of negating or destroying
the world, but of idealising it as a dream, as a phantasm to which the Ideal is
itself returned to. Denial leads to the suspension of the movement of desire
in order to transfer it into phantasm, into an idealised world that condenses
frozen postures, photographic scenes, in an eternal repetition. “The aesthetic
and dramatic suspense of Masoch contrasts with the mechanical, cumulative
repetition of Sade” (Deleuze [1971] 1991, 34). Sadistic repetition is an accel-
erant, but masochistic repetition suspends. It suspends the real to fix it into
the phantasm. It is a repetition that refers to the imagination since it repeats a
denial based on an ideal of the imagination. “[The masochist] does not believe
in negating or destroying the world nor in idealizing it: what he does is to dis-
avow and thus to suspend it by denying it, in order to secure an ideal which is
itself suspended in the fantasy [phantasm]. He questions the validity of existing
reality in order to create a pure ideal reality” (ibid., 32–33, my translations in
italic). The masochist denies the real world to fix himself in an ideal of his imag-
ination, itself frozen and embodied in the phantasm. Masochism is then a pure
contemplation, a mystic contemplation of the real. This is why masochistic rep-
etition is a process of an infinite deferral of the ideal, of the phantasm, of pleas-
ure. Pain is repeated so that the result will fail, thus suspending the moment
of pleasure. “The masochistic process of disavowal [denial] is so extensive that
it affects sexual pleasure itself; pleasure is postponed for as long as possible
and is thus disavowed [denied]. The masochist is therefore able to deny the real-
ity of pleasure at the very point of experiencing it, to identify himself with the
‘new sexless man’” (Deleuze [1971] 1991, 33, my translations in italic). Hence,
the importance masochism attributes to rites of suffering with real physical
suspensions and to the frozen poses of the executioner woman who appears as
a statue, a portrait, or a photo. “Repetition does occur in masochism, but it is
totally different from sadistic repetition: in Sade it is a function of acceleration
and condensation and in Masoch it is characterized by the ‘frozen’ quality and
the suspense” (ibid., 34).

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In relation to Sade and Masoch, Deleuze describes the novel as a perverse

case. Deleuze wants to explain the act by which language exceeds itself, reflect-
ing a body of desire to constitute, with words, another body, a glorious body
full of new pleasures for pure spirits. This is the descriptive act of the flesh and
of its transgression, but a transgression of language by language. According to
Deleuze, the perverse device in literature merges with the movement of fic-
tional production itself. It is a fiction of the double, of the reiteration of facts,
but as their impossible and excessive archive. This fiction directly affects sen-
suality. It seeks to “spiritualise” it, to make it a pure effect of language. Sade
and Masoch confabulate worlds, as does all literature, but their’s are impossi-
ble, darker, or more glorious worlds. They make detailed descriptions of these
worlds, but as that world’s excessive double. “With Sade and Masoch the func-
tion of literature is not to describe the world, since this has already been done,
but to define a counterpart of the world capable of containing its violence and
excesses. . . . Similarly the words of this literature create a counter-language
which has a direct impact on the senses” (Deleuze [1971] 1991, 37).
The fundamental structure of this fictional other world, which meets the vio-
lence of the first world and makes it act on the senses, must be found in the
doubling device, in the production process of a perverse double of the world.
This double is what Deleuze, in agreement with the psychoanalytic tradition,
calls the “phantasm.” It is the concept of the phantasm that occupies the centre
of Deleuze’s reading. In sadism, the phantasm is obtained by the process of
negating laws; in masochism, it is obtained by the process of the denial of the
pleasure object and of the suspension of desire that leads to moving towards
this strange being, this simultaneously impossible and absolutely real object.
With Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze rebuilds psychiatry’s vision of the pleasure
in suffering phenomenon, which it had held since Richard von Krafft-Ebing
and Sigmund Freud. Yet Deleuze also offers a new understanding of some of
the most fundamental features of masochism. Four such aspects outline his
contribution.
The first of these aspects is the refutation of the sadomasochistic complex as
a unit. Sadism and masochism must be distinguished. One who suffers sadistic
torture is not a masochist; and one who tortures in a masochistic rite has no
pleasure causing pain. By using the concept of “sado-masochism,” one takes
the complex “pleasure–pain” as a sort of neutral substance common to both
sadism and masochism. The task is therefore to separate this complex from
the inside and to discover two completely different substances or essences:
the essence of masochism and the essence of sadism. In singularising each
of these perversions, Deleuze points out that the pain of those who suffer in
masochistic relationships has a completely different essence from the pain
of those suffering in sadistic relationships. These different essences concern
not only the voluntary or involuntary character of the suffering but also the
kind of relationship that is established between the torturer and the victim.
This relationship cannot be defined either as erogenous or sensual (such as the
relationship pain–pleasure) or as legal or sentimental (such as the relationship
conviction–punishment). It has a purely dramaturgical structure. As Deleuze

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says, “masochism is above all formal and dramatic; this means that its peculiar
pleasure–pain complex is determined by a particular kind of formalism, and its
experience of guilt by a specific story” (Deleuze [1971] 1991, 109).
Deleuze’s essay frequently features this need for clear distinctions, which
range from literary aspects to issues such as the anthropology of desire, the
nature of law, or the metaphysics of the negative. For example, concerning the
role of description in suffering, Deleuze shows the extent to which Sade’s texts
are demonstrative and obscene in themselves, in that they pursue the full expo-
sure of bodies and movements. In Masoch, there is an uncommon decency.
Masochism is not demonstrative but dialectical. Excitement is obtained by
expectation, by waiting, by suspending something always promised but never
realised. This decency explains why “Masoch was not a condemned author but
a fêted and honored one” (Deleuze [1971] 1991, 26).
Furthermore, Deleuze distinguishes between negation as a partial process
and pure negation as a total idea. These two levels of the concept are also pres-
ent in Sade. Sade establishes an opposition between the two Natures—the pri-
mordial and the pure—which are the foundation of life itself, and a second
Nature of the institutions, linked by rules and laws. Sadistic violence is the
process of the negation of the second nature through transgression, through
profanation, to achieve the original and pure Nature. However, this negation
of rules is destruction, the reverse of creation. Here, the negative is a partial
process where disorder is another form of order. The negation as total Idea can
never be completed.
The masochistic operation, on the contrary, is not a negation but a denial
that operates at three levels: (1) the ideal positive denial of the mother, (2)
the annihilative denial of the father, (3) denial of genital sexuality. As Deleuze
draws the line between sadism and masochism, he looks for points of comple-
mentarity. Thus, he is able to show the extent to which these two regimes of
pleasure exhaust the field of perversion. The two essences of the experience
pleasure–pain—that is, the two perversions—reveal the most intimate struc-
tures of the psychic field.
Deleuze’s second contribution to an understanding of perversion concerns
the role of women in masochism. Against the interpretation that consid-
ers all perversion as a symbolic struggle against the father (all perversion is a
father-version, a père-version), Deleuze argues that this privilege of the father’s
image is valid only for sadism. To transfer the paternal and patriarchal theme
into masochism, and to understand the pleasure of the victim as the representa-
tion of the father producing pain—believing that the masochist puts himself in
the place of the father and robs him of his masculine puissance, and, fearing to
be punished, renounces his active principle of taking the mother’s place and
then offering himself to his father and to his violence—is to remain locked in
the preconception of a sadomasochistic unit.7 According to Deleuze, the cen-

7 As Deleuze ([1971] 1991, 59) says, “We are again faced with the question whether the belief in the
determinant role of the father in masochism is not simply the result of the preconceived notion of a
sadomasochistic entity.”

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tral figure in masochism is that of the mother. The father is very present, but he
is to be annulled, ridiculed. “The masochist feels guilty, he asks to be beaten, he
expiates, but why and for what crime? Is it not precisely the father-image in him
that is thus miniaturized, beaten, ridiculed and humiliated? What the subject
atones for is his resemblance to the father and the father’s likeness in him: the
formula of masochism is the humiliated father. Hence the father is not so much
the beater as the beaten” (Deleuze [1971] 1991, 60–61). Against Theodor Reik,
who saw the violent woman as a disguised father, Deleuze wants to show the
directly matriarchal character in the desire to be beaten and to expiate.
There are three fundamental images of the mother: the uterine mother
(mother of the open spaces); the Œdipian mother (the image of the beloved
mother); and, between the two, the oral mother (the mother from the steppe,
the mother who feeds and provides death). All these images express the same
movement of direct magnification of the mother as the object of love and, as
such, an impossible reality. In masochism, the mother becomes identical to
the law in its impossibility. All the mother’s roles in masochism are the coun-
terpoint of the father’s role in sadism. “There is between sadism and maso-
chism an irreducible dissymmetry: sadism stands for the active negation of the
mother and the inflation of the father (who is placed above the law); maso-
chism proceeds by a twofold disavowal [denial], a positive, idealizing disavowal
[denial] of the mother (who is identified with the law) and an invalidating disa-
vowal [denial] of the father (who is expelled from the symbolic order)” (Deleuze
[1971] 1991, 68, my translation in italic).
The autonomy of the mother’s role in masochism, meaning the autonomy
of masochism as a singular essence, can be seen as the starting point for the
subsequent dissent from the father’s role (and therefore from the Oedipus
trinity) in the structure of desire and, especially, from Lacan and his concept
of the symbolic.8 Without explicitly saying so, it is Lacan whom Deleuze refers
to when he complains about the way psychoanalysis identifies the law with the
“name of the father.”9 Because his analysis of the mother’s role in masochism
allows him to refuse to assign the exclusive role of representation of the law to
the father, Deleuze can propose a new explanation for the emergence of the
symbolic structure.
The third contribution is the new approach to the relationship between
desire and law, and, thus, a new approach to the distinction between real, imag-
inary, and symbolic proposed by Lacan. In Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze never

8 For Lacan, the symbolic function is essentially linked to the paternal function. The law is always the
father’s name. “Even when in fact it is represented by a single person, the paternal function concen-
trates in itself both imaginary and real relations, always more or less inadequate to the symbolic relation
that essentially constitutes it. It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the support of the
symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his person with the figure of the law”
(Lacan 1966, 278, as translated in Lacan 2001, 50).
9 “It is therefore surprising that even the most enlightened psychoanalytic writers link the emergence of a
symbolic order with the ‘name of the father.’ This is surely to cling to the singularly unanalytical concep-
tion of the mother as the representative of nature and the father as sole principle and representative of
culture and law. The masochist experiences the symbolic order as an intermaternal order in which the
mother represents the law under certain prescribed conditions; she generates the symbolism through
which the masochist expresses himself ” (Deleuze [1971] 1991, 63).

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criticises the Kantian conception of these legal issues. Instead, he reproduces

the Freudian interpretation of Kant’s legal and moral formalism, as one could
find in Lacan. According to Freud, the renunciation of instinctive gratification
is neither the product of consciousness nor the consequence of our respect for
the law. On the contrary, consciousness itself was born of this renunciation.
Consciousness inherits the conduct of repressed impulses. In his famous text
“Sade and Kant,” which Deleuze closely follows, Lacan concludes that law is
the same as repressed desire. We desire what law prohibits. And law is the real
object of desire. According to Lacan, this is why for Kant law is a pure form, a
pure experience of respect. Law’s object and the desire’s object are one and the
same, and they remain equally occult. “Which demonstrates,” Lacan says “that
desire is the opposite of the law” (Lacan 1966, 787, my translation; En quoi se
démontre que le désir soit l’envers de la loi).
In masochism, law receives content. Law is intra-maternal. It identifies itself
with the image of the mother, both uterine, oral, and the object of love. Law
occurs not as something to transgress or to desecrate, as in sadism (to achieve
a pure, primitive Nature, beyond norms and institutions), but as something
impossible, untouchable. While impossible, law becomes a producer and
induces desire. But a desire that only exists in the delay, in the suspension of
its own realisation. Deleuze then underlines both expectation and suspense as
characteristics of the masochistic experience. All the ritual scenes of physical
suspension, of crucifixion, of domestication in Masoch’s novels remain incom-
prehensible if they are not connected to the form of suspense, and particularly
with the temporal form, that makes the masochist experience possible: the
postponement, the anticipation, the delay.10 As Deleuze ([1971] 1991, 71) says,
“formally speaking, masochism is a state of waiting; the masochist experiences
waiting in its pure form. . . . It is inevitable that such a form, such a rhythmic
division of time into two streams, should be ‘filled’ by the particular combina-
tion of pleasure and pain. For at the same time as pain fulfills what is expected,
it becomes possible for pleasure to fulfill what is awaited. The masochist waits
for pleasure as something that is bound to be late, and expects pain as the
condition that will finally ensure (both physically and morally) the advent of
pleasure.” Both suspension and waiting have as their object the impossibility
of the mother. At the same time, they take the fetish of the mother-image as
the unique content of the law of this infinite delay. Deleuze opposes the full
law as the frozen image of the impossible mother to the empty law of Lacan.
He opposes the symbolic that produces desire as suspense and waiting to the

10 As Zourabichvili explains, “There is more to ‘aesthetic suspense’ than the idea of making suspense a
novelistic procedure; if after Kant and Schiller, something like an aesthetic field establishes itself, it is
within a gesture of suspense, suspense of interests and passions that create the distance necessary to
contemplate things in their true form or appearance. In Masoch, suspense is literary and always has
the effect of transforming the scene into a painting” (Zourabichvili 2006, 97, my translation; “Suspens
esthétique”: il y a là bien plus que l’idée de faire du suspens un procédé romanesque; car si quelque
chose comme un champ esthétique s’instaure, depuis Kant et Schiller, c’est bien dans un geste de sus-
pension, suspension des intérêts et des passions, qui crée la distance nécessaire à la contemplation des
choses dans leur pure forme ou leur pure apparence. Chez Masoch, c’est une suspension littérale, qui a
toujours pour effet de transformer la scène en tableau pictural).

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symbolic that produces desire as a lack, as a cruel condition of transgression in

the father’s name.
This new concept of law led Deleuze to another opposition between sadism
and masochism: the opposition between institution and contract. Sadism sup-
poses the invention of the institution against the law. Masochism follows the
model of contract and submission. To achieve the denial that transposes reality
into phantasm, the masochist needs to establish a contract with someone who
adopts the function of the executioner, of the torturer. This contract is prior to
or even independent from the law. It presupposes in principle the consent of
both contracting parts, and determines between them a system of reciprocal
rights and duties. It cannot affect a third party, and is valid for a limited time.
The institutions of Sade, on the contrary, determine a long-term state of affairs
that is both involuntary and inalienable. They establish a power or authority
that affects a third party. In masochistic relationships, the contract is the loca-
tion of the constitution of the law, while institutions that were built against
the law and are made to transgress it make the law unnecessary. Deleuze can
then present sadism and masochism as two complementary modes of the rela-
tionship with the law. Sadistic heroes subvert the law through irony. They seek
something beyond the law—the institution, Nature. Sadism is the search for
a transcendent principle—the anarchy or the idea of an absolute daemon.
On the contrary, masochism is a descendant movement that goes from law to
its consequences, from phantasm to waiting and suspension. The sadistic is
ironic; the masochistic is humorous.
Masochistic suspense is a fusion with the object in its condition of an impos-
sible image, where imagination and reality meet. In masochism, fetish—that is,
the still image, the paralysed mother-image—becomes the symbolic, the imag-
ination, and Lacan’s real. The frozen image is the law of desire, its impossible
object, and the realisation of the advent of pleasure. Against Lacan and against
his equivalence between the role of the father and the empty structure of the
law, Deleuze proposes by the autonomisation of masochism the equivalence
between the role of the mother and the full structure of law. And because it is
full, this law condenses in itself the three dimensions of the soul: law, desire,
and pleasure. To this new version of the Lacanian trinity, where everything is
condensed in the reality of a single image, Deleuze gives the old name “phan-
tasm.” He can thus say that, in masochism, everything is phantasm; everything
is returned back to phantasm. “Reality, as we have seen, is affected not by
negation but by a disavowal [denial] that transposes it into fantasy [phantasm].
Suspense performs the same function in relation to the ideal, which is also rel-
egated to fantasy [phantasm]. Waiting represents the unity of the ideal and the
real, the form or temporality of the fantasy [phantasm]. The fetish is the object
of the fantasy [phantasm], the fantasized [phantasmé] object par excellence. . . .
There is no specifically masochistic fantasy [phantasms], but rather a masochis-
tic art of fantasy [phantasm]” (Deleuze [1971] 1991, 72, my translations in italic).

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Conclusion
To understand the way Deleuze theorises perversion is to understand the spec-
ificity he sees in masochism and its difference from sadism. It is to understand
how he reads Masoch from a critical point of view, showing that Masoch takes
the phantasm as a genuine double of the world and how literature arises as the
ideal realisation of the world.11 “Sade expresses himself in a form which com-
bines obscenity in description with rigor and apathy in demonstration, while
the art of Masoch consists in multiplying the disavowals [denials] in order to cre-
ate the coldness of aesthetic suspense” (Deleuze [1971] 1991, 133, my translation
in italic). Sade creates a literature of reason, of the cold thought where rigor-
ous demonstrations show that reasoning itself is violence, that demonstration
itself is violence. Obscene descriptions give sadists the power to show them-
selves to be apathetically all-powerful. Masoch is the inventor of the phantasm,
the author of the imagination that multiplies denial as the procedure of his
art du suspens. He denies reality in order to incarnate, in suspense, the dialectic
ideal phantasmé. He proceeds by multiplicating the denial as an ascending path
towards the intelligible. He creates pedagogical trials of initiation to this path
in order to reach his Ideal. Sade’s obscene language and detailed description,
on the one hand, and Masoch’s suspense and suggestive setting, on the other,
both serve to conjugate literature and sexuality, that is, both the clinical and
the critical plans.
Among all Deleuze’s works, Coldness and Cruelty provides perhaps the most
clinical literary approach, where critical aspects cannot be understood with-
out their clinical mirror. It is an experience of reading the art of the novel as a
perverse affair. Deleuze always considered Sade and Masoch as major writers.
Literature thus becomes a thought on the world’s epiphanies and novelistic
configurations. In Coldness and Cruelty, for the first time, Deleuze gives a clinical
function to artistic creation and takes a writer as an example of the intrinsic
link between literature and life, of what he later termed literature as a health
affair.

11 The link between critical and clinical in Coldness and Cruelty is so narrow that it becomes difficult to
discern purely literary aspects; rather, it becomes clear that, for Deleuze, literature is a real part of life
and therefore of the clinical. As Anne Sauvagnargues (2013, 26) explains, “Symptomatology implies
the proximity of art to life: the goal of art is to explore the intensities of life without being stuck in a
moralistic attitude, but instead it captures the anomalous complexities of life and renders them sensible.
It is in this sense that writing brushes up against the border of social and psychic normality. Deleuze is
interested in marginal figures because he assigns a clinical function to artistic creation.”

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References
Bogue, Ronald. 2003. Deleuze on Literature. Lacan 2001.
London: Routledge. ———. 2001. Écrits: A Selection. Translated by
Deleuze, Gilles. (1971) 1991. Coldness and Alan Sheridan. London: Routledge. First
Cruelty. In Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty; published as Lacan 1966.
Venus in Furs, translated by Jean McNeil, Sauvagnargues, Anne. 2013. Deleuze and
9–142. New York: Zone Books. Essay first Art. Translated by Samantha Bankston.
published 1967 as “Le Froid et le Cruel” London Bloomsbury. First published
in Présentation de Sacher-Masoch (Paris: 2005 as Deleuze et l’art (Paris: Presses
Minuit). This translation first published universitaires de France).
1971 in Sacher-Masoch: An Interpretation Thomas, Chantal. 1994. Sade. Écrivains de
(New York: Braziller). toujours. Paris: Seuil.
Lacan, Jacques. 1966. Écrits. Paris: Seuil. Zourabichvili, François. 2006. “Kant avec
Selections translated by Alan Sheridan as Masoch.” Multitudes 25: 87–100.

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 Deleuze, Simondon,
and Beckett
From Being to Becoming
Audronė Žukauskaitė
Lithuanian Culture Research Institute

In this essay I will discuss Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of becom-
ing-imperceptible and demonstrate how this notion works in Samuel Beckett’s
texts.1 Contrary to modernist interpretations of Beckett, which evoke such con-
cepts as “emptiness” or “nothingness” (Eagleton 2009), Deleuze and Guattari
aspire to read Beckettian works as a new philosophy of life involved in con-
tinual flux or becoming. This becoming leads to becoming-imperceptible,
which can be read in three different but interconnected aspects: first, becom-
ing, moving towards becoming-imperceptible, replaces the notion of being;
second, becoming is seen as an endless process of individuation that replaces
atomised identities as individuals; third, the permanent becoming introduces
transduction that replaces the metaphysical logic of identity.
The same strategies can be traced in Beckett’s works, and Deleuze often
refers to Beckett’s characters, which function in his texts not as a simple
example but as an argument, strengthening the contours of a new immanent
ontology. This new immanent ontology raises the question of life in terms of
non-personal and even non-organic power, which, by passing through dif-
ferent intensities and becomings, moves towards becoming-imperceptible.
Becoming-imperceptible refers to impersonal life that might do without any
individual or individuality. This is precisely what various Beckettian characters
are striving for: some of these characters are vanishing, some of them are only
body parts, some of them take different shapes and consistencies but still per-
sist as a certain intensity or quality of life. Deleuze (1997, 154) names these bod-
ily transformations as “a fantastic decomposition of the self.” In other words,
becoming-imperceptible evades the perceptible forms of identity or individu-
ality, but this should be read not as an attempt towards self-annihilation but as
a movement towards an impersonal and non-organic life.

1 A different version of this research appeared in �ukauskaitė (2015).

272
 Deleuze, Simondon, and Beckett

From being to becoming

The first strategy connecting Deleuze and Beckett is the critique of being
understood in terms of unity and identity. As Gilbert Simondon (2009, 6) points
out, being is always “more than unity and more than identity”—it is ontogene-
sis or individuation that continuously develops in an unpredictable direction.
Thus Deleuze and Guattari, following Simondon, argue that ontology of being
should be replaced by ontology of becoming. As Simondon (2009) explains, the
ancient Greeks were forced to think of stable being because they had no knowl-
edge of modern physics. By contrast, contemporary philosophy, informed by
the discoveries of physics and thermodynamics, has to reflect on the genesis
or becoming of being, which is understood in terms of metastability as a pre-
individual reality and a transition phase as an actual individuation. In this sense,
reality, according to Simondon, is “more than unity and more than identity, capable
of expressing itself as a wave or as a particle, as matter or energy” (Simondon
2009, 6). Similarly Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987) introduce
the theory of two planes—the plane of organisation or transcendence and
the plane of immanence. The plane of organisation or transcendence makes
of us moulded individuals and subjects, whereas the plane of immanence is
defined by continuous becoming and can be described as a soup of intensities
or singularities. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 266) point out, in the plane of
immanence “there are no longer any forms or developments of forms; nor are
there subjects or the formation of subjects . . . between [unformed] elements.
. . . There are only haecceities . . . assemblages . . . of nonsubjectified powers or
affects.” In this respect, the plane of immanence disconnects and destroys the
order of organisation and opens the flow of permanent becoming.
This means that the plane of immanence is a plane of becoming that neces­
sarily leads towards becoming-imperceptible. But what does becoming-
imperceptible signify? We can presume that to become imperceptible means to
disorganise the body, to dismantle the system of signification and to erase the
subject and subjectivity. Deleuze and Guattari point out that becoming-imper-
ceptible leads not to nothingness or to the total dissolution of the subject but
to the virtual state of the body that proceeds by the production of intensities,
in the medium of becoming and transformation. Becoming imperceptible is
a passage from one state to another, an increase or decrease of intensities and
powers. Trying to explain what becoming-imperceptible means, Deleuze and
Guattari (1987, 279) refer to Fitzgerald: “after a real rupture, one succeeds . . .
in being just like everybody else.” In this sense, to become imperceptible is to
make a connection with the world, to connect and conjugate with its molecular
components: “Such is the link between imperceptibility, indiscernibility, and
impersonality—the three virtues. To reduce oneself to an abstract line, a trait,
in order to find one’s zone of indiscernibility with other traits, and in this way
enter the haecceity and impersonality of the creator” (ibid., 280). Interpreted
in this way, becoming-imperceptible expresses an impersonal singularity or
haecceity, immersed in the process of change.

273
 Audronė Žukauskaitė

From individual to individuation

In this regard Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming is very close to
Simondon’s notion of individuation. As Simondon (2009, 10) points out,
“becoming is a dimension of being. . . . Individuation must be understood as
the becoming of being.” It is individuation and not the individual that is the
primary concern of philosophy: “Instead of understanding individuation starting
from the individuated being, the individuated being must be understood starting from
individuation” (ibid.). This is the best way to understand the various Beckettian
characters: they should be interpreted not in terms of individuals but in terms
of individuation. In other words, in the Beckettian universe, we are confronted
not with the moulded subject but with continuous variations and modulations,
expressing different degrees of intensities. As Sarah Gendron (2004, 49–50)
points out, “This is the status of the majority of Beckett’s characters: if they
are, what they are is ‘not quite there.’ . . . Some of his characters are literally
absent in one way or another. ‘Auditor’ in Not I can, for example, be seen but
not heard. Others, like ‘V,’ the offstage voice in Footfalls, can be heard but not
seen.” Although characters in Beckett’s novels, like Malone in Malone Dies or
the character of The Unnamable, are about to vanish or expire, they still persist
as a certain intensity of life process. Some of these characters, such as ghosts
or the chorus of urns (Play), emerge only in imaginary or phantasmatic mode.
Some of these characters are only body parts, or the organs without bodies,
such as Mouth in Not I. As Gendron points out, citing Difference and Repetition,
“Beckett’s ‘subjects’ . . . greatly resemble what Deleuze calls the ‘virtual object,’
an entity that escapes determination, and in particular humanization. . . . They
are, like Ada, May, V, and Willy never quite there. Never fully present, they are also
never entirely absent. They have the property of ‘being and not being where
they are, wherever they go’” (Gendron 2004, 51, in part quoting Deleuze 1994,
102).
As such, Beckettian characters express the process of individuation or trans-
ductive unity, which means that they can permanently change in relation to
themselves. In other words, the process of individuation could proceed in dif-
ferent directions: sometimes the Beckettian characters “go liquid and become
like mud,” and sometimes they are “hard and contracted” (Beckett 2010a, 51).
These characters can be described following the Bergsonian rule of expansion
and contraction: sometimes the body can hardly resist the sensation of exten-
sion, so that the body covers the surface of the world, and sometimes it shrivels
and shrivels (ibid., 61–62). The Beckettian character would gladly give him- or
herself the shape and consistency of an egg, in other words, become the real
body without organs, “with two holes no matter where to prevent it from burst-
ing, for the consistency is more like that of mucilage” (Beckett 2010b, 15). All
these bodily transformations move towards becoming-imperceptible, which
brings singular individuations and molecular components into play with the
world and makes connections with a world: “perhaps that’s what I feel, myself
vibrating, I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world,
I don’t belong to either” (Beckett 2010b, 100). In this sense, to become imper-
ceptible means to disperse in the world, to become the particle of the world.

274
 Deleuze, Simondon, and Beckett

As Deleuze and Guattari ([1977] 1983, 77) point out, “Molloy and Moran no
longer designate persons, but singularities flocking from all sides, evanescent
agents of production. This is free disjunction; the differential positions persist
in their entirety, they even take on a free quality, but they are all inhabited by a
faceless and transpositional subject.” At this point, life as a non-subjective and
non-organic force emerges in its pure potentiality.

From the logic of identity towards transduction

When Deleuze and Guattari, following Simondon, replace the ontology of being
with continuous becoming, they have to rethink their philosophical methodol-
ogy. If being is “more than unity and more than identity,” the principle of the
excluded middle and the logic of identity cannot be applied to the process of
ontogenesis. A new notion emerges: that of transduction. As Simondon (2009,
11) points out, “transduction . . . is a mental process, and even more than a pro-
cess, it is a functioning of the mind that discovers. This functioning consists
of following being in its genesis, in carrying out the genesis of thought at the same
time as the genesis of the object.” “It applies to ontogenesis, and is ontogenesis itself.”
Thus transduction means a transformation that expands progressively and at
the same time structures a new arrangement. For example, a crystal grows from
a very small seed and expands in all directions; at the same time, every layer
of this crystal serves as a basis for creating a newly constituted layer. In this
respect, transduction is a kind of “logic” of becoming, which helps explain both
differentiation and duration. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, becoming is dif-
ferentiation and disparity, it is always the becoming-other (becoming-woman,
becoming-animal, becoming-child, becoming-imperceptible); and, second, it
is temporal duration, or a transitional phase that moves the process of ontogen-
esis from one phase to another. Transduction describes not only the process of
individuation but also the condition of mind that follows the genesis of being.
Thus transduction is the quasi-operator, the dark precursor, initiating the pro-
cess of ontogenesis and the condition of its perception.
In this respect, transduction means both the “logic” of ontogenesis, an oper-
ation of mind, and ontogenesis itself—in other words, the process of change
and transformation. Transduction can also be related to what Deleuze and
Guattari call the plane of immanence, because all transformations emerge not
from an outside but from the same milieu in which they take place. In this sense
the process of ontogenesis both contains within itself all potentialities or vir-
tualities and makes these potentialities or virtualities incompatible—some of
them are actualised and others are not. In his last essay, “Immanence: A Life”
(2001), Deleuze refers to life as an indefinite quality, a “virtuality,” which might
do without any individuality or individual. As Deleuze (ibid., 31) points out,
“a life contains only virtuals. It is made up of virtualities, events, singularities.
What we call virtual is not something that lacks reality but something that is
engaged in a process of actualization following the plane that gives it its par-
ticular reality.” All these events and singularities coexist on the plane of imma-
nence and enjoy their full reality. In this sense, a life refers not to individuals
but to life as a haecceity, as something that is impersonal. For example, very

275
 Audronė Žukauskaitė

small children have no individuality but they have singularities, something that
is more like a phase of individuation than a sign of individuality.
The specific instance of dialectics between the richness of potentialities
and their incompatibility Deleuze finds in Beckett’s works. In his essay “The
Exhausted,” Deleuze points out Beckett’s obsession with possibilities and elab-
orates his own theory of virtuality. Deleuze describes the Beckettian character
as someone who is exhausted in relation to potentiality. “The tired person has
merely exhausted the realization, whereas the exhausted person exhausts the
whole of the possible. The tired person can no longer realize, but the exhausted
person can no longer possibilize” (Deleuze 1997, 152). Deleuze points out that
in tiredness, the possible is realised according to a certain plan or goal; one
possibility is preferred and realised and another is excluded. In contrast, in
exhaustion one possibility is not excluded for another but all possibilities are
simultaneously disjoined and inclusive. As Deleuze points out, “the disjunc-
tions subsist, . . . but the disjointed terms are affirmed in their nondecompos-
able distance. . . . The disjunction has become inclusive: everything divides, but
into itself ” (ibid., 153). This can be compared with the nonexclusive logic of
pre-individual reality, where a certain “problem” awaits a “solution” in the
form of individuation. This means that in pre-individual reality all potentiali-
ties or virtualities coexist without any structure or plan: they are nondecompos-
able, which means they coexist in their potentiality. Deleuze refers to different
practices of exhaustion in Beckett, such as the combination of “sucking stones”
in Molloy and the combination of five small biscuits in Murphy; he also refers
to specific practices of exhaustion of language, words and things, and also to
the exhaustion of potentialities of space in Quad. All these potentialities create
energetic potential, which pushes the metastable system towards the process
of individuation.

Transductive image: Beckett’s Film

The notion of virtuality is differently elaborated in Deleuze’s film theory.
Similarly to in A Thousand Plateaus where Deleuze and Guattari describe the
opposition between the organism and the body without organs, or between the
plane of organisation and the plane of immanence, in his film theory Deleuze
(1986, 1989) reveals the tension between the movement-image and the time-
image. Deleuze describes the movement-image as an “organic” or conventional
visual regime, which can be related to the notion of an organism, whereas the
time-image is described as an “inorganic” or “crystalline” visual regime, which
can be imagined as the body without organs. It is an image that is simultan­
eously virtual and actual, composed of different and multiplied time dimen-
sions and, in this sense, it constantly dephases and transforms itself and leaves
the spectator in a state of mental indeterminacy.
In this sense we can claim that by inventing the crystalline image Deleuze
defies the logic of identity and tries to invent a transductive image, or an
image that is constantly changing and differentiating. Deleuze also calls it the
time-image, stressing its temporal or ontogenetic dimension. It is interesting
that in order to leave the movement-image, which is based on the logic of iden-

276
 Deleuze, Simondon, and Beckett

tity, Deleuze refers to Beckett’s Film (Schneider 1965) and uses it as a “reverse
proof,” demonstrating which filmic conventions should be abandoned.
Deleuze interprets Beckett’s film as an instance of becoming-imperceptible
and argues that we can abandon the logic of identity and “rid ourselves of our-
selves” only by extinguishing the action-image, perception-image and affec-
tion-image (Deleuze 1986, 66). This is precisely what Beckett’s Film does: the
central character (played by Buster Keaton) gradually gets rid of action, of the
perception of other people and animals, and, finally of his own self-perception.
In other words, in Film Beckett gradually renounces organism, signification
and subjectivity to create the body without organs and the crystalline image.
As Deleuze (1997, 26) explains, at the end of Beckett’s Film, after all possible
amputations, “the room has lost its partitions, and releases an atom into the
luminous void, an impersonal yet singular atom that no longer has a Self by
which it might distinguish itself from or merge with others. Becoming imper-
ceptible is Life, . . . attaining to a cosmic and spiritual lapping.” In this sense
the crystalline transduction augments the images, which are pre-individual,
impersonal, and asubjective. The crystalline transduction helps get rid of per-
ception and self-perception, to empty space of both objects and the subject. As
Beckett points out, no matter whether someone is living, is dead or alive, the
potentiality of life forces one to go on, to continue, following the principle of
individuation or ontogenesis.

References
Beckett, Samuel. 2010a. Malone Dies. Edited (Paris: Minuit).
by Peter Boxall. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 2001. “Immanence: A Life.” In Pure
First published 1951 as Malone meurt Immanence: Essays on A Life, translated by
(Paris: Minuit). Anne Boyman, 25–33. New York: Zone
———. 2010b. The Unnamable. Edited by Books. Chapter first published 1995 as
Steven Connor. London: Faber and Faber. “L’immanence: Une Vie” (Philosophie 47).
First published 1953 as L’innommable Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1977)
(Paris: Minuit). 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert
Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane.
Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press. First published 1983 as Cinéma 1: Press. First published 1972 as Capitalisme
L’image-mouvement (Paris: Minuit). et schizophrénie 1: L’anti-Œdipe (Paris:
———. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minuit). This translation first published
Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and 1977 (New York: Viking Press).
Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of ———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
Minnesota Press. First published 1985 as and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian
Cinéma 2: L’image-temps (Paris: Minuit). Massumi. Minneapolis: University of
———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as
Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Mille plateaux (Paris: Minuit).
Columbia University Press. First Eagleton, Terry. 2009. “Beckett and
published 1968 as Différence et répétition Nothing.” In Reflections on Beckett: A
(Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Centenary Celebration, edited by Anna
———. 1997. Essays Critical and Clinical. McMullan and S. E. Wilmer, 32–39. Ann
Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: Gendron, Sarah. 2004. “‘A Cogito for the
University of Minnesota Press. First Dissolved Self ’: Writing, Presence,
published 1993 as Critique et Clinique and the Subject in the Work of Samuel

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Beckett, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles by Gregory Flanders. Parrhesia 7: 4–16.

Deleuze.” Journal of Modern Literature 28 Žukauskaitė, Audronė. 2015. “Deleuze
(1): 47–64. and Beckett towards Becoming-
Schneider, Alan, dir. 1965. Film. Written by Imperceptible.” In Deleuze and Beckett,
Samuel Beckett. New York: Evergreen edited by S. E. Wilmer and Audronė
Theatre. Žukauskaitė, 60–77. Basingstoke, UK:
Simondon, Gilbert. 2009. “The Position of Palgrave Macmillan.
the Problem of Ontogenesis.” Translated

278
 Appendix

Online materials

As further illustration to the chapters “Deleuze’s Fold in the Performing

Practice of Aaron Cassidy’s The Pleats of Matter” (pp. 56–66) and “Alone/
Together: Simulacral ‘A-presentation’ in and into Practice-as-Research in
Jazz” (pp. 167–73), an online repository of audio and video examples has been
created and hosted within 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: http://www.orpheusinstituut.be/
en/the-dark-precursor-media-repository.
Editors © 2017 by Leuven University Press /
Paulo de Assis Universitaire Pers Leuven /
Paolo Giudici Presses Universitaires de Louvain.
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ISBN (2-vol. set) 978 94 6270 118 2
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D/2017/1869/36
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Lois Fitch
Mike Fletcher
The research leading to these results
Paolo Galli
has received funding from the
Lindsay Gianoukas
European Union Seventh Framework
Keir GoGwilt
Programme ([FP7/2007-2013]
Oleg Lebedev
[FP7/2007-2011]) under grant agreement
Jimmie LeBlanc
n° 313419.
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Audronė Žukauskaitė
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Lozie. All rights reserved.

Illustrations on pp. 22, 23,

188, 189: © Lucia D’Errico
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cians since 1996 and introduced the first doctoral programme for music prac-
titioners in Flanders (2004). Acting as an umbrella institution for Flanders, it
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Throughout the Institute’s various activities (seminars, conferences, work-
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– Artistic Research in Music: Discipline and Resistance
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The Dark Precursor:

Deleuze and Artistic Research

The Dark
Precursor:
Deleuze and Artistic Research

edited by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici

Volume II
The Dark Precursor in Image, Space, and Politics

Leuven University Press

 Table of Contents

Volume II: The Dark Precursor in Image, Space, and Politics

Part 1 Image

293 On Contemporary Art and Philosophy:

Towards a Diagrammatic Critique of Aesthetics
Éric Alliez

309 Deleuze and Guattari’s Digital Art Machines

Anne Sauvagnargues

315 Heterogeneity of Word and Image:

What is the Possible Dark Precursor?
Jūratė Baranova

326 Godard and/with Deleuze:

“C’est comme ça que le monde naît”
Zsuzsa Baross

338 No Voice is Lostor or, The Dead as a Witness

Anna Barseghian and Stefan Kristensen

345 )( Z )(
Lucia D’Errico

346 Digital Folds, or Cinema’s Automated Brain

Elena Del Río

354 Beyond Artist and Artisan:

Performing Unformed Sound in the Art Machine
Lilija Duoblienė

366 Hollywood Flatlands:

Taking a Line for a Walk
Verina Gfader

375 Bacon and the Cartoonist:

The Emergence of the Figure through Two Opposing Diagrams
John Miers

285
 Table of Contents

386 al niente—a dissolution:

Thinking in Images and Sounds
Adreis Echzehn and Elfie Miklautz

390 Drawings from A Thousand Plateaus

Marc Ngui

395 The Image as a Process of Invention within Artistic Research

Andreia Oliveira and Felix Rebolledo

401 Matter-flow:
Studies of Minor Composition
Federica Pallaver

408 perpetual doubt, constant becoming

Mhairi Vari

415 The Fold:

A Physical Model of Abstract Reversibility and Envelopment
Elisabet Yanagisawa

Part 2 Space

431 Urban War Machines

Manola Antonioli

437 Transmissibility:
A Mode of Artistic Re-search
Jae Emerling

446 Architecture and Indifference

Ronny Hardliz

456 Zigzagging:
Bound by the Absence of a Tie
Andrej Radman

286
 Table of Contents

Part 3 Politics

471 The Fear of Boredom

Ian Buchanan

481 Art, Knowledge, and the In-between

Rahma Khazam

488 In the Act:

The Shape of Precarity
Erin Manning

510 On the Concept of Creal:

The Politico-Ethical Horizon of a Creative Absolute
Luis de Miranda

517 Affects of Indeterminacy and Silence as Aleatory Intervals

between Art and Philosophy:
A Deleuzian Reading
Janae Sholtz

526 Something Along the Lines of . . .

Mick Wilson

544 Notes on Contributors

561 Index of Names

567 Index of Subjects

287
Part 1
Image
 On Contemporary Art
and Philosophy
Towards a Diagrammatic Critique
of Aesthetics*
Éric Alliez
Paris 8; Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University

My title packs a certain trans-genre charge; a charge that is introduced, in the

name of the contemporary, in-between (contemporary) philosophy and (con-
temporary) art. Contemporary art is deliberately foregrounded; but it’s also
conjoined with a contemporary philosophy that, make no mistake, serves to
call into question a certain zeitgeisty contemporary art, an art that has become
the cutting-edge trophy-piece of the creative (and still cultural) industries. At
the same time, this philosophy sizes up contemporary art as an “input” whose
intensive definition it expects to precipitate a movement “towards a diagram-
matic critique of aesthetics.” A movement that will then have repercussions
for a philosophy that the “critique of aesthetics” will cause to differ from itself
by distancing it, from the outset, from its usual approach to such artistic mat-
ters—namely, that of aesthetics as philosophy of art.
So it’s not so much a matter of producing a philosophy of contemporary art,
as of sliding in between art and philosophy to introduce an oscillation, a sup-
plementary pulsation, between a philosophy that is contemporary with con-
temporary art and an art that is contemporary with contemporary philosophy.
The contemporary grasped in this doubled manner, divided in itself, is not a
“philosophical condition” (let’s face it, what could a contemporary art placed
under condition of contemporary philosophy even mean?). Rather, it is—in the
Deleuzian sense—a problem, a problem rendered yet more acute by the recip-
rocal problematisation of the two terms, now placed in chiasm, disrupting
their categories along with all received and affiliative disciplinary divisions.1
And indeed, the problem is most decidedly that of the “contemporary”: for the
common notion of the contemporary, with its untenable a priori/a posteriori,
leaves no room for any “differential” critical temporality of and in art and
philosophy.

* This text, originally delivered at DARE 2015: The Dark Precursor, is excerpted and adapted from the
preface to Alliez and Bonne (2017).
1 We shouldn’t disregard that, despite their autonomy, it is art and philosophy that share the category of
the contemporary, to the self-evident exclusion of hard and human sciences alike, where such a category
would be bafflingly tautological.

293
 Éric Alliez

We must presume that the concept of the contemporary will ring hollow so
long as it falls short of the political-speculative construction (a monster, need-
less to say!) that would determine its dramatisation, and so long as it fails to
grasp the extent to which it must be out of phase with the zeitgeist that it tracks.
The contemporary must instead become a fractured zone of interference intro-
duced into what Giorgio Agamben (2009, 52) calls “the inert homogeneity of
linear time.”
The first, and most immediate, consequence of this is that the “contempo-
rary” only makes sense if it involves, and involves us in, a critical operation on
the identity of the present (the state of things), and a clinical examination of the
alterities that bring forth a new eventality (virtuality) but whose signs are sti-
fled beneath the historical form of presence (and the omnipresence of current
actualities). A certain urgency and a certain absolute of thought are affirmed
here in the figure of the “untimely,” in a political experimentation that can only
be carried through by a heterogenesis of thought that grapples with the real
becomings that condition its emergence.
Second, this effectuation of the contemporary is knotted together with the
pragmatics of a thinking in act, at once transcategorial and transdisciplinary
(two notions I share with my friend and colleague Peter Osborne). As Deleuze
and Guattari (1994, 199) say, on the very last page of the chapter “Art” in What
is Philosophy?: “Each created element on a plane calls on other heterogeneous
elements, which are still to be created on other planes,”2 all the while commu-
nicating on one and the same ontological plane of consistency, always singu-
larly grasped and modulated to construct a real to come, through points of
creation and the potentialisation of the present. I made a first foray into this
transformation of relations, which posits and invests thought as the milieu of
art and philosophy, but in excess over their constituted forms (a transcategorial
art, a transdisciplinary philosophy) with Jean-Claude Bonne, under the rubric
of “Matisse-thought” (La Pensée-Matisse),3 from the still-gestating perspective
of an archaeology of contemporary art. At that point it was a matter of think-
ing anew the radicality of the rupture that Matisse, over the longue durée of a
half-century, dared to carry out in painting; a rupture with the art form defined
by the aesthetic of the “pictorial”—which he replaces with the decorative, in
a “bio-energetic” sense that is as unprecedented as the relation to the envir­
onment that flows from it. Here the decorative finds its support in a vitalist
thought, Bergsonian in spirit, Nietzschean in its flow, constructivist in its devel-
opment, and pragmatist in its continuation (whence the employment—not so
much generative as transformational—of Deleuzian philosophy).
A third and final consequence is that the motif of the contemporary, stra­
tegically reinterpreted in this way, is determined in relation to a time that sets
modernity into becoming. This motif must be analysed from a twofold—gene-

2 Which is also to say that the “contemporary” projects us to the end of the “disciplinary” enquiry of What
is Philosophy? (where they redefine the tripartite division philosophy–science–art from the perspective
of philosophy)—and right into the (transdisciplinary) middle (the milieu) of the Thousand Plateaus
explored with Guattari some ten years previously (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987).
3 See Alliez and Bonne (2005).

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alogical and archaeological—perspective. From the genealogical perspective,

the contemporary is informed by and thinks from the 1960s and the total crisis
of all models of determination, a crisis contemporary with the opening up of
new fields of possibility and new virtualities bringing forth a social mutation
on the global scale which, in turn, led to a “de-definition” of politics as a sepa-
rate sphere of life, itself related in the last instance to the professional politics
that had routed the avant-gardes, leaving them adrift between art as politics
and political art. This contemporaneity may be summed up in the formula:
“May ’68 did take place”; and its site is biopolitical, given the micropolitical
questions of subjectivation that it brings to the fore. Let us note here that the
“de-definition of art” (to adopt Harold Rosenberg’s famous expression [see
Rosenberg 1972])—and its prime motivation of “dissolving art into life”—is in
turn contemporary with a de-definition of philosophy whose principle is posited
by a Deleuze (precisely in 1968) when he writes that “the time is coming when
it will hardly be possible to write a book of philosophy as it has been done for
so long” (Deleuze [1994] 2014, xviii). What particularly interests us here is the
way in which Deleuze sets out the modalities of this impossibility: “the search
for new means of philosophical expression was begun by Nietzsche and must
be pursued today in relation to the renewal of certain other arts”; a pursuit the
consequences of which, turned against the philosophical discipline, he marks
well—“In this context, we can now raise the question of the utilization of the
history of philosophy”—the better to make this anticipation resonate with a
most Duchampian look/L.H.O.O.Q.: “In the history of philosophy, a commen-
tary should act as a veritable double and bear the maximal modification appro-
priate to a double. (One imagines a philosophically bearded Hegel, a philosophi-
cally clean-shaven Marx, in the same way as a moustached Mona Lisa)” (ibid.).
Beyond its properly Deleuzian sense of a Difference and Repetition of philoso­
phy, this collage incites us to move onto the archaeological plane, so as to
rewrite the modernity of a century that began with the “crisis of scientific foun-
dations” and continued with a philosophical critique of representation that
tore down all the formal and categorial dispositifs that had upheld its specific
regimes of objective and/or subjective identity.
Who should we come across here but, once again, Duchamp—who, with his
3 Standard Stoppages, promptly goes overboard with this crisis, unleashing his
“amusing physics” (with four-dimensional aspirations), thereby signifying a
radical paradigm shift in the Idea of art.4 This idea is now submitted to a triple
stoppage of aesthetic standards—and of the standard of the aesthetic. A good
enough demonstration of how art as experiment, which Duchamp elevates to
the status of a (pseudo-)experimental-scientific protocol, is implicated no less
than philosophy (Duchamp produced a “laughable Bergson,” for example) in
the discovery and exploration of all the forces that act beneath and against the
representation of the identical in the logic of recognition.

4 We evince the proof of this at the heart of volume 3 of Undoing the Image (Alliez and Bonne, forthcoming
[b], Part 2). Knowing that this “other side,” or underside, is also that of science and philosophy, one
will be able to verify through the becoming-contemporary (via Duchamp) of art that antiscience and
antiphilosophy are an integral part of contemporary thought(s) (and contemporary philosophy!).

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But may it not even be the case, then (as affirmed, once again, by Deleuze),
that it is art—and contemporary art in particular (Deleuze “cites” pop art)—
that indicates the “path” for philosophy, in challenging its formal identity (the
art form) and the distribution of that identity into subgenres (painting-form,
sculpture-form, etc.); in propagating works whose nature is problematic and
which do not sit well under the post-romantic, still aesthetic, category of “art-
ist-thought” pensée-artiste? With this in mind, the archaeological formula for
the contemporary might be formulated as follows: “the twentieth century did
take place.”5 And so we are embarked—beyond Deleuze “himself ”—upon a
journey to an outside that is also the outside of philosophy “itself,” given that
“strictly speaking, something philosophers have never done, even when they
were talking about politics, even when they were talking about taking a walk
or fresh air” is “to hook thought up directly and immediately to the outside”
(Deleuze 2004b, 255). Thus Deleuze, in the grip of the Guattari effect—the
Deleuze who writes these lines marked by the “nomad thought” of the thinker
of the untimely (Nietzsche), and who, taking his thought to its most extreme
point (with Guattari), even affirms that “the painter’s model is the commodity”
(Deleuze 2004a, 247). A statement that, of course, complicates somewhat the
notion of a direct and immediate connection to the outside. . . .

* * *

The perspective of an archaeology of contemporary art will now have to affirm

itself through what may appear a singular displacement of the vision of the
“century of the avant-gardes,” but one that is entirely necessary. For, if it is a
question of investing the crisis of the idea of the image opened up by mod-
ern art (see Alliez 2015), and of demonstrating that the full effects of this crisis
will be felt in the phenomenal discontinuity of contemporary art, what we find
most crucial for this discontinuity is the break made by Matisse and Duchamp,
in opposite directions, with the pictorial phenomenology of the aesthetic
image. With this break, Matisse and Duchamp together will determine not so
much the two foundational paradigms of contemporary art (for this would be
to reintroduce the continuous chronology of a history of art, only displacing its
terms) as its putting in tension—not on the (genealogical) level of the practices
through which it has constituted itself, but on the (archaeological) plane of the
modes of construction of its auto-problematisation within the field of forces
thereby generated, between:

(1)  a constructivist vitalism (that is to say, a vitalism that is processual and

relational, in the Matissean sense of a decorative constructivism)
bringing painting out of itself, staging the defenestration of the
painting-form so as to exceed the contemplative world of the
painting and to take possession of an environment that it affects

5 Here we take up Natacha Michel’s proposition, used as an epigraph-dedication to Alain Badiou’s The
Century (2007, xiv).

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and deconditions in a manner that is already in excess of all site-

specificity (“elsewhere as well as anywhere else,” as Dominique
Fourcade reluctantly suggests, in his treatment of the “non-art” logic
mobilised in Matisse’s cut-up gouaches).6

(2) a constructivism of the signifiant that begins by reducing the art form
to language games about art, so as to subvert its aesthetic regime
by cutting it off from the so-called plastic arts through a readymade
reversal of the Bergsonian perspective of an in-the-making. In the
readymade (le tout-fait), this Bergsonian perspective finds itself
captured by a signifier that is literalised in so far as it is phallically
unleashed against the dialectic of the visible and the invisible that
informs the desire for the image—a desire now exposed to the shop
window of the department store. The outside passes into the vitrine
of the commodity become absolute. Fresh Widow: fallen back on
the shop window that reflects the gaze like a mirror (it reads: “the
onanism of shop windows”), the window-perspective-of-painting
is rendered blind for and by the voyeur-consumer, who must,
according to the Duchampian idea, reflect the whole production-
circulation-consumption/consummation cycle (of art) on the
shortest circuit that stands for the short-circuiting of aesthetic
“masturbation” confronted to the real subsumption of the world.
The end of sublimation.

But the veritable reinvention of Duchamp to which the 1960s gave rise (not
without the complicity of the man himself) confirms in its turn, on this familiar
ground, the dangers of any “continuist” projection of and in contemporary art,
calling to mind once more the Foucauldian warning that it is “practices that
systematically form the objects of which they speak” (Foucault [1972] 2002, 54).
For we cannot ignore that this contemporary reformatting of Duchamp partici­
pates in the deconstruction of the artistic field in political terms aggravated
by the institutionalisation of the historical avant-gardes, the most readymade
configuration of this extreme modernity included; an institutionalisation that
would also become the determining factor in an “institutional” critique (avant
la lettre) of the “Duchamp myth” and a sublation of the Matissean lineage (the
whole importance of Daniel Buren’s work may reside in the fact that he conju-
gates the two).7 What we confront here is a radical “after-Matisse” that emerges
from an inevitable “after-Duchamp”—as is confirmed by a highly experimen-
tal reprise of the question of architecture as social signifiance that emerges
at this very point (see Osborne 2013, 141). It is this latter that will determine
both the spatial ontology of contemporary art and the ontological reopening
of art as a transcategorial question attached to a post- or trans-media effect
(for example, in the work of Hélio Oiticica, and above all in that of Gordon

6 See Undoing the Image, volume 2 (Alliez and Bonne, forthcoming [a]).
7 See Undoing the Image, volume 4 (Alliez and Bonne, forthcoming [c], Part 1, “DB Entrance”).

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Matta-Clark).8 As if it is the problematising exposition of the “site,” in the nego-

tiation of the (high-risk) passage from the living plenitude of aesthetic expe-
rience (Art as Experience, according to the epochal title of John Dewey’s 1934
book) to art as extra- or non-aesthetic experimentation, that determines the
contemporary orientation of art on the side of the critical and clinical assess-
ment of the semiomaterial organisation of the present time. Pop will have been
an essential component of this passage, precisely because of its break with any
kind of participative aesthetics.

* * *

But we must now specify the most important characteristic of this discontinu-
ity that deploys itself as a disjunctive synthesis of contemporary art. We have
summarised it in the idea of a diagrammatic regime, agency, or assemblage
in contradistinction to the aesthetic regime of art and to the formal analysis
that underwrites the latter’s constitutive, and far too generic, indetermina-
tion. According to Jacques Rancière’s definition, the aesthetic is the historico-
transcendental moment of total revolution pertaining to those “new forms
of visibility and intelligibility” that never define any specific content, and can
therefore extend to infinity the domain of their condition of possibility, in a
“superior poetics of metaphor” (Rancière 2004, 152). Images and enunciations
are indefinitely referred back to one another in an endless relation or non-rela-
tion (the relation of a non-relation) animated by a paradoxical poetics (a discur-
sive logic of forms in contra-diction) that binds together with the tourniquet of
its metaphors the “aesthetic regime” it covertly controls.9 Now, this name “dia-
grammatic,” synonymous with an undoing of the image of the aesthetic regime
of art, is first of all a password and a passage-word. That is, it must be understood
in terms of how it is used (“no problem of meaning but only of usage” [Deleuze
and Guattari (1977) 1983, 77–78]) to pass from conditions of possibility (a free
play of “forms-signs” or of “image-phrases”—two of Rancière’s key expres-
sions) to reality-conditions (those of “signs-forces”). It is in this sense that the
diagram can be mobilised as the “probe head” of a contemporary thinking-art
that, as we all realise, is no more that of yesterday than that of a “bel aujourd’hui”
encompassing everything that takes place within the present.
On this point, recall that the logic of the aesthetic position so profoundly re­-
defined by Rancière—in a post-Kantianism that (pace Schiller) has rediscovered
its metapolitical horizon, upsetting the firmly established division between the
sensible and the intelligible—hails from the end of the eighteenth century. A
foundational rupture with the representational and hierarchical order of the
arts, the aesthetic is a question of an open reconfiguration of experience that

8 See Undoing the Image, volume 4 (Alliez and Bonne, forthcoming [c], part 2, “GMC Entrance”) and
volume 5 (Alliez and Bonne, forthcoming [d]).
9 On the literary paradigm of the “aesthetic regime” (and of Rancièrian aesthetics tout court), see, above
all, Rancière’s Mute Speech (2011) (in particular the pages on Flaubert’s “metaphysics of literature”—and
the conclusion, where the advance of literature over the plastic arts is attributed to its being a “sceptical
art” capable of living with its contradictions).

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serves to isolate that which is singular to art. This singularity can then become
the object of a “counterhistory,” upstream of Greenbergian purification, by
plunging it back into the longue durée of the play of autonomy and of a heteron-
omy “attuned to all the vibrations of universal life” (Rancière 2013, 262)—with-
out the question of the contemporary or of contemporary art ever emerging as
a problem. But doesn’t exactly the same thing happen in Alain Badiou’s inverse
yet symmetrical “inaesthetics”? Badiou provides an account of the saturation
of all the schemas followed by the arts of the twentieth century, in various
syntheses that survive the death of the avant-gardes (ibid., 14–19) only in the
degraded contemporary form of a “romantic formalism.” This enables Badiou
(2006, 142) to propose an “affirmationist” sublation that can tailor to its own
requirements the set-target of a contemporary art subject to “maxims” (that
is to say, prescriptions) in the form of a requisitioning of an “artistic will” that
must be “recreate[d] . . . in its incorporeal rigour”—in order to subtract “form”
(eidos) from the romanticism of expressivity that fuels the “multimedia motif of
a multisensorial art” (ibid., 99).10 Accordingly, he will not hesitate to denounce
the Deleuzian conception of art, having reduced it to the (romantic) incarnation
of the infinite in the finite (See Badiou 2005, 10).
In fact, Badiou (2007, 154) prosecutes this critique in the name of a “wholly
secularized conception of the infinite”11 that supposedly unites all the great
ruptures of modern-contemporary art (from the critique of the painting-form
to the readymade and minimal art). The logic of this Badiousian position may
be summed up in his notion of an “experimental formalization” that seeks to
grasp the form as the material index of formalisation coupled with the real of
the act of an Idea which governs the infinite opening of the visibility of the
power of the finite. The infinite, then, is no longer captured in form: it transits
via the finite form that, taken up in the animation of its act, is the only infinite
of which art, in the multiplicity of its formalisations, is capable (ibid., 155). In
this way the “sensible form of the Idea” is flipped over into an Idea of form, the
act of the formalisation of the sensible into an event of the Idea. Form is no
longer form in the classical sense, “the formation of a material, of the organic
appearance of a work, of its manifestation as a totality” (ibid., 159); it conforms
to the act of the dematerialisation of the sensible, an act that formalises the
Idea as that “qualitative infinite” that affirms what Hegel still calls the “pure
quality of the finite itself ” (ibid., 157), something like the “subjective” ground
of the essential form of the artwork.
With this Badiousian ontology of art, form is pushed back to its last con-
temporary retrenchments, its last retrenchments in contemporary art, by way of
an “experimental formalism” that maintains—rather classically!—that “the
essence of thinking always resides in the power of forms” (Badiou 2007, 164).

10 “ . . . l’art traite le sensible region par régions”: the modernist motif is solidly reaffirmed here (Badiou
2006, 99).
11 See also the whole subchapter entitled “Romantic Infinite, Contemporary Infinite” (Badiou 2007,
152–60), from which we freely borrow in the lines that follow, not without certain incursions into the
subsequent argument (“Univocity”), where Deleuze is, inevitably, mentioned. The chapter is entitled
“The Infinite.”

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Now, the “diagram,” or experimental diagrammatisation, is the rigorous alter-

native to this approach, precisely at the level of “what the artistic act authorizes
by way of new thinking” (ibid., 159),12 because it begins by exceeding, in a multi­
plicative becoming of forces, the trick of “disappearing” form into the act of
formalisation. A new thought, a contemporary thinking of art as a capture of
forces . . . which, if one is not simply to pay it lip service, obliges us to “affirm”
quantity (a “quantitative infinite” in place of the ideal abstraction of a formal-
isation that identifies quality with the purity of art: Badiou’s modernism) and
relation (the process and operations of placing in relation, rather than the act
via which the Platonism of the same is modernised in the form of art). It was
Matisse who first drew attention to this quantitative relation, in the revolution
of Fauvism. For if every force is a relation of forces and has no being other than
one of relation (of forces: immanence), the (always singular) construction of a
diagram of forces acts transversally at the points that it connects by mobilising
“relatively free or unbound points, points of creativity, change and resistance”
in a “distribution of singularities” (Deleuze 1988, 44) that redefines force as
affect: every force has the power to affect other forces (with which it is in rela-
tion) and the power to be affected by yet others (ibid., 71). In opposition to the
two “truth” procedures which Badiou (2007, 102) keeps sequestered into art
and politics (politics, singular), it is a whole micropolitical conception of the
“real” that proceeds in the direction of art in this Deleuzian formulation, the
context and assembly of which we must briefly explicate here.
Before the important developments of A Thousand Plateaus, Guattari’s work
is already in effect when Deleuze uses the term “diagram” for the first time,
in a 1975 article on discipline and punishment (Deleuze 1975),13 where he
adopts Foucault’s hapax in the description of the Panopticon as a “diagram of
a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form” (Foucault [1977] 1995, 205).
Deleuze strikes out the “ideal form” though, replacing it with the principle
of an “abstract machine . . . coextensive with the whole social field” (Deleuze
1975, 1216–17, as translated in Deleuze 1988, 34), establishing the difference
in nature between “micro” and “macro,” but not without it being immedi-
ately affected by a double direction or by two opposed states: the “diagram of
power” governed by a principle of the integration of forces, a plan[e] of organ-
isation linked to the State (qua molar regulator of the “micro-elements” of the
diagram); and the “diagram of lines of flight . . . linked to a war machine” and
which locally effectuates its plane of immanence: a “dream of the war machine”
that animates the “collective field of immanence” (Deleuze 2007, 132–33). It is
in relation to this double instantiation of the diagram that Deleuze will intro-
duce the political function of literary experimentation (Hölderlin, and above
all Kleist, against Goethe) and musical experimentation (the two conceptions
of the sonorous plane), having opposed to the Foucauldian dispositifs of power
his own conception of a “desiring-assemblage” [agencement de désir], developed

12 This is said of form in so far as “the essence of thinking always resides in the power of forms” (Badiou
2007, 164).
13 The article is reprinted, modified, in Deleuze’s Foucault (1988, 1–23), under the title “From the Archive
to the Diagram.”

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together with Guattari. This agencement is an agency that affirms the primacy of
desire (it is always assembled [agencé]: a desiring-constructivism), and affirms
the primacy of lines of flight over power (ibid., 126), whose dispositifs, as
abstract as they may be, are always lines of reterritorialisation on the horizon of
a capitalism that ceaselessly recodes and axiomatises with one hand what it has
deterritorialised with the other.
Called forth by this Copernican revolution in desire/power, the micropoliti-
cal function of experimental deterritorialisation, for which art will become the
laboratory as it brings “Ideas” back to the most material relations of forces, is
confirmed by the argument Deleuze now sets out: “if the dispositifs of power
are in some way constituent, only phenomena of resistance could possibly
counter them” (Deleuze 2007, 128, translation modified). Instead of which
he affirms the existence of phenomena of creation that pass by way of a think-
ing become war machine, a machine of absolute, positive deterritorialisation,
defined by a diagrammatism whose regime Deleuze anticipates in his article on
Foucault: “[the diagram] never functions in order to represent an objectivated
world; on the contrary, it produces a new kind of reality. . . . The diagram is not
a science, it is always a political matter . . . undoing existing realities and signifi-
cations, constituting so many points of emergence or of creativity, unexpected
conjunctions or improbable continuums” (Deleuze 1975, 1223, as translated in
Deleuze 1988, 35). “It doubles history with a becoming,” he concludes (Deleuze
1988, 43, translation modified), through the mapping of the forces or inten-
sities that it conducts (it is an intensive map). Here the diagram itself is sub-
jected to a deterritorialisation that detaches it from its usual scientific usage so
that it can participate in an “art” of the cartography of the present inseparable
from a distribution of affects that subjectivates the whole process, qualifying it
as “desiring.” Although Deleuze thus extracts the principle of a diagrammatic
thought from the conception of the diagram as a “schematism,” by extending
its Foucauldian usage to the point at which its whole logic is reversed, this
deterritorialising operation must still be inscribed within an exercise of the
diagram that fuses, per se, in its very etymology (drawing-writing) a space of vis-
ibility and a field of legibility. This therefore goes well beyond an experimental
formalism that is but an abstract co-adaptation between form of expression
and form of content.14

[It is therefore] the diagram [that] retains the most deterritorialized content and
the most deterritorialized expression, in order to conjugate them. Maximum
deterritorialization sometimes starts from a trait of content and sometimes from a
trait of expression; that trait is said to be “deterritorializing” in relation to the other
precisely because it diagrams it, carries it off, raises it to its own power. (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987, 141–42)

What is at stake here are the real virtualities of a “revolutionary diagram from
which flows both a new saying and a new doing” (Deleuze 1975, 1227, my trans-

14 Take the Peircian formalisation of the diagram, which maintains, at the most formal level of semiotics
involved, the articulation into signifier and signified.

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lation), in conditions where they attain “unformed and unorganized matter

and unformalized . . . functions” (Deleuze 1988, 34) and consequently address
the informal element of forces in which the visible and the invisible alike are
immersed; real virtualities that will be capable of “[displaying the] relations
between forces . . . and direct power” (ibid., 35) (if clarification should be neces-
sary: power in all its forms and in all domains). For it is by way of these relations
of force between content and expression that “the stabilizing of the relation-
ships of de-territorialization” is determined (Guattari 1984, 83), from the point
of view of their formalisation (tending toward an axiomatising reterritorialisa-
tion) and formations of power (stratification)—or, on the contrary, that of the
assembly of a machine of intensive deterritorialisation that is carried along on
flows of signs, involving them in processes of diagrammatic conjunction that
mesh them with material fluxes of all kinds, in which they work ever more inten-
sively.15 In either case, “politics precedes being” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987,
203)—it does not follow on afterwards. “Diagram” is thus the name and the
process that leads to this enunciation (in A Thousand Plateaus), an enunciation
that puts to work in being generative practices of heterogeneity and complexity.
“Signs work flush to material flows” (ibid., 87, translation modified): such
is the Guattarian lemma that instigates the constructivism of desire. It is the
correlate of the ontologico-political deterritorialisation of the sign and of the
image, in the machining of the diagram and of its function as a “shifter” [embra-
yeur] within a dimension of processual creativity that is less and less inclined
to recognise itself in the aesthetic/inaesthetic formalities of art. The archi-
vist aestheticisation of conceptual art and its commodification confirms the
“truth” of the whole process and refers us back, in fine, to the critical aspect of
the notion of the postconceptual. But Guattari’s guiding formula also marks
the bringing back into play of the contemporary and of art as experimentation
in the trajectory of a thinking—namely, Deleuze’s. If Deleuze’s thinking only
ever truly thought when it was forced, by the problematic intrusion of a “sign”
(see Deleuze [1972] 2003) that stripped it of representation, to the point of a
Copernican revolution of subject and object, it was Guattarian “signaesthe-
sia”16 that drove the real passage from a pensée-artiste that adopts the revolution
of abstraction in painting as model for a “thought without image,”17 summon-
ing the “groundlessness” of forces within it to rise up into forms18 (a vitalist ani-
mation of abstraction), to a micropolitical thinking of abstraction that deter-
mines itself in the real (a “real-abstraction”) through the generalised decoding
and deterritorialization of the material fluxes and signs that define the capi-
talist field of immanence. The coextensivity of the social field with the desire

15 Whence the particularly unfortunate expression “immaterial capitalism.”

16 Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus Papers (a collection of notes sent to Deleuze while writing the book) is placed
entirely under the aegis of what he himself calls the “mad constructivism of the sign” and on the side of
the most marked engagement in “the desire of artifice” (that is, desire in its essence) that is correlative
to it (see Guattari 2006, in particular 79–81).
17 This is another celebrated phase from Difference and Repetition, “The theory of thought is like painting:
it needs that revolution which took art from representation to abstraction. This is the aim of a theory of
thought without image” (Deleuze [1994] 2014, 362).
18 In which one would struggle to find the christic visitation of the infinite denounced by Badiou.

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that defines it will now de-define it, in an art become “minor.”19 Which means
that to orient oneself in the present in thought is to redefine oneself between
Capitalism and Schizophrenia—to take up the unique title of Deleuzo-Guattarian
thought and the site where their diagrammatic thinking emerges. And doesn’t
this thought have in common with “schizophrenia” (or the schizophrenic pro-
cess) its experimentation with decoded and deterritorialised fluxes, which it
renders back over to desiring production as it crosses all the limits of social
production? It is the absolute condition for “mak[ing] thought a war machine”:
“Faire de la pensée une machine de guerre” (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 467;
as translated in Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 377).
Let us now suggest, very quickly, that we fall short of the diagrammatic impli-
cation of Deleuzo-Guattarian (or Guattaro-Deleuzian) thought on its most
politically acute plane of insistence unless the “diagram”—beyond the letter
and the intention of those inspired machinists—is explicated and complicated
by secreting within the “and” that links capitalism and schizophrenia (identity
in nature, difference in regime) the constitutive possibility of an ontology of
contemporary art qua cartography-art of our present. (Whence, also, its abil-
ity to reterritorialise upon the cutting-edge capitalism of the creative indus-
tries). Access to this ontology will be governed by the always singular operatory
sense of the diagram, placed in variation across its diverse montages. Maybe
the only thing the diverse montages have in common is their affirmation, from
this reconfigured contemporary perspective, of art as a real-abstract machine
that forces the infinity of possibles to proceed directly from the finite. But this
only confirms the identity-alterity—not so much problematic as problematis-
ing—of a “diagram” that, from Peirce onward, engages the reality of the pos-
sible only by aspiring to the virtualities of a thought experiment.20 However,
since it is a matter of a thought experiment that thinks through art,21 we must
always singularise the reality conditions of its functioning in a matter-flux (as
deterritorialised and semiotised as it might be). The contemporary “site” of
this matter-flux is not to be “theoretically” confirmed (and extended into a
superior reflection on art) but rather problematised by inventing approaches to
works that are immanent to them, at the level of the exigencies, even the most
conceptual, of contemporary thought (which stimulate the interrogation of the
very notion of “the work”). So, diagrams may bear the proper names of artists;
but they designate operations and effects rather than “persons and subjects.”
As a method for the “remontage” of contemporary art, this involves a whole
pragmatics indissociable from the politics of experimentation brought into
play by those “signs-forces” that attack the “strata” so as to make something
unprecedented take flight—and to make pass through it the aesthetic form of
art, which it undoes by forcing it.
* * *
19 This is the importance of the book on Kafka (Deleuze and Guattari 1986) that serves as a hinge between
Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus.
20 What Peirce calls “diagrammatic reasoning.”
21 “En pensant par l’art” (Thinking through art) was the title of Élie During and Laurent Jeanpierre’s
(2010) introduction to “À quoi pense l’art contemporain?,” an issue of the journal Critique.

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To conclude, and to clarify my hypothesis, I’d like to briefly set out the dia-
grammatic forces at work within what I would call the Neto-operation, after the
Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto, who in 2006 produced an intervention entitled
Leviathan Toth upon the very site of the Panthéon de la république (the French
republic, revolution oblige)—a monument that, it cannot be denied, is almost the
same age as the “aesthetic.”
Plugged into the monumental structure like a monstrous parasite, at once to
scale and out of all proportion, irreducible to any kind of metaphor or image,
it (Leviathan × Toth) confronts the visitor with a body that is too foreign—and
doubtless too machined: a counter-installation?—to lend itself in any endur-
ing way to the aesthetic ecstasis of the “bare” artwork with whose overly “sub-
lime” ideal determination we are only too familiar. Instead, what first strikes
the disconcerted visitor is the complexity of the operations, both physical and
mental, carried out on this shrine of republican recognition. I will venture here
to rearticulate its motifs in “critical” and “clinical” terms.
Critical: Leviathan Toth grapples with the whole building, on every one of its
architectural “scales” (technical, functional, material, optical, symbolic, etc.),22
confronting the building and its sheer size by placing all its physical and meta-
physical coordinates into and under tension. The operation thus engages with
nothing less than the image of power in its relation to the power of the image
that animates it and gives it a discursive existence. For the “an/architectural”
denunciation of the Panthéon produced by Neto would not be possible without
the (Hobbesian) metaphysical enunciation of the leviathan that it addresses and
recalls, in the very fabric of the diagram of forces stretched taut around and
above us, and which extends the entire height of the transept, crowned by its
gigantic cupola. From this apex descends a sort of tall, broad cylinder of fab-
ric, forming a vast, distended reticulation, its cells deformed by the extreme
tension under which it is secured to the ground, solidly anchored around the
oscillations of Foucault’s pendulum. The reticulated and static structure of the
cupola—an anamorphosis of the orthogonal grid that provides the underlying
order for the entire plan of the Panthéon, its rationalisation more geometrico—
is captured by a play of deforming forces that seem to threaten to tear it to
shreds. Which brings us quite naturally to the strange formal analogy between
the structure of the panelled cupola and the frontispiece designed by Abraham
Bosse for Hobbes’s Leviathan. Doesn’t the arrangement of the panels evoke
that of the anonymous subjects presented from behind in Bosse’s illustration,
their heads converging towards the sovereign according to the rigorously cal-
culated perspective of an “egalitarian” subjection? As we know, this is doubt-
less the most constitutive image of Power, in so far as it is the presentation of
the proto-foundation of a politics capable of unifying the body of the people
through the representation of all its “members” within a consenting organism,
at peace with itself; an organism that is none other than the “State.” And yet at
the same time, the title of this counter-installation deposes the leviathan, since

22 It is to the work of Philippe Boudon that we owe the development of the notion of “scale” (see Boudon
1971, 1975).

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its signified-signifying syntax, which above all is meant to knot together in one
“statement” the biblical leviathan and the in situ of its Hobbesian political met-
aphoricity, is immediately disrupted by the appending of a mysterious Toth—
the other or the double, the messenger of signs and graphs—opening up an
improbable line of flight that passes between the two “mythical” figures, sub-
mitting their signifying chains to asignifiance. The rhythmic montage of the
words (than-toth) is of a piece with the strange orthography adopted by Neto
for the Egyptian god Thoth,23 which he writes as “Toth,” reinforcing still fur-
ther the register of discursive alterity in which “the” leviathan is taken up here:
a De-enunciation which submits enunciation to that function of deterritor­
ialisation denoted by Deleuze and Guattari, in the conclusion to A Thousand
Plateaus, with a capital D.
Clinical: Underlying this highly-charged putting-in-tension is the fundamen-
tally energetic nature of the environmental appropriation: for the whole instal-
lation rests upon differences in potential and degrees of intensity between the
elements (elasticity and resistance, the lightness and weight of the elastic Lycra,
its stretching into long thin sinews, bloated pockets, and suspended planes).
The virtual-real grasping of being [prise d’être] of its physical alterity (a body
without organs, as Neto says) liberates its “counter-image” effect both from
the labour of the negative within the image, and from a purely critical relation
to its aesthetic forms, so as to introduce the intensive action of a “powerful
non-organic life”24 that saturates these forms via signaesthesia. In this patriotic
site, such a “force of non-organic life” cannot fail to bring to the surface all the
signs of a “dissolute” multitude (multitudo dissoluta, in Hobbes’s Latin). It does
so by disorganising the representation of the “civil” unity of the people of the
Leviathan-State—that people “united in one Person . . . is called a Common-
wealth [or Res publica]” (Leviathan XVII, Hobbes [1651] 1996, 120) of which the
Panthéon is the temple (both ex nostro arbitrio and more geometrico). The rhizo-
matic subversion to which Neto’s “clinical” operation submits this “civil unity”
deploys the diagram of forces mobilised in situ, through the affirmative power
of a biopolitical critique of the State form.
Without these two (critical and clinical) dimensions, which involve the pol-
itics of experimentation in a deregulation of all the senses and all aesthetic
forms of expression and content, of bodies and signs, aesthetics could always
return again. And, ultimately, in its worst possible form. As in the restaging,
in the atrium of the Guggenheim Bilbao, of the formal dispositif of Leviathan
Toth alone (in reality, one of its “parts”): for here we see a brutal de-monstration
of the Paris counter-installation.25 Failing to diagrammatically bring into play
the stratigraphy implied in one of the most symbolic edifices of the integrated
global capitalism of the art-architecture complex, Neto’s anti-leviathan finds

23 Interviewed on the subject, Neto responded that he wanted to introduce a principle of variation in
accord with its own “operation” on the Leviathan.
24 On the “powerful non-organic life” related to the Body without Organs, see Deleuze ([2003] 2005,
46–47).
25 Ernesto Neto, Le Corps qui me porte, Guggenheim Bilbao, 14 February–18 May 2014. Here we leave aside
the Neto retrospective sumptuously “installed” in the exhibition halls.

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itself subverted into a mere foil for the postmodernist pomposity of an archi-
tectural leviathan coated with “fish-scales.”
As explained by the great impresario of the Global Guggenheim, Thomas
Krens, to Frank Gehry, the lead architect of the Bilbao Museum: “The atrium
is yours, you’re the artist here. This is your sculpture . . . you then make perfect
exhibition spaces around it” (quoted in van Bruggen 1997, 115, my emphasis).
And therefore Neto finds himself doubly “installed” here. But the same goes
for a more global context—that of the brand-image of which Thomas Krens
himself was the veritable architect: Venice, Berlin, MassMoca in Massachussetts,
Abu Dhabi. . . . He states quite openly that, “more than any other art institu-
tion in the world, the Guggenheim understands the power of a single building
to define its image. Frank Lloyd Wright’s landmark Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum in New York is recognised universally as an architectural icon of the
modern era, and, since its opening in 1959, has become synonymous in the
public mind with the name Guggenheim. . . . A museum for the twenty-first
century, it perfectly complements our New York City base” (Krens 1997 [9], my
emphasis).26 Among the reasons why, to this day, we still await a de-installation
capable of analysing the new economy of the twenty-first-century museum, we
must no doubt include the importance these global institutions attribute to
the politics of brand-image management. For it is the whole city of Bilbao (and
the economy of the whole region) that has been Guggenheimed.
Bilbao Guggenheim as Gotham City . . . But where is Batman?

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Digital Art Machines
Anne Sauvagnargues
Paris West University Nanterre La Défense

I want to thank very deeply Paulo de Assis, his team, and the Orpheus Institute
for the organisation of this conference on the relationship between philosophy
and music, which is probably more important than the relationship between
Deleuze/Guattari and music. I draw this distinction to highlight that, if one
thinks Guattari and Deleuze can help build a philosophy of art for today, the
first thing one needs to do is not pay any attention to parodisation itself,
because parodisation in and of itself does not exist. Parodisation is just the cut
or, more precisely, the cinematographic montage one does when one tries to
understand something as a reader. For instance, when as a reader of philoso-
phy one tries to understand a practice that is artistic, one mixes between con-
cept and effect, so that parodisation does not concern the history of thought.
I wish to emphasise this point because at the beginning of this conference we
heard it said that it is important for musicians and philosophers to create pos-
sibilities for encounters with each other. But my point is that such a problem
does not exist: there is no need to produce encounters between philosophy,
as a boring academic discipline for specialists, and artists, who are considered
uneducated monkeys capable of transforming society, but using their minds in
unusual ways in order to express something, or themselves. This question on
the “encounter” between art and philosophy is, thus, exactly the same wrong
question as trying to understand whether Gilles Deleuze is or is not a historian
of philosophy. Deleuze is and he is not a historian of philosophy, for the simple
reason that he is a philosopher. Thus, he sometimes speaks about philosophy and
sometimes he doesn’t. When he speaks about philosophy, what he does may
or may not be interesting. If it is interesting, then it is philosophy. If it isn’t
interesting and is just a boring repetition of what we probably already under-
stood by ourselves, then it is called history of philosophy. Therefore, there is
no difference between philosophy and history of philosophy, only between what is
interesting and what is not interesting.
After this introduction, I must try not to be boring. In my view, our contem-
porary way to revitalise Deleuze and Guattari should not be historical, and it
actually cannot be historical. Either it is interesting for us to think with them,
in which case we are doing our own thought, or it isn’t. Thus, I will try not only to
be interesting but to be interesting about what is most important now, which
neither Deleuze nor Guattari addressed simply because they died twenty or
thirty years ago. We are building something for the present and to achieve this
we may sometimes use their concepts and sometimes not. The issue I am dis-

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cussing is digital art or, I would rather say, digital culture: these digital devices
that we are thinking with and which are transforming everything, not only art.
In this beautiful building, in this very hall, I can make up what I believe is a
fresco vaguely appearing from the wall. So, we have here something from the
past, the fresco, this hall, an architecture probably of religious use and origin.
And in this device we have all these capturing elements —video cameras and
microphones—which are part of our contemporary situation: this is digital art.
My first point, or my first definition of digital art can be expressed in the
following simple statement: all forms of art are now digitised, because the kind of rela-
tionship we have with ancient art too is precisely this process of digitising. My point is
that the way we organise our relationship with what today is called art concerns
this curious transformation of our social subjectivities—and we need to think
about this not only as humans but also as philosophers. This digital environ-
ment has something to do with a new type of subjectivities, which are linked
with a new type of understanding, to psychic transformations that previously
were considered exclusively human. The first important transformation of this
digital world is that this kind of subjectivity that we used to understand merely
or sometimes exclusively as human now needs to be extended to include other
living forms and possibly technical objects, which are also related to a certain mode
of existence. When I say “mode of existence,” I mean not only that they trans-
form our modes of existence but also that they have modes of existence of their
own. This is not vitalism, because I am not extending subjectivity to animals
or plants; nor is it technophilia, a kind of weird vitalism extended to technical
objects as if I were talking to myself. What I mean is that we need to think of
existence as something more than a mode given for every kind of existence: we
need to problematise the different modes of existence and open them to what
we have called “technical objects.”
And this is my second point, which is complicated for all of us involved in
the philosophy of art: to understand that there is no distinction between art
and technique/technology. It is crucial to understand that we left, nous sommes
sortis, the situation of the philosophy of art, we left what I have called “the art
machine,” referring to the slow individuation of art in the West. One may think
that art has always existed; if one does one is obliged to put many devices, trans-
formations, and events into art that were not originally intended to be part of
the Western system of art, let’s say from the eighteenth century until the begin-
ning of the twentieth century. With digital art, we departed this art machine,
characterised by a distinction between art and technology, because art was not
meant to be useful. I intend to show that the process by which art became dis-
interested, non-useful, happened at the same time as technique became useful.
Technique and art were individuated at the same time, first in the Renaissance
and then in the eighteenth century with the creation of aesthetics.
If one objects that art already existed before its individuation in the Western
regime and claim that it underwent a process of becoming autonomous, then
one is obliged to maintain a distinction, a real difference, between body and
spirit, need and soul, between nature and culture and, further, between Western
cultures and others. One assumes a Western-centric position when one claims

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that art is the spiritual agency of our cultural devices, the only thing capable of
maintaining the spirituality and bodily effects emanating from our technical
devices. I believe that we need to consider the digital world as an opportunity
to understand the relationship between human environment, technologi-
cal environment, and socio-aesthetic capacities. These need to be thought of
together in order to understand, for instance, what music or cinema will be,
which produces a huge transformation in our discourses about what art should
be. I believe that what I’ve been talking about so far is very easy to understand
for musicians: what would a musician think if someone would say that music is
independent from its instrument.
If we consider that the relationship between technique and art is a rela-
tion whereby technical devices produce sensory-motricities, then producing
sensory-motricities that are not something that is added to our natural body,
overcomes the distinction between nature and culture. Sensory-motricity is a
capacity to bring out effects that are not human-like effects, but effects that
take into account this ecological, technical capacity to transform reality. And
when we take into consideration technicity as sensory-motricity, than we have
a new definition, what we may call—recalling Deleuze’s definition of cinema—
an image.
And this is the third point of my argument: image, sensory-motricity, and
technology. You may recall that Deleuze (1986–89), at the beginning of his
books on cinema, argues rather mysteriously that an image should not be taken
as a representation but as an existence. This argument is difficult and not easy
to understand. When I say image, for example, I should immediately clarify that
I don’t mean only “visual images,” there are sound images too. But if one takes
Deleuze’s argument seriously, one cannot speak only of landscapes but also of
soundscapes, and I suggest that we have to put these “-scapes” together, not
only landscapes and soundscapes but, let’s say, also videoscapes. By “video,” I
don’t mean only the scopocentric theory of theoria, the scopocentrism of the
vision. Instead, I mean the digital capacity to scan or code something that is
regarding the human vision, on the same level as something that is taking human
hearing into consideration.
A video signal is heard and seen at the same time. This is probably the most
crucial thing to understand philosophically: it’s not just a signal that recodes
something belonging to the eye or vision, together with other things belong-
ing to sound or the ear. Of course, we have two eyes and two ears, at least we
often do. For instance, in my case, one ear is better than the other, and my eyes
are not so good anymore, so that I need to use a technological input device,
such as my glasses, to read. My eyes and ears are not only coupled in my head
as a system of “faciality,” as Deleuze and Guattari put it in A Thousand Plateaus
(1987, 167–91), they are also capacities cutting through a continuum of sensory-
motricity. This is the reason why the human eye and ear have always been com-
pleted with socio-techno-aesthetical devices that are both regimes of science
and, as Foucault would put it, équipment de pouvoir (“power facilities”), where
facilities are, like roads and stairs, capacities to form subjectivities.

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Now, the main thing about digital art is to understand the type of relation-
ship that our so-called natural body has with this kind of transformed reality. To
do so, I will give an example related to the fine city of Ghent, the magnificent
altarpiece by the Van Eyck brothers—since it was painted not only by Jan but
by his brother too.1 Why is it interesting to consider the art machine not only in
relation to the autonomy of art but also to imply a certain machinical or tech-
nical capacity? Is the Ghent Altarpiece a tableaux? Is it painting? Absolutely not, it
is not as painting. Of course it is made with paint, and it was painted, but it is
closer to woodcraft.
Let me describe how the Ghent Altarpiece works. God the Father is at the cen-
tre, with St John at the right and the Virgin at the left. In a separate domain
below, you see Paradise with the Sacred Lamb, like Holy Meat to eat and
Mystical Flesh to worship. Nevertheless, the central piece is not the main sub-
ject of this incredible machine, because it also has two wings, which can be
opened and closed. On the wings, there are other paintings, so that the altar-
piece is not one painting but a multiple of images. It is like a video installation,
in which it is quite impossible to focus on a single part. The altarpiece is an
installation and a piece of furniture, and also a box, coloured inside but black
and white outside, as if in anticipation of television. The outside is black and
white for ordinary days, but on sacred days it opens like a cupboard and spreads
its wings as two embracing arms. A devastation of colours suddenly appears. In
the Middle Ages or early Renaissance, the expansion of colours must have been
incredible, as if the faithful in the cathedral had taken LSD.
Clearly, the altarpiece is not a painting meant for a museum. I would claim
that it is a mode of subjectification, it works as an elevator: the religious aspi-
ration that art is capable of immediately raising the soul up to the last level of
paradise. Thus, it has a functioning, a really machinic function.
Many people are not unused to consider paintings as machinic devices
because their eyes were formed and educated by museums. Such people
wouldn’t know that after the beginning of art history and museums, religious
not-art of this type—this équipment, with its capacity to produce Christianity—
was often cut into pieces: one altarpiece was turned into twenty little paint-
ings or, if each of these were cut in two, into forty tiny paintings. What you see
in museums are only little bi-dimensional tableaux created from this kind of
ancient cupboard.
When we speak about art history and don’t take into consideration this
kind of machinery, these quite theatrical installations, we don’t understand
anything. This is one of the reasons why I love Guattari and Deleuze so much,
because they were able—Guattari more than Deleuze, I believe—to take seri-
ously the historical capacity not of art but of art-machines to transform our
modes of subjectification. What changed between the late Middle Ages or
the early Renaissance and our contemporary world? Everything. Everything
changed. If you come up with a single concept of art and believe that with
this one notion—this one spiritual notion, an essence of art—you can explain

1 Hubert and Jan Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb or Ghent Altarpiece (1453), Saint Bavo Cathedral,
Ghent. Oil and tempera on wood panels, 3.5 × 4.6 m. See http://www.sintbaafskathedraal.be/en/gallery.

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everything, you completely miss what happened. This is the reason why I
emphasised that art is not one.
I believe that if one is interested in music one already has an initial under-
standing of this incapacity to cut between human spirituality and machinic
sensory-motricity—let’s say there is an instrumental body without organs of
musicians. The relationship between technique and art did not emerge with
contemporary art, it was always there, which one realises as soon as one recog-
nises it in the present. For instance, certain mechanical relationships between
hand and skin (as when I blow on hand) are the same as certain kinds of rela-
tionships between hand and pigments (as when I blow on my hand). Art always
had a capacity to form a symbiosis not between one body and one device but
within a transformed collective body, including mechanical devices and chem-
ical devices.
Besides mechanical and chemical devices, today we also need to consider
the electronic capacities of symbiosis. Not just body and forces on a mechanical
level, not just bodies and transformation of material on a chemical level, but
its capacities on a quantic level. This is a completely different type of relation-
ship, no longer in Cartesian space and time—that is, not in this universe, where
space and time can be considered to be the frame for material objects, but in
the electronic, energetic world where matter and energy are combined to form
the kind of bodies that are contemporary bodies. Therefore, I am connected to
my mobile phone, which is probably more my master than I am its owner—I
look down and find that twenty seconds ago I received a call, so I enter cyber-
space to check whether somebody is trying to get in touch with me.
Let me summarise my intentions. For this lecture, I planned to talk about
the artists Tania Moraud and Georgik, but then I forgot to bring my USB stick,
which was partly due to jetlag, because I was travelling from Japan. The capacity
for this kind of sensory motricity is related to the new type of digital and capi-
talist subjectivities that we need to think about and that I have been discussing
here. This new digital capitalism is no longer connected with schizo­phrenia,
as we read in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) and Anti-Oedipus
(Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1984). Rather, I would suggest that it is con-
nected with autism, capacities of calculation, and capacities of effects, which
are incredibly narrow and quick and have a certain sensory-motricity that we
need to consider. I talk a lot about sensory motricity, but let me explain what I
mean. We normally consider art only in relation to sensoricity, to senses, not to
motricity. But if I asked a musician whether he or she needs motricity to pro-
duce music, what do you think would be the reply? Of course music is related
to movement, right? Now, if this is understood for music, it follows that even
for poetry, sensitivity or sensibility is related to motricity. Now, it is crucial to
decide which is first, the sensory or motricity? I would argue that it is motricity,
and, therefore, we can consider images as movement. This was of course the
reason why Deleuze put “sensory” and “motricity” together in his conception
of movement/sensory, movement/motricity, image/sensory. Right? So, he put
sensory-motricity together in this concept of movement-image (e.g., Deleuze
1986: 155–59; 1989:1–13). Nevertheless, I think it’s crucial to decide whether

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perception or motricity comes first. I would argue that motricity is more impor-
tant, because perception is not an opening onto a given world and, when we
are talking about art experiences, perception is not used to perceive a new kind
of world. Instead, perception is used to create or to construct science that is
techno-motricity, the elaborate products of experiencing, so that we do not
perceive another region of experience, we produce it. This is the reason why
art is important.
Art is not important because it gives us a better, more profound, or more
spiritual way of understanding our world, or because it is a mystical door to a
better reality. Art is important because it is the only way we have to construct in
a collective way the modes of subjectification by which we live. Insofar as we are
capable of constructing them and placing them as effects outside our zones of
experiences, art is not an imaginary doubling of reality but part of reality itself.
Surely, art is not the only way to achieve reality—this would be idealistic—but
it is the only way to do so not as a given community but as a collective that is
trying to understand the way it can transform its own reality.
Thus, art’s real capacity is to give us the possibility of understanding how
experiencing needs to be formed; it is not something already given to us by
some kind of god. From this perspective, art has only a political value: it makes
us capable of re-singularising and transforming our present modes of existence
and transforming them in a way that seems better for us tomorrow.

References
Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement 1984. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert
and Barbara Habberjam. London: The Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane.
Athlone Press. First published 1983 London: Athlone Press. First published
as Cinéma 1: L’Image-Mouvement (Paris: 1972 as L’anti-Œdipus (Paris: Éditions de
Éditions de Minuit). Minuit). Translation first published 1977
———. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time Image. (New York: Viking Press).
Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and ———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian
of Minnesota Press. First published 1985 Massumi. Minneapolis: University of
as Cinéma 2: L’image-temps (Paris: Éditions Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as
de Minuit). Mille plateaux (Paris: Éditions de Minuit).
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1977)

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Word and Image
What is the Possible Dark Precursor?
Jūratė Baranova
Vilnius University

Foucault and Deleuze: between word and image

Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault shared similar interests. They united their
experimentations in philosophy with the visual arts. Foucault started from
reflections on visual images. Deleuze (1988, 80) noticed that Foucault had a
passion for describing scenes in his written texts, or, even more, “for offering
descriptions that stand as scenes.” He thought Foucault in some sense a painter
as well as a writer, having in mind Foucault’s descriptions of Diego Velázquez’s
Las Meninas, pictures by Édouard Manet and René Magritte, and “the admirable
descriptions of the chain gang, the asylum, the prison and the little prison van,
as though they were scenes and Foucault were a painter” (ibid.).
In Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason ([1965] 1988),
Foucault treats examples from literature and art as part of the same historical
special turn towards madness in the Renaissance mentality. Foucault reveals
how from the fifteenth century on the face of madness haunted the imagi-
nation of Western people. In his historical study he not only reflected on ex­-
amples of discourse (Sebastian Brandt’s satire Das Narrenschiff [Ship of Fools]) but
also pointed to pictures by Hieronymus Bosch (The Cure of Madness, The Ship of
Fools, and the Temptation of St. Anthony triptych, c.1505) and Pieter Bruegel (Mad
Meg or Dulle Griet, c.1564) as visual signs of the same approach (Foucault [1965]
1988, 15). As Deleuze (1988, 50) observed in his book on Foucault, “Foucault
continued to be fascinated by what he saw as much as by what he heard or read,
and the archaeology he conceived of is an audiovisual archive (beginning with
the history of science).”
The opening words of the first chapter of Foucault’s The Order of Things
([1970] 2002) concern a painter: “The painter is standing a little back from his
canvas” (Foucault [1970] 2002, 3). Velazquez’s picture Las Meninas becomes the
starting point for further reflections on classical representation. The discrep-
ancy between the word and the image are very clear in Foucault’s correspond-
ence with Belgian painter René Magritte (1898–1967) and his reflections on his
own visual experiments in the text with the same title as Magritte’s picture, This
Is Not a Pipe (1983). In this text, Foucault also mentions Paul Klee and Wassily

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Kandinsky. Foucault was also fond of the work of French painter Édouard
Manet (1832–83) and gave lectures on his pictures in Milan (1967), Tokyo (1970),
Florence (1970), and Tunis (1971). Deleuze believed Foucault had destroyed his
writings about Manet and that they were lost. He also thought that the texts of
the lectures had never existed apart from as a transcript. After Deleuze’s death,
Maryvonne Saison found the transcript of the Tunis lecture and published it as
La peinture de Manet (Foucault 2004).
At the beginning of his philosophical career, Deleuze combined his inter-
est in philosophy with his interest in literature. His texts on Hume’s, Kant’s,
Bergson’s, and Spinoza’s philosophies were intermingled with his insights on
Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, published in 1964 (Proust and Signs [Deleuze
1972]), and reflections on the phenomenon of writers such as the Marquis
de Sade and Sacher-Masoch, published in 1967 (Masochism: An Interpretation
of Cruelty [Deleuze 1971]). There are few mentions of visual images in any of
his books written before meeting Félix Guattari in 1969, including Difference
and Repetition (first published 1968 [Deleuze 1994]) and The Logic of Sense (first
published 1969 [Deleuze 1990]). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (first
published 1972 [Deleuze and Guattari (1977) 1983]), written together with
Guattari, was Deleuze’s first broadly interdisciplinary book, where the phil-
osophical insights on the schizoanalysis controversy in psychoanalysis were
intermingled with examples not only from literature (Beckett, Canetti, Céline,
Ginsberg, Gombrowicz, Joyce, Kafka, Kerouac, Lawrence, Mallarmé, Miller,
Poe, Proust, Sade) but also from visual arts such as painting and installations
(Dalí, Duchamp, Klee, Tintoretto, Turner) and even from music (Cage). They
were few in number, only mentions: the intention of the book was different.
A far more interdisciplinary approach appeared in A Thousand Plateaus (first
published 1980 [Deleuze and Guattari 1987]), the second volume of Capitalism
and Schizophrenia. Here there is more sound (Bach, Bartók, Beethoven, Berlioz,
Bizet, Cage, Chopin, Debussy, Mahler, Mozart, Mussorgsky, Stravinsky, Wagner,
Verdi) and many more visual impressions (Bonnard, Cézanne, Dalí, Ernst,
Bacon, Giotto, Kandinsky, Klee, Mondrian, Monet, Titian, Vermeer). For the
first time, the names of film directors (Godard, Herzog, Hitchcock, Pasolini,
Pollock, Sternberg, Truffaut) and even actors (De Niro) appear. So Deleuze
was interested in the relation not only between philosophy and literature
but also between philosophy and the visual arts. In Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari: Intersecting Lives, Dosse (2011) wrote about Deleuze’s dialogue with
the arts, his friendship with French artist Gérard Fromanger (440), and his
real attraction to cinema (397–422). In any case, after finishing his common
project with Guattari, Deleuze made a decisive turn towards visual culture. In
1981 he published his book on the British painter Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon:
The Logic of Sensation (Deleuze 2003). Two years later, in 1983, the first volume
of Cinema, The Movement Image (Deleuze 1986), appeared, followed in 1985 by
the second volume, The Time-Image (Deleuze 1989). In 1986 Deleuze published
Foucault (Deleuze 1988), which, as he said in an interview, was inspired by
Foucault death in 1984 and the necessity to reflect on his ideas. In that inter-
view, Deleuze described his own attitude towards philosophy and the visual,

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following Foucault: “Philosophy as a general dermatology or art of surfaces (I

tried to describe such surfaces in The Logic of Sense). The new forms of image
give the problem a new impetus. It’s in Foucault himself that surfaces become
essentially surfaces on which things are inscribed: this is what utterances being
‘neither visible nor hidden’ is all about. Archaeology amounts to constituting a
surface on which things are inscribed” (Deleuze 1995, 87).

Heterogeneity and dark precursor

The concept of heterogeneity is one of the key concepts in Deleuze and
Guattari’s chaosmic universe. The motto “heterogeneity versus homogeneity”
formed a starting point for further arguments in building their philosophical
vision. Heterogeneity is not simultaneous with homogeneity nor does it come
after it. They discern heterogeneity in every event; heterogeneity is the open
possibility for becoming. In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari (1994,
158) wrote: “In every event there are many heterogeneous, always simultaneous
components, since each of them is a meanwhile, all within the meanwhile that
makes them communicate through zones of indiscernibility, of undecidabil-
ity: they are variations, modulations, intermezzi, singularities of a new infinite
order.” Additionally, in A Thousand Plateaus, they conclude that heterogene-
ity moves through all possible spheres of becoming; it intersects the order of
things, the order of words, and the order of arts. Heterogeneous series com-
pose a rhizome: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other,
and must be: “Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 10).
There is also essential heterogeneity between the order of things and the
order of words: “When knife cuts flesh, when food or poison spreads through
the body, when a drop of wine falls into water, there is an intermingling of bodies;
but the statements, ‘The knife is cutting the flesh,’ ‘I am eating,’ ‘The water is
turning red,’ express incorporeal transformations of an entirely different nature
(events)” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 86). Reflecting on the order of words,
Deleuze and Guattari suppose that an ideal speaker-listener is as impossi-
ble as a homogeneous linguistic community. They conclude, “Language is,
in Weinreich’s words, ‘an essentially heterogeneous reality’” (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987, 7). A philosophy is also permeated with the same heterogeneity.
They define philosophy not as discussion, nor as communication or medita-
tion, but as the creation of concepts. But a concept is connected with a heter-
ogenesis as well. They write, “The concept is defined by the inseparability of a
finite number of heterogeneous components traversed by a point of absolute
survey at infinite speed” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 20–21, italics removed).
The philosophers also state that the error we must guard against is to believe
there is a kind of logical order to this string, these crossings or transformations:
“It is already going too far to postulate an order descending from the animal
to the vegetable, then to molecules, to particles. Each multiplicity is symbiotic;
its becoming ties together animals, plants, microorganisms, mad particles, a
whole galaxy. Nor is there a preformed logical order to these heterogeneities,

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the Wolf-Man’s wolves, bees, anuses, little scars” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987,
250).
If one starts to discuss an art at this moment, the concept of heterogeneity
comes into play. Deleuze and Guattari declared that they in no sense believe
in a fine arts system; but they believed in very diverse problems whose solu-
tions are found in heterogeneous arts. They wrote, “To us, Art is a false concept,
a solely nominal concept; this does not, however, preclude the possibility of
a simultaneous usage of the various arts within a determinable multiplicity”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 300–301).
There is no preformed order between heterogeneities, but is there any possi-
ble common point of communication between them?
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 10) noticed that this com-
munication could be neither imitation nor resemblance:

It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing its image in a
signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.). But this is true only on the level
of the strata—a parallelism between two strata such that a plant organization on
one imitates an animal organization on the other. At the same time, something
else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus value of
code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid
and a becoming-orchid of the wasp. . . . There is neither imitation nor resemblance,
only an exploding of two heterogeneous series on the line of flight composed by a
common rhizome.

What is this something else? How can it be named? In his early work Difference
and Repetition, Deleuze mentioned the dark precursor. He wrote that every sys-
tem contains its dark precursor, which ensures the communication of periph-
eral series. Given the variety among systems, this role is fulfilled by quite diverse
determinations. Deleuze (1994, 119) mentions the possibility of a third party
ensuring communication between two differences:

The most important difficulty, however, remains: is it really difference which

relates different to different in these intensive systems? Does the difference
between differences relate difference to itself without any other intermediary?
When we speak of communication between heterogeneous systems, of coupling
and resonance, does this not imply a minimum of resemblance between the series,
and an identity in the agent which brings about the communication? Would not
“too much” difference between the series render any such operation impossible?
Are we not condemned to rediscover a privileged point at which difference can be
understood only by virtue of a resemblance between the things which differ and the
identity of a third party?

Deleuze does not define exactly what this dark precursor or third party is. In
Foucault, Deleuze (1988) returned to the problem, mentioning that Kant had
already encountered a similar problem: he had needed to find a third party
to be appropriate for the spontaneity of understanding and the receptivity of
intuition as two heterogeneities. Kant therefore, according to Deleuze, had
to invoke a third agency beyond the two forms: the schema of imagination.

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Deleuze (1988, 68) discerns that “even Foucault needs a third agency to co-
adapt the determinable and determination, the visible and the articulable, the
receptivity of light and the spontaneity of language, operating either beyond or
this side of the two forms.” What is the possible dark precursor ensuring com-
munication between the word and the image as two heterogeneous systems?
This third party in Foucault’s texts is non-place or distance “which bears witness
to the fact that the opponents do not belong to the same space or rely on the
same form” (ibid.). On the one hand, Deleuze discerns the role of a third party
in Foucault’s concept of “diagram,” on the other, Deleuze also suggests another
line of flight leading to the third party.

Magritte and Ivanauskaitė: abrupt relief above the

horizontal line of words
Foucault’s correspondence with Magritte in a sense inspired him to reflect
on heterogeneity between the word and the image. Belgian surrealist René
Magritte encouraged creative philosophical thought in his painting. Magritte
proposed an “optimistic” version of surrealism, based not on the unconscious-
ness or dreams but on the unexpected overturning of reality. His paintings are
examples of plausible inversions of formal logic and ordinary meaning, leading
in each case to a paradox. Magritte experimented with the relation between
words and images in various ways. First, he created gaps between the titles of
pictures and their images. As Foucault noticed, Magritte named his paintings
to focus attention upon the very act of naming. Magritte reflected his experi-
ment as an attempt to demolish everyday ideas in pictures: “The titles are cho-
sen in such a way as to keep anyone from assigning my paintings to the familiar
region that habitual thought appeals to in order to escape perplexity” (Magritte
quoted in Foucault 1983, 36). The image and the title of the picture are not
linked by a narrative or necessary logical link. It seems that the titles of most
of Magritte’s pictures have nothing to do with the images themselves. Foucault
reflected the results of such an experiment, noting: “This gulf, which prevents
us from being both the reader and the viewer at the same time, brings the
image into abrupt relief above the horizontal line of words” (Foucault 1983, 36).
Second, in his experiment with words and images, Magritte included words
in the paintings alongside the images, or even instead of images, or in paradox-
ical correlation with the images. In 1928–291 he created the famous picture The
Treachery of Images (This Is Not a Pipe) (La trahison des images [Ceci n‘est pas une pipe])
in which the painted pipe coexists with the explanation written below: “This
is not a pipe.” In 1964 Magritte repeated this surreal word and image puzzle in
the picture This Is Not an Apple (Ceci n‘est pas une pomme), in which in the same
manner a realistic depiction of an apple is accompanied by the subtitle “This is
not an apple.” Two years later, Magritte repeated the idea in the picture The Two
Mysteries (Les deux mystères, 1966), which depicts the painting This Is Not a Pipe as
an object in the painter’s studio with another pipe hanging above it like an air

1
Foucault indicates a different date: 1926 (Foucault 1983, 15).

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 Jūratė Baranova

balloon pretending to be the real pipe. Foucault (1983, 15) reflected on both var-
iants of This Is Not a Pipe: “The first version disconcerts us by its very simplicity.
The second multiplies intentional ambiguities before our eyes.” This sequence
of the painted pipes inspired Foucault to ask a number of questions that lead to
possible multiplicities, reflecting the relationship between a pipe and its image:
“There are two pipes. Or rather must we not say, two drawings of the same pipe?
Or yet a pipe and the drawing of that pipe, or yet again two drawings each rep-
resenting a different pipe? Or two drawings, one representing a pipe and the
other not, or two more drawings yet, of which neither the one nor the other
are or represent pipes? Or yet again, a drawing representing not a pipe at all
but another drawing, itself representing a pipe so well that I must ask myself:
To what does the sentence written in the painting relate?” (Foucault 1983, 16).
These questions open something like a gap between the discourse about the
pipe and the visual image of a pipe. Reflecting on Foucault, Deleuze wrote:

In his commentary on Magritte, Foucault shows that there will always be a

resurgence of “the little thin band, colourless and neutral” separating text from
figure, the drawing of the pipe from the statement “this is a pipe” to the point
where the statement becomes “this is not a pipe,” since neither the drawing, nor the
statement, nor the “this” as an apparently common form is a pipe: “the drawing of
the pipe and the text that ought to name it cannot find a place to meet, either on the
black canvas or above it.” It is a “non-relation.” (Deleuze 1988, 62)

Deleuze in his experimental philosophy took seriously into account the insights
of the artists themselves. We also suggest an alternative reflection on the same
topic following some examples from the creation and insights of the “minor
art” by Lithuanian writer and artist Jurga Ivanauskaitė.2
Foucault expressed his personal experience concerning the discrepancy
between the word and the image as follows: “What I really like about the paint-
ing is the necessity of watching. I feel so cool. This is the one of the rare things
I were able to write about with a pleasure, without fighting with anyone. I think
I have no tactical or strategic relation towards painting” (Foucault 1994, 2:706,
my translation).3 A very similar reflection on the discrepancy between writing
and painting was also expressed by Ivanauskaitė, not from the position of an
observer or a theoretician, but from the position of a creator of words and
images noticing that when one writes one is obsessed with words, having no
peace day or night, but that painting brings meditative rest:

2 Jurga Ivanauskaitė (1961–2007) was a prose writer, poet, essayist, playwright, and artist, and a traveler
in India and Tibet. She wrote twenty books. Her creativity and world perception were influenced not
only by literary contexts (Jack Kerouac, Saulius Tomas Kondrotas, Ričardas Gavelis) but also by surreal
art (Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel, Salvador Dalí, Paul Delvaux, Giorgio de Chirico, Šarūnas Sauka,
and, especially, René Magritte), classical art (El Greco, Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, old sacred
paintings, and more), cinema (Luis Buñuel, Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky), theatre and music
(John Lennon, Jim Morrison, Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt), philosophy (Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre), and
other theoretical literature. The works of Mircea Eliade and Carl Jung formed Ivanauskaitė’s interpreta-
tion of the relationship between the East and the West.
3 “Ce qui me plaît justement dans la peinture, c’est qu’on est vraiment obligé de regarder. Alors là, c’est
mon repos. C’est l’une des rares choses sur laquelle j’écrive avec plaisir et sans me battre avec qui que ce
soit. Je crois n’avoir aucun rapport tactique ou stratégique avec la peinture.”

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Writing and painting are two different things. Writing is a very exhausting and
tormenting activity: while writing you constantly feel tension, you feel how your
unconsciousness is boiling, working. During the nights when I am writing a novel
I see texts coming to me in my dreams. A terribly tiresome and exhausting process:
all day you are writing and afterwards all night you are further laying out the words.
Pictures for me are pure meditation. After meditation you quietly fall asleep. All day
you are painting, but when your work is finished—that’s all. The burden falls off
your shoulders and nothing else is tormenting you. (Quoted in Baranova 2014, 194,
my translation)

Ivanauskaitė never read Deleuze or Foucault, but by rhizomatic link she was
virtually connected. Influenced by Magritte’s painting experiments, she trans-
formed these insights into surreal short stories. The unexpectedness of the plot
in these stories, like a surreal upturn of reality, is very close to Magritte’s thought
experiments in his painting. In the short story When Will Godot Come? the charac-
ters from Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot meet Magritte’s character the
man with the black coat and hat. The young writer asks a provocative question:
What if Godot came at last? What would he be like? Possibly, he would be like a
character from Magritte’s paintings. The paradoxical intrigue of Ivanauskaitė’s
short stories is based on the interweaving of surreal signs from painting and
from literature. The story The Day That Never Happened is also based on a rather
“Magrittian” question, what if New Year’s Day never came? This question is for-
mulated at the very beginning of the plot: “Just look at the calendar and you’ll
see for yourselves. That day simply did not exist!” (Ivanauskaitė 1997, 193).
The story is recalled from a young man’s perspective. On the day that never
came, he met a girl who made him sick with her talk of supreme love. He hated
her and scolded her naivety and left the room, but when he returned he found
her covered in blood and overcome with disaster. The room was full of feath-
ers. The fragile creature moaning in his bed appeared to have wings and feath-
ers. The narrator glanced at his own hands and noticed that tangled feathers
and iridescent dust clung to his blood-covered hands and arms. “I broke her
wings . . . sooner or later someone would have done it,” concluded the narra-
tor (Ivanauskaitė 1997, 201). The writer in this story turns the expression “to
break the wings” upside down, transferring it from language into reality. The
question of what would happen were our words unexpectedly to turn into real
events is also very close to Magritte’s thought experiments.
Ivanauskaitė was also inspired in her visual works by Magritte’s experimental
games with the heterogeneity between the word and the image. She reflected
on the consequences of her double interest in the word (being a writer) and
the image (being an artist) saying: “My paintings until now have been very lit-
erary; I like to include into them not only a brief plot, but the entire narra-
tive as well—the story, the heroes—in order to make them a bit similar to the
animated cartoon films where everything is moving from point A to point Z,
where it changes from the beginning to the end” (quoted in Baranova 2014,
193, my translation). The closest example is the poster she created for the rock
group Antis (figure 2.3.1). The Lithuanian word antis can be translated to mean
“a duck,” but in this picture it has several meanings.

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 Jūratė Baranova

Figure 2.3.1.

First, “a duck” in its direct biological meaning is an animal. The duck is visible
in the poster, held by the work’s main hero in his hands behind him. Second,
Antis (a duck) is the name of a famous Lithuanian rock group. The group’s
leader, Algirdas Kaušpėdas, can be seen looking in the mirror as in Magritte’s
picture Reproduction Prohibited (Portrait of Edward James) (La reproduction interd-
ite [Portrait d’Edward James], 1937). In Magritte’s picture, a man looking at him-
self in a mirror sees not his face reflected but his own image from behind. The

322

Figure 2.3.1. Jurga Ivanauskaitė. Poster for the rock group Antis (a duck), 1988.
 Heterogeneity of Word and Image

picture’s viewer observes two identical images of the same body from behind,
which is impossible in the real world. In Ivanauskaitė’s poster, the protagonist
does see his reflection in the mirror in front of him but the image is not iden-
tical with his real figure. He sees himself as an angel with angel’s wings, but in
reality he is holding a duck behind him and the angels’ wings are just those
of the duck. The spectator is able to see two different images: the first is the
reflection of an angel in the mirror and the other is the disclosure of the fraud.
But the picture also has a third plane. The third metaphorical meaning of the
word antis (a duck) in Lithuanian is “the forgery in the press.” The walls of the
room in which the action is taking place are covered with old newspapers on
which the word antis (a duck) is printed. On one side, at the time the poster was
created the rock group Antis was hugely popular, playing an important role in
establishing Lithuanian independence. The group was reflected in the news-
paper almost every day. On the other side, the third meaning of the word reveals
that all this glory is a bit like “the forgery in the press,” inviting the spectator to
reflect the multiple meanings of the picture.
This picture creates not only literary but also philosophical intrigue: it raises
questions very similar to those Foucault asked about Magritte’s This Is Not a
Pipe: How many ducks are there in the picture: one, two, three, or four? Does
the word “duck” (antis) written on the wall have anything in common with a
real duck, the duck as an animal, or only with a metaphorical duck, meaning
the duck as “the forgery in the press”? Do these several ducks (the animal, the
painted object, the rock group’s name, and the word on the wall) have anything
in common? Or are they forever separated by an abyss? Is there a hierarchy
between the ducks? Which one of them is the most “real”?
The picture also raises the question of whether it is possible to take any image
(as a reflection in a mirror) for granted and as the final event. The story is cre-
ated in the space in-between, between the word and the image. It is based on
the heterogeneity of the several meanings of the word antis—the impossibility
of reducing them to a single one.
What is their possible point of meeting, which could be the dark precursor
of these heterogeneous ducks? Deleuze would have answered: it is a thought.
Deleuze mentions this possibility following Magritte and Foucault’s corre-
spondence: “Visibilities are not defined by sight but are complexes of actions
and passions, actions and reactions, multisensorial complexes, which emerge
into the light of day. As Magritte says in a letter to Foucault, thought is what
sees and can be described visibly” (Deleuze 1988, 59). Deleuze does not relate
this thought, on what sees and can be described visibly, to Martin Heidegger’s
Lichtung or to Maurice Merleau-Ponty phenomenological concept of a free or
open element that addresses itself to sight only secondarily. He discerns two
points of difference: Foucault’s light-being is inseparable from a particular
mode, and while being a priori is none the less historical and epistemological
rather than phenomenological; on the other hand, it is not as open to words as
it is to sight, since words as statements find completely different conditions for
such an opening in the language-being and its historical modes (see Deleuze
1988, 59).

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 Jūratė Baranova

This thought, which sees and can be described visibly as a third part navigat-
ing inward through the heterogeneous systems, from Foucault and Deleuze’s
perspective differs from phenomenological insight for the reason that it looks
more like a diagram. Deleuze points out that Foucault suggests this new infor-
mal dimension gives it its most precise name: it is a “diagram” and this dia-
gram is no longer an auditory or visual archive but a map, a cartography that
is coextensive with the whole social field. It is an abstract machine. A diagram
is defined by its informal functions and matter; in terms of form, it makes no
distinction between content and expression, a discursive formation and a
non-discursive formation. Following Foucault, Deleuze (1988, 34) concludes,
“It is a machine that is almost blind and mute, even though it makes others see
and speak.” Deleuze went on to explore Foucault’s concept of diagram in his
book on Francis Bacon’s painting, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation.

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fenomenas: Tarp siurrealizmo ir York: Columbia University Press. First
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Deleuze, Gilles. 1971. Masochism: An Translated by Paul Patton. New York:
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———. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1977)
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Cinéma 2: L’image-temps (Paris: Minuit). (Paris: Minuit).
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Burchell. New York: Columbia University translation first published 1970 (London:
Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que Tavistock).
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———. (1970) 2002. The Order of Things: Never Happened.” In Lithuania: In Her
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mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard). This

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 Godard and/with Deleuze:
“C’est comme ça que le monde naît”1
Zsuzsa Baross
Trent University, Canada

Form is performative. Unlike a medium (telegraph or fortune cookie) or genre

(poetry, journal, or essay) that qualifies or modifies, perverts or undermines the
sense it carries but still operates in the same field of signification, form is an act
of creation. The fragment, the triptych, or, as in the case of this essay, a Zig-Zag
performs a unique action, proper to it and to it alone, whose effects exceed the
work of signs.
The Zig-Zag that in-forms this essay is to perform three distinct tasks. The
first is to be a modest homage to one of its two protagonists, Gilles Deleuze,
who himself celebrates the prodigious form and dedicates the last entry of his
Abécédaire (Deleuze and Parnet 1988–89) to its emblem and perfect image, the
letter Z. The second, more onerous task for the text is to redouble as the per-
formative and pragmatic confirmation of the thesis it advances in the writing:
the creation of the new by montage—montage-image, thought-image, or musi-
cal montage, that is, melody. A miracle in a non-theological sense of the word.
Not the prestidigitation of the thinker, writer, or cineaste working behind the
scenes, knowing in advance where the work is heading, but the coincidence
of chance and necessity. The first, the chance event—an incalculable encoun-
ter, an unforeseeable collision taking place between discrete and distant ele-
ments—is what the thinker, or the cineaste (Godard), or the painter (Bacon),
or the composer (Boulez) hopes for and perhaps facilitates; but the second, the
necessity of the event that is born and carried by chance is something the latter
observes (also in the religious sense, as one observes an interdiction), guards,
and, for its future, assumes responsibility.
Furthermore, if the first two tasks are to be accomplished, the writing itself
must effectuate the form and become a micro-machine for the creation of
something new. The Zig-Zag must take shape and place in the writing: the ten-
sion between two horizontal lines, moving at a distance, in opposite directions,
must be conjoined—reconducted and recharged—by the transversal of a diag-
onal in the elan of a single movement, indivisible into parts. (With an energetic
geste of the hand in the video, Deleuze draws in the air the movement of this
single line.)

1 “So is the world born” (Deleuze and Parnet 1988–89, my translation).

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 Godard and/with Deleuze

The new, therefore, is not a new relation between the parts, which may not
even be the right word. It is born in an instant, and this birth has something in
common with the creativity of montage discussed in this essay: it is simultan­
eous with the birth of the form, with the Zig-Zag taking place, which actual-
ises it, sets free its effects, on an entirely different plane. In consequence, the
new is discontinuous with the form; it hovers over it as if it were its pure effect,
without having anything in common with it, with what gave birth to it. In other
words, it pertains to the incalculable, to the miracle that is incalculable.

First horizontal: from Deleuze to Godard or three

telegraphic axioms
0. A concept in the vocabulary of Deleuze is neither predictive nor descriptive,
nor true or false. It “gives a new truth to things,” cuts and distributes things dif-
ferently.2 In other words, it is creative of possible worlds or, to borrow another
of Deleuze’s terms, it possibilises virtual worlds—worlds whose weakness or
strength is to be measured, in an inverse of Platonic maieutics, by the viability,
desirability, or necessity of that world itself.3 A whole world—a universe—and
not new relations of things in the (same old) world.

1. The concept “dark precursor” is cinematic. Like the cinema, it temporalises in

a very specific way, engenders anachronic contretemps that are either untimely,
arrive too soon, or suffer from a fatal but creative belatedness. On the one hand,
the coming to pass of its events, whose path it determines in advance, precedes
the actualisation of its own presence (“The thunderbolt explodes [éclate] . . . but
it is preceded by a dark precursor, invisible, imperceptible, which determines
its path in reverse in advance” [Deleuze 1994, 119, translation modified]); on
the other hand, its presence becomes visible a posteriori, against the current
of chronological time, as the after-effect of its own effects: the new it intro-
duces to the system. (“The path it traverses is invisible and becomes visible only
in reverse, to the extent that it is travelled and covered over [recouvert] by the
phenomena it induces within the system” [ibid., 119–20, translation modified]).
Adding one more complication to this already folded time, one could also ask
whether this covering over [recouvert] is not also a recovery, a saving measure;
whether this passage in reverse over the path leading to the éclate recovers what
is in the course of disappearance, or, on the contrary, it effaces the path that
leads to the birth of the new and thereby the evidence as to its lack of “orig-
inality.” Such a hypothesis would also explain why the precursor is fated to
obscurity.

2 As Deleuze writes in a 1956 essay on Bergson, the concepts of a great philosopher “donnent aux chose
une vérité nouvelle, une distribution nouvelle, un découpage extraordinaire” (Deleuze quoted in
Dumoncel 2009, 158, my translation; give a new truth to things, a new distribution, an extraordinary
frame).
3 “Créer de nouveaux concepts qui aient une nécessité,” such is the task of philosophy (Deleuze 1990, 48,
as translated in Deleuze 1995, 32; to create new concepts, with their own necessity).

327
 Zsuzsa Baross

Now, we believe we know such aberrant temporal trajectories from the cin-
ema, which actualises them and gives them to direct experience: as the untimely
apparition of signs, the becoming sensible (in every sense) of events after the
fact, the memories of the future (“le souvenir d’un avenir,” remembrance of
things to come, as says the title of a Chris Marker film), as sendings from the
past to futures yet to arrive . . .4 One would like to think that cinema invents
such heterochronias, breaches their path, hollows out the zone of their time
inside time. We certainly learnt to associate such productive dis- and reorder-
ings of chronological time with the work of the image. Except that Deleuze’s
dark precursor now robs us of the illusion of this originality. Certainly “older”
than the cinema, the figure, which is not a figure, belongs to the immemo-
rial, to cosmic time. It is also more “originary”: it has no precursor. Its force or
agency is without identity or place, “there is no other place than that which it
lacks, there is no identity other than that which it lacks” (Deleuze 1994, 120,
translation modified). As such it precedes identity and difference. On the other
hand, as Deleuze says, every system contains its dark precursor. If the cinema is
certainly not the first empirical field to shelter it, it is perhaps the first medium
where it operates with such spectacular effects, and which, moreover, exhibits
so powerfully its obscurity as fatal and necessary. As Godard (1998, 308) says,
one shoots today and projects tomorrow. In between—between registration
and projection, between the invisible tracings of light and the visible image,
between the reel of 35 mm still frames and the projected film, there opens a
hiatus: a gap in the world that nothing could fill, a rupture in the continuity
of time that nothing could repair.5 This hiatus, which has neither a location in
space nor a time in time, is creative of something that nothing else could cre-
ate. Such is not the magic but the miracle of/in the cinema.

2. Godard’s theorem—the cinema is a form that thinks (“le cinéma, une forme
qui pense”6)—is conceptual. It does not define or represent what the cinema is;
instead, it instantaneously transforms it into a total apparatus (camera, projec-
tor, and the archive) that reorders the relation between cinema and thought—
ends the monopoly of thought over thinking. Henceforth, the cinema is not a
machine made for representation or narration, for the creation of facts and for
the making of fiction; paradoxically, it does something for which it was perhaps
not made and gives birth to something that is not made, something absolutely
new: a form that thinks, thought without parole.

3. The “form that thinks” redistributes the creative function of spectator,

auteur, and apparatus. The events of the cinema arrive—éclate—by way of
the apparatus cinema, by means of its multiple creative repetitions. They are

4 On cinematic temporalities, see Baross (2011).

5 On this same subject, see Baross (2006).
6 The formula is repeated throughout the work: in Histoire(s) du cinema, in Scénario du film Passion, in
Godard’s discussion with Marguerite Duras: “c’est le film qui pense . . . il n’y a qu’un témoin de cette
pensée” (Godard and Duras 1998, 143). See also Baross (2014).

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 Godard and/with Deleuze

present in between and nowhere else: between image and text, voice and image,
and especially between images, actual and virtual—for the most part distant,
heterogeneous, disparate. In consequence, auteur and spectator—neither of
which is the (or a) creator (dispensing with Rancière’s figure of the emanci-
pated spectator)—both become witnesses of the creations of the form cinema,
which are pre-personal, a-subjective, arrive from the outside, from an ailleurs.

The diagonal: montage—or monter and montrer—

according to Godard
The signature method of Godard’s montage is visible, visibly legible, through-
out his massive corpus, especially in the late period, but the work that hyper-
bolises it, carries it to its very limit of disintegration, is the monumental
Histoire(s) du cinema (Godard 1988–98). A pure montage film of cinematic rep-
etitions of second-hand materials (“le cinema /  re-dites /  le,” reads a cap-
tion in Histoire(s)), it draws its borrowed materials from archives of every sort:
black-and-white images, paintings, drawings, soundtracks, photographs, and
especially an infinitely rich collection of excerpts lifted from “toutes les his-
toires du cinéma”—of the cinema that ever was, the cinema that was not to
be, and the cinema that could have been . . . The montage deploys itself along
two principal lines of movement: a “prismatic” dispersion recalls Mallarmé’s
methodless method (the throw of the dice is often referred to or filmed by
Godard) of letting chance throw elements “near or far from the latent theme
[conducteur latent],”—here we have again the same fated belatedness—so that
“in some exact spiritual mise en scene” and “because of the verisimilitude
. . . the text [here, the montage] imposes itself ” (Mallarmé 2015, 1, translation
modified); then a contrary movement of condensation, as in dream-work, con-
tracts distant, heterogeneous elements into dense and opaque image-signs. On
the one hand, there is seriality, the dissemination and prolongation of spon-
taneous associations forming multiple series along forever bifurcating lines;
on the other hand, at extreme points of dense condensations, different series
(image and sound series, voice and text series, music and writing series, image
and image series, etc.) intersect in the contracted space of an infinitely com-
plex montage, knotting together multiple strands—which in turn themselves
become points of departure for new series.
Ideally, one would create a cartography mapping these labyrinthine trajec­
tories or a partition that simultaneously tracks each developing line, the promis-
cuous, spontaneous coupling, copulations, nuptials of each image or montage
cell; ideally, one would like to bracket and suspend interest in the work of the
work to stay close to the rhythmic mutations, follow the becomings as a single
image is inscribed (or inscribes itself) in different series: moving closer or fall-
ing further away from the imaginary “conducteur latent” that the montage—
following/responding to these very associations—itself invents. Yet as the
mobile effects of these interplays—at once moving vertically and horizontally,
simultaneously mutating in time on each of the separate tracks (of music, text,
image, voice, sound, even of the letter)—are impossible to arrest on a map,

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 Zsuzsa Baross

such a project could never be realised. Or rather, its realisation is the film itself,
in 2 × 4 parts, over its entire length.
This limitation calls for another heuristic. Limiting the project to a far
more modest task, I begin with the simplest possible example: a single pair,
the coupling in a montage cell of two distant sets of images, which itself will
be taken up as a series of variations and repetitions later, in a sequence whose
name could be “victim and executioner.” The first, a flickering (fragmented)
sequence, is lifted from the famous rabbit hunt in Jean Renoir’s La règle du jeu
(1939) (figure 2.4.1, left): beaters wearing white overcoats chase from the under-
growth to the open a “petit lapin” (whose silent death will reappear later in the
film, in another series, where it composes with other wordless deaths and exe-
cutions—as quick, as undramatic as is its own).
The other image, also staggered, projected in staccato, sharply cut, is lifted
from Kenji Mizoguchi’s Chikamatsu Monogatari (1954) (figure 2.4.1, right): inside
the two quickly passing shots, a young woman, wearing a kimono, desperately
and awkwardly tries to flee from something or someone in a forest, before fall-
ing to the ground.

Figure 2.4.1.

The two distant images compose a “faux accord,” a third virtual image: “hunted
like a rabbit” (for one would not say “hunted like a woman”). But this bias (for
it is a bias, women are more commonly hunted than rabbits) is not the reason
why this caption is reductive and banal. It is because it effaces the tension of the
difference between the two distant images qua images and, as a consequence,
reduces the third image, a pure creation of montage, sans parole, to a compari-
son or analogy (a mechanical repetition of the same), or, at best, to a metaphor,
an Idea translatable to/by words.
Godard speaks of the fraternity of images in several of his films and texts. It is
that fraternity that is incalculable, unforeseeable. For it is not resemblance (of

330

Figure 2.4.1. Left, Histoire(s) du cinéma 1a, 6:52; right, Histoire(s) du cinéma 1a, 6:40.
 Godard and/with Deleuze

content, referents, signification) that propels images to contract, forcing them

to enter into the alliance of a series (“nothing new has ever come from a com-
parison”). In fact, resemblance is secondary, not the cause but the after-effect
born of such spontaneous (or, as one should say) miraculous “nuptials,” which
set into motion the reciprocal contaminations of referents, representations,
signifiers. (Sergei Eisenstein’s sequence of rising lions in Battleship Potemkin
[1925], on the other hand, sets no such process in motion; a metaphor or men-
tal image of the uprising, it is essentially a linguistic operation.)

* * *

Here I need to open a parenthesis to ask how an image communicates/com-

munes with others qua image? In Godard’s cinema it is often the asignifying
traits, the asignifiant forms that vehicle the movement of montage: in Puissance
de la parole (1988), for example, the outline of Vilma’s young naked body bend-
ing over a wash basin and photographed against the light fuses with the form
of a giant exotic palm leaf, standing upright, transparent to the same light, as
if made of lace. Another extraordinary and extraordinarily quick sequence, this
time in Histoire(s), is embedded in/surrounded by equally compacted images
evocative of fascism: the white wall and an olive grove suggestive of the scene
of Federico García Lorca’s assassination. Here the communication between
images of distant provenance takes place in the space of one image, the frag-
ment of a painting, or, rather, inside the form of the triangle that opens up
between the exposed breasts of two figures—agonising women (recalling but
not actually from Picasso’s Guernica). This space is penetrated first by a tiny
insect of an aeroplane, an image borrowed from the archives (figure 2.4.2,
left), then by the pointed triangular head of the vampire Nosferatu from F.
W. Murnau’s eponymous black-and-white silent film from 1922 (figure 2.4.2,
right). Both the insect and the vampire appear to be feeding on a breast.

Figure 2.4.2.

331

Figure 2.4.2. Left, Histoire(s) du cinéma 1a, 46:55; right, Histoire(s) du cinéma 1a, 47: 04.
 Zsuzsa Baross

In the space of the triangle, three distant (memory) images collide—of

Guernica, the martyred city, of the painting Guernica that cries out before
the violence of its destruction, and of the striking, expressionist image of the
vampire in Murnau’s “symphony of horror”—in other words, the real, its rep-
resentation, and its imaginary and untimely prophecy. (In Benjamin’s language,
its historical index, inscribed in the image but destined to become legible only
in the future that is the “now” of the real). Within the space of the few seconds
that the montage lasts, on the stage of the triangle that the double penetration
itself opens up in the painting, revealing the naked flesh as exposed, unshel-
tered from the violence falling from the sky, an encounter takes place. Between
the imaginary and the real or the virtual and the real: Nosferatu encounters the
future—the pestilence whose coming to the world it announces ahead of its
time—as actualised.
All this happens not by premeditation or calculation but by chance. The form
of the painting’s composition is not accidental. In between the two bodies, it
leaves open a space whose form is analogous, in the geometrical sense of the
term, to the triangular shape of Nosferatu’s face in Murnau’s image, which fills
up, fits right into this space, as if ready made for it, as if the encounter was des-
tined, expected, or prepared for (we recall—or, rather, it is the sequence that
recalls—the end of Murnau’s film, where the young woman offers up her neck
to the vampire visitor who penetrates her bedroom). It is not resemblance by
image but the coincidence of this neutral form and empty space that facilitates
the encounter, which concerns not signification or sense but time. The mon-
tage does not make a comparison between fascism and the vampire that feeds
on living bodies (even if the film has long been read as an untimely warning
about fascism). Unlike Eisenstein’s rising lions, it is not expressive of an idea.
The third image is a time image: the short circuiting of two heterogeneous
orders of time whereby the future of the past and memory of the future are
simultaneously actualised.
To give one more example, once again from Histoire(s): five distant images—
asymmetrically distributed/dispersed inside a long series of anonymous deaths,
exterminations, executions, assassinations—contract by way of nothing more
than an asignifying line, an outline, or a Zig-Zag, intimating the outline of the
letter M or an inverted W. The still frame (figure 2.4.3, above left), in colour,
taken, as Godard notes, by George Stevens’s 16 mm camera in Auschwitz, of
a muselmann, his body collapsed on the bare bunk, communicates by way of
the bare legs folded at the knee. Their double line links up with another pair
of legs and knees, exposed from under a skirt in another blurred image (fig-
ure 2.4.3, middle left), suggesting a woman, on her back, attacked, or raped, by
a dog (from Andrzej Munk’s unfinished Passenger [1963]). Retrospectively, the
coupling communicates, without words, with the line of the buckled legs of
Christ’s inert body lifted from the cross, pulled down by gravity in Rembrandt’s
etching Descent from the Cross (figure 2.4.3, above right) and, prospectively, with
the angular lines of the yellow and black brush strokes in Bacon’s homage to
Van Gogh (2.4.3, middle right), intimating the violence of the ploughed field
and the flight of crows above, in one of the last canvases Van Gogh painted just

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 Godard and/with Deleuze

before his suicide. And then again, the same lines come to resonate differently
with the abstract blue line (one of Nicolas de Staël’s? another suicidee?) in the
last image of the sequence (figure 2.4.3, below). It represents nothing, the line
only traces what could or would be the form of a limp, shrouded body held up
by two invisible arms, whose outline, traversing the series in reverse, contracts
with the line of the body lifted from the cross.

Figure 2.4.3.

333

Figure 2.4.3: above left, Histoire(s) du cinéma 1a 43:49; above right, Histoire(s) du cinéma
1a 39:03; middle left, Histoire(s) du cinéma 1a, 43:49; middle right, Histoire(s) du cinéma
1a 43:45; below, Histoire(s) du cinéma 1a 45:36.
 Zsuzsa Baross

The rhythmic repetitions—which compose in the musical sense of the term—

effectuate reciprocal contaminations and transformations in each image. In
one direction, they are washed over with the borrowed agony of the muselmann,
without witnesses; in the other, in an a posteriori attribution or donation, they
are transfused with the pathos of the mourning they lack.

* * *

Closing the long parenthesis here, I return to my first example, rabbit/woman,

by way of the question, what is an image for Godard? The answer: it is never
one image alone. An image that merits the name recalls other images. It is an
act of memory, not of an absent past, but of absent images. In other words, the
archive—potentially, the actual or virtual memory archive of the cinema.
The two quickly passing images from Mizoguchi’s The Crucified Lovers
(Chikamatsu Monogatari), one of which is barely perceptible, recall not the film
or the story from which they are extracted (in fact, in the film it is the woman
who chases her lover), but rather Mizoguchi’s cinema, whose signature image is
that of a woman in flight, falling out of the frame, of the world, in the forest,
on the road . . . I am thinking of a particularly brutal scene in Ugetsu Monogatari
(1953): she, running in the forest chased by soldiers or bandits who catch up
with her, is lanced—a cruel turn—in the chest, causing her to fall on the baby
strapped to her back.
But what activates a particular memory image in an image that bears an
infinite number of memory traces and has no stable identity? (Indeed, the
death of the rabbit will become an element in another series of inaudible deaths,
instantaneous, instantaneously forgotten, without pathos or drama.)
The answer: the other image, that of the petit lapin, which activates the anam-
nesis, without being the cause of it. Or rather, the activation is the collision
effect. When two images collide and in the collision contract—which is rarely
the case, as most images remain neutral, indifferently pass by one another—
each image comes to haunt the other as the memory it cannot forget. In their
encounter (montage) each image becomes in the strong sense of this term (as
Deleuze says, encounter is a becoming) the bearer of the other’s memory: a mem-
ory image of the other and not just the memory of the other. Their faux accord
is not resemblance, nor analogy or comparison. A new and third image cannot
be born from either of these operations. Born of the collision of an encoun-
ter, it is present in between the two and nowhere else. In my first example, the
coming of a third image corresponds to the becoming image of a third being,
woman-rabbit/rabbit-woman, oscillating—without ever coming to rest on one
side or the other—between the pure impersonal animality of the hunted ani-
mal and the pathos of the victim, naked, exposed, absolutely without defences.
Yet, this formulation is still not precise enough. It still refers us back to lan-
guage as its support, not yet recognising the force of the image-effect, sans
parole. What passes without words in between two images in their reciprocal
transference or transformation? It is what we may call “sense”—in several
senses of this word.

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First, there is the sense of the montage, which is not its meaning but its taking
place, that it takes place: that something arrives in between when Godard cuts
and splices together these utterly unrelated, dissimilar frames, never before
seen together; that they couple and compose with one another. This, in itself a
micro-machine of sense, is actualised as if in a miracle (not the magic) by mon-
tage: namely, this simple manual or, as it may be, digital operation, of cutting
and splicing or pasting on one plane, should give birth to something absolutely
new, on an entirely different plane. Not a new order but a new sequence of
images that itself will order. Or not.
What is the miracle? That it (montage, the third image) takes place; that it
makes (creates) sense. For, paradoxically, the reason, motivation, or justification
for the cut is that something new may arrive, but this something remains, until
it arrives, if it arrives, incalculable, unknowable. While it is necessary, it is not
the necessary consequence of the cut. In fact, that something should take place
is not necessary at all. The operation—cut and slice, or paste—is only the facil-
itator of the montage event, whose necessity is situated on another plane, on the
other side of the cut: that if and when by chance something new does arrive in
the place of the cut, the event of this creation is not arbitrary but necessary. Or,
as Deleuze, writes, “Chance is arbitrary only in so far as it is not affirmed or not
sufficiently affirmed” (Deleuze 1994, 198).

Second horizontal: from Godard back to Deleuze

One nagging question still remains, how is the third image born? What pres-
ence or event may precede it? What force or agency is responsible for its birth,
if, as we said, the apparatus deprives both auteur and spectator of the right to
claim authority over it?
Above, I spoke of the miracle of montage. But “miracle” only refers us back
to the same question: how do distant and disparate images enter into com-
munication or communion to give birth to something absolutely new, a third
image that resembles nothing and cannot be derived from anything else? In
other words, it is not the image of their difference.
Deleuze encounters a similar aporetic problem in Difference and Repetition
regarding communication between heterogeneous series: must not there be
some minimum of resemblance, he asks, “when we speak of communication
between heterogeneous systems, of coupling and resonance, is it not under the
condition of a minimum resemblance, and of an identity in the agent that oper-
ates the communication?” (Deleuze 1994, 119, translation modified). Or does
the different immediately and directly relate to the different?
His answer, as we know, is the enigmatic, troubling concept of the “dark
precursor.” It is that which ignites the lightning (Deleuze is at his most poetic
here) that shoots through the system. It is the creator of the new but a cre-
ator that effaces itself after the fact, as the after-effect of its own effects—by
the phenomena it itself actualises. While it exists (il y a), it has neither identity
nor a place, or rather, no other identity, no other place than that which it lacks
(Deleuze 1994, 120).

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If the system cinema has its own dark precursor, if in the cinema a perhaps
analogous creative function is performed, its agent would have to be the “inter-
val.” Deleuze himself speaks of the interval as “creative,” as does Jean-Luc
Nancy, albeit in a different language, of an écarte—a distance, a gap—that is the
condition of a relation: “Pas de contact sans écart” (Nancy 1992, 51, as trans-
lated in Nancy 2008, 57; No contact without interval).
It is across this interval that two disparate images enter into communication,
each reciprocally imposing itself as the other’s memory, a memory that has
been haunting it since the beginning of time, outside historical time, which
may arrive from (our historical) future or past. So it happens that in Godard’s
cinema Goya’s prisoner bears the memory, recalls ahead of its time both the
black-and-white archival footage from the camps and Rossellini’s close-up of
the tortured face of the resistance fighter in Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City)
(1945).
The event of creation takes place in a space that is not identifiable as a place.
(In truth we should speak of events in the plural, which correspond with a
series of intervals: between shooting and projection, between the developed
and undeveloped negative, between film negative and positive, between the
still image frames, between images themselves that resonate at a distance or
articulate in montage without intermediaries.) While the interval is not a place,
it is that which separates spaces or heterogeneous space-times; or, better yet, it
itself heterogenises homogeneous/continuous space–time, by inserting a gap,
cutting in it the hiatus of an interval that has no other place, no other identity
than the il y a, the “there is.” It exists but exists as inaccessible, untouchable;
its operations are necessarily without witnesses and fall outside every memory
field. Hence the term “miracle”: the exception that is the foundation of the sys-
tem that the system (in this case, the apparatus) cannot reappropriate to itself.
As concerns the cinema, the art of making visible, the exception must remain
invisible and by necessity lack phenomenality. It is a black hole, at one stage
literally the dark room, without light, which no light can penetrate.
And yet, this void, this pure opening, is not nothing, just as the silence of
Cordelia who, in Godard’s King Lear (1987), says nothing, is not nothing. Like
every miracle that merits the name, it is more powerful than any presence or
anything that the apparatus could render present, represent, or bring to virtual
presence.

References
Baross, Zsuzsa. 2006. “Future of the Past: de Philosophie. Accessed 2 May 2017.
The Cinema.” Angelaki 11 (1): 5–14. https://www.academia.edu/3516264/
———. 2011. “‘Remember to Remember Une_forme_qui_pense_ou_le_cinema_
the Future’: Cinema, Memory, History.” selon_Jean-Luc_Godard.
In Posthumously, for Jacques Derrida, 27–54. Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. Pourparlers: 1972–1990.
Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. Paris: Minuit. Translated by Martin
———. 2014. “‘Une forme qui pense’ ou Joughin as Deleuze 1995.
le cinéma selon Jean-Luc Godard.” ———. 1994. Difference and Repetition.
Seminar given at Collège International Translated by Paul Patton. New York:

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Columbia University Press. First Godard, Jean-Luc, and Marguerite Duras.

published 1968 as Différence et répétition 1998. “Marguerite Duras et Jean-Luc
(Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Godard: Entretien télévisé.” In Godard
———. 1995. Negotiations, 1972–1990. 1998, 148–50.
Translated by Martin Joughin. New Mallarmé, Stéphane. 2015. Preface to A Roll
York: Columbia University Press. First of the Dice, translated by Robert Bononno
published as Deleuze 1990. and Jeff Clark, 1–2. Seattle: Wave Books.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. 1988–89. First published in book form 1914 as Un
L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze. Filmed by coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (Bruges:
Pierre-André Boutang. Paris: Editions Imprimerie Sainte Catherine).
Montparnasse, 2004, 3 DVDs. Mizoguchi, Kenji, dir. 1953. Ugetsu Monogatari
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1991. (Tales of the Rain and Moon). London:
Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? Paris: Minuit. Eureka, EKA50031, DVD.
Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and ———, dir. 1954. Chikamatsu Monogatari (A
Graham Burchell as Deleuze and Guattari story from Chikamatsu; aka The Crucified
1994. Lovers). London: Eureka, EKA50035,
———. 1994. What is Philosophy? Translated DVD.
by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Munk, Andrzej, dir. 1963. Passenger
Burchell. New York: Columbia University (Pasażerka). London: Second Run DVD,
Press. First published as Deleuze and 018, DVD.
Guattari 1991. Murnau, F. W., dir. 1922. Nosferatu—A
Dumoncel, Jean-Claude. 2009. Deleuze face à Symphony of Horrors. London: BFI,
face. Paris: Éditions M-éditer. BFIVD520, DVD.
Eisenstein, Sergei, dir. 1925. Battleship Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1992. Corpus. Paris:
Potemkin. London: BFI, BFIB1058, Blu-ray. Métailié. Translated by Richard A. Round
Godard, Jean-Luc, dir. 1987. King Lear. Santa as Nancy 2008.
Monica, CA: Cinematheque Collection/ ———. 2008. Corpus. Translated by Richard
Xenon Entertainment, XE CC 5000, VHS. A. Rand. New York: Fordham University
———, dir. 1988. Puissance de la parole. Paris: Press. First published as Nancy 1992.
Gaumont/JLG Films. Renoir, Jean, dir. 1939. La règle du jeu
———, dir. 1988–98. Histoire(s) du cinéma. (The Rules of the Game). London: BFI,
Paris: Gaumont, 4H24, 4 DVDs. London: BFIVD583, DVD.
Artificial Eye, ART 382, 3 DVDs. Rossellini, Roberto, dir. 1945. Rome, Open
———. 1998. Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc City (Roma, città aperta). London: Arrow
Godard; tome 2: 1984–1998. Edited by Alain Films, FCD229, DVD.
Bergala. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma.

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 No Voice is Lost
or, The Dead as a Witness
Anna Barseghian
Utopiana, Geneva

Stefan Kristensen
Utopiana, Geneva

Introduction
This chapter introduces a project we worked on between 2010 and 2012.
Anna Barseghian was born in Soviet Armenia into a family of survivors of the
Armenian Genocide. Her family was from the plan of Mush, now in south-
eastern Turkey. She grew up with the story of Gülizar, a young girl who was
abducted by a Kurdish tribal chief, but who resisted and became a hero in her
homeland. When travelling in the area, we became aware that Gülizar’s story
was also well known to the Kurdish population now living there. We then
collected a series of testimonies from people who have a relation with her story,
and images from the area: traces and ghostly presences of the Armenians from
Mush. This became the video installation Spectrography, shown in Geneva and
Valence in 2013 and Istanbul in 2015. Our aim was to show how the ghosts are
still present and influence everyday life in Anatolia today. We discovered that
not only the survivors but also the dead were witness to the Catastrophe.

The history and the story

The story took place in 1889, some twenty-six years before the destruction
of the Ottoman Armenians. It happened in the plain of Mush, now eastern
Turkey. Gülizar, a fourteen-year-old Armenian girl, was abducted by Musa Bek,
a powerful Kurdish tribal chief, after her uncle Miro, the chief of a village in
the eastern part of the plain, had gone to the governor in Bitlis to file a com-
plaint against Musa Bek for his violence towards the Armenians in the region.
Gülizar was abducted in the first days of the spring; contrary to other girls in
the same situation, Gülizar resisted her abductor and managed to send a mes-
sage to her family saying she was alive and did not intend to become a Muslim.
Eventually, Musa Bek agreed to bring her to the governor in Bitlis and make her
perform the Islamic declaration of faith to appease the situation. One day in
June 1889, after three months captivity, Gülizar appeared before the governor
and all the important people of the region; this young girl said that she was a

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Christian, that she wanted to come home to her village again, and she also tes-
tified against the crimes committed by Musa Bek and his men.1
What followed this event is also important: Musa Bek was indicted and a
court case was instructed a few months later in Constantinople; a whole dele­
gation of Armenians from the region of Mush travelled to the capital city (at
that time this meant a two-week trip!). Eventually, a few years later, the appeal
court sentenced Musa Bek to one year’s exile in Mecca. Gülizar literally became
a hero in the aftermath of the court case, a symbol of resistance against injus-
tice and discrimination. She eventually married the son of a priest, Kegham
Der Garabedian, an important writer and political activist in the Armenian
national movement who became a deputy in the Ottoman parliament from
1910 to his death in 1918.
Gülizar’s trajectory did not finish with her death; her story survived in the
memory of the people. Among the Armenians from Mush who survived the geno­-
cide, her story survived through the lament sung by grandmothers, through
being told as a family story among the Kurds living in those places now, and
through the oral tradition carried by dengbej (troubadours). Actually, during her
lifetime Gülizar had already become what she still is now: a ghost shared by so
many people that she can be considered a myth, because her life bears witness
to the destiny of the subsequent generations.

What is a ghost?
A ghost is a being that exists after the death of a person, a presence originating
from this person after her or his passing. It is a dead person’s way of being,
among the living. The problem of ghosts is to give an account of the presence
of an absence, of the way an absence is perceived as such, and this implies a
paradoxical experience of time.
First of all, let us insist upon the fact that we speak from the point of the
living. We do not pretend to take the point of view of the dead and speculate
about what they might feel and think from where they are. Our aim is to under-
stand the way the dead are present to the living, what kind of respect is expected
from us towards them, what the consequences are if we forget them or if we
continue as if they had not existed. The ethical dimension being that our rela-
tions with the dead can occasion great violence and injustice to the living, if
they are not right, if the presence of the dead is not recognised as it ought to be.
There are at least two ways of approaching the presence of the dead for the
living; principally, there are the anthropological and the psychoanalytical ways.
The first way studies specific social rituals and behaviours around the dead; the
second studies the ways past experiences (often forgotten) play a role in pres-
ent life. In contemporary anthropology, we find significant material on how
the trajectory of a person doesn’t stop at his or her death and how their action

1 Her story is told in Les noces noires de Gülizar, written by her daughter Arménouhie Kévonian in 1946. The
French version was edited by her grandchildren, historians Anahide Ter Minassian and Kéram Kévoni-
an, and published by Editions Parenthèses in Marseille (Kévonian [1993] 2005).

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after death can be beneficial to the living. In a recent issue of the anthropolog-
ical journal Terrain, writing on “the useful dead” (les morts utiles) philosopher
Vinciane Despret (2014, 4, our translation) presents a range of such examples:
“persons,” she writes, “once their life is accomplished, . . . are mobilised in very
diverse projects and resume work among the living.” One famous example is the
case of Brazilian physician José Arigo, who is said to have made surgeries under
the direction of a German military surgeon who had been killed during World
War 1.2 In an earlier paper on the relation to the dead in Iceland, Christophe
Pons points out that the living ordinarily but unexpectedly encounter the dead,
and that these encounters are always narrated. Solitary visions or dreams very
soon become a social experience. As Pons (2002, 131, our translation) notes,
“The encounters with the dead . . . refer to culturally coded experiences, their
primary aim is always to be communicated to other living persons, and this is
how the exchanges with the dead take place.”3 But as we wish to claim, it can
also be a much more everyday presence, a presence continually inspiring the
existential priorities of a singular life, as is the case with Gâzîn, a woman dengbej
singer we met in Van in the summer of 2010. She doesn’t speak about visions of
the dead, but of how the memory of Gülizar that her own grandmother carried
inspired her to become a traditional singer (a dengbej) herself.
The presence of the dead can be positive or negative, depending on a series
of factors, such as the profile of a person’s life, the behaviour of the living, and
so on. Such cases are quite obvious if we consider the remnants of Ottoman
societies: violence, unburied dead, and impeded or failed mourning have given
rise to many disturbances in the presence of the dead in disrupted families
and communities, throughout the different communities (not to mention the
ongoing violence against Kurds). A branch of contemporary psychoanalysis
has specialised in the treatment of such disturbances. In Nicolas Abraham and
Maria Torok’s works, a ghost is defined as a “formation of the unconscious that
has never been conscious. . . . It passes . . . from the parent’s unconscious into
the child’s” (Abraham and Torok 1994, 173). Their idea is that there has been an
important event in someone’s life that has been repressed and concealed in a
crypt; instead of dying with the person at the end of her or his life, the event is
taken up by a person from the next generation, leading her or him to do strange
things, for example actions against personal interest. Abraham and Torok
(1987, 391, our translation) describe the ghost as “a work in the unconscious of
the shameful secret of another. . . . Its law is the obligation of unknowing [nesci-
ence]. Its manifestation, the haunting, is the return of the ghost in strange words
and actions, and in symptoms (phobic, obsessive . . .) and so on.”4

2 A story recounted and commented on by Pons (2011).

3 “les rencontres avec les morts sont . . . renvoient à des expériences culturellement codées, leur dessein
premier est toujours d’être communiquées à d’autres vivants et que c’est par ce biais que les échanges
avec les morts ont lieu.”
4 “Le fantôme est le travail dans l’inconscient du secret inavouable d’un autre. . . . Sa loi est obligation de
nescience. Sa manifestation, la hantise, est le retour du fantôme dans des paroles et actes bizarres, dans
des symptoms (phobiques, obsessionnels . . .) etc.”

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But the limit of this clinical approach, however useful, is twofold: first, it
seems to reduce the ghost phenomenon to a malevolent reality—it is basically
seen as a source of harm to the living, since it mostly takes the form of a skele-
ton in the closet. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it tends to focus on
the transmission of traumatic secrets by individuals and families. But the trans-
mission of unconscious contents involves collective processes not reducible to
relations between individuals, and simply not intelligible from the individual
point of view. Seen as the mere communication of individual unconsciouses,
the transmission appears as a strange telepathy. In other words, we need a con-
cept of the unconscious encompassing the collective, an unconscious from
which individual life emerges.

The transmission of collective traumas and oral

culture
Transmission is a transversal phenomenon, and our proposal is to understand
it with the help of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the refrain (ritournelle),
by which they refer to a kind of practice conscious or unconscious, by which a
living being (a bird, a child, and so on) delineates a space to dwell in; a habit-
able, properly subjective, space. This they call the process of territorialisation;
in itself, a refrain is a temporal form—that is, a dance, a tune, a bodily charac-
teristic (colour, shape), or any perceptible feature able to structure space, for
example, by signifying to others that “this is my territory.” Deleuze and Guattari
show that there is a circle between the rhythm of the refrain, its expressive
character, and its territorialising function. This triangle (rhythm, expression,
territory) is what the refrain produces, which means that the refrain itself is
not of the order of meaning; it fulfils what Guattari calls an existential func-
tion—that is, the nondiscursive, creative driving force of enunciation. Deleuze
and Guattari (1987, 316) suggest that this is precisely what art actually consists
in: “Can this becoming, this emergence, be called Art? That would make the
territory a result of art. The artist: the first person to set out a boundary stone,
or to make a mark.” It is important to stress that this notion of territory in our
reading is necessarily the territory of somebody, not the objective geograph-
ical scientific delimitation of space, and that the refrain has an ontological
dimension, not merely a semiotic one, inasmuch as it is involved in the very
constitution of the self. The essence of art is situated there, in the creativity
of a people, in such practices of resistance that are able to delimit a territory
where that people may be at home. Actually we are close to the notion of land-
scape—and it is notable that the sister notion of the refrain discussed in the
seventh chapter of A Thousand Plateaus is the notion of face and faciality (vis-
age, visagéité), treated as equivalent to landscape (paysage, paysagéité). The refrain
produces a landscape—that is, the possibility of situating oneself in space. And
the specific landscape of somebody at a certain moment in history can become
so significant and so pregnant for a whole community that it is transmitted
and remembered as such. Our proposal is that this is precisely what a ghost
is: the expressive rhythmic relation of a subject (individual or collective) to a

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person’s land and the people who live there. What is transmitted is this very
relation; the ghost is thus nothing other than the possibility of a landscape,
and thus is a grounding enabling the subject to feel at home in her or his own
existence.
In both the Armenian and the Kurdish cases, we have an oral transmission
enacted as spontaneous micropolitical resistance against the oppression of a
totalitarian state, on the one side, the Soviet oppression of the memory of the
genocide, and, on the other side, the negation and repression of Kurdish iden-
tities by Kemalist Turkey. The oral form of a song is crucially important to the
territorialising power of its refrain. It is always a certain rhythm that partici-
pates in giving shape to a subject’s relation with her or his own history, ancestry,
and landscapes—the reference to childhood in the very first lines of Deleuze
and Guattari’s (1994, 311) chapter on the refrain is not by chance: “A child in the
dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks
and halts to his song.” Just as Gülizar’s granddaughter Anahide Ter Minassian,
an important character in our video, recalls an episode such as this from her
childhood, Anna too grew up in the discrete rhythm of her grandmother’s inti-
mate refrain, and Gâzîn, the Kurdish dengbej singer, also keeps remembering
the way her grandmother would tell the story. In this way, the refrain crosses
the different territories; the different refrains form different territories, both
different and common territories of resistance.
To be more precise about the very content of this refrain, we must turn to
the way it is sung by the local dengbej Kurdish troubadour singers. Here we’re
quoting from the version of Cahido, a dengbej from Mush:

Akh le waye, waye!

Haji Mousa Bek, I told you, stand up, it’s the morning
I swear, I’m Gülo the insane, I told you to stand up
Gülo left Khars and you are in Kala
Gülo says, “Haji Mousa Bek, what you are doing, God sees it
Even if you rip off my flesh with pincers . . .”
I know that your faith is as worthy as mine,
But I swore not to betray my Andris Pasha,
I will not convert, I will not become a Muslim

While in captivity, Gülizar undoes her self, the pregnant refrain of the dengbej
resounds “I am Gülo the insane,” signalling that she has found another self in
this distress. To survive, she had to bring about a real rupture with her previous
self; as for any survivor, the past has ceased to exist, and the present of captiv-
ity becomes a past that doesn’t go away. When the dengbej sings this phrase, he
or she shows that the power of the event is about to change the girl from top
to bottom, and madness becomes both a refuge for her and a warning for the
persecutor. The evocation of God goes beyond cultural aspects—it concerns
the central component of the refrain, that is, the idea that one has to rely on an
unconditional instance to be able to constitute one’s self as a subject. In a sem-
inar of the mid-1980s, Guattari (1985) touches on this idea, explaining that it is
only by putting the self in relation to God (or the King, or any unconditional

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 No Voice is Lost

figure of authority) that one can have the courage to risk one’s life. The issue is
the acting out of the individual establishing a new level of existence.
In another verse, the denbej sings that Gülizar “will go to the European coun-
tries” and complain about Musa Bek’s crimes and seek justice. The dengbej have
well understood the political dimension of Gülizar’s attitude. They develop a
new refrain evoking the European countries, the throne of Kemal Pasha,5 the
political authorities able to intervene. Gülizar’s territory of resistance suddenly
is widened on another scale, from the confined space of Musa Bek’s village to
the space of international politics.
In yet another passage, she calls out to her abductor, “Musa Bek, let me go,”
“I am not worthy of you” /  “I’m not for you,” hinting at the ineffable fact of
the rape that she was subjected to. Here we touch upon a hidden aspect at the
heart of the refrain, and upon the ability to perceive the imperceptible, which
is so crucial in the creative process of becoming minoritarian. As Deleuze and
Guattari (1987, 287) write, “There is always a woman, a child, a bird to secretly
perceive the secret. There is always a perception finer than yours, a perception
of your imperceptible, of what is in your box.” This image is coherent with the
other sentence that we constantly heard during our encounters, “Güle6 was
very beautiful”—a sentence repeated as a warning to young girls that they
could become the object of the predatory behaviour of dominant males. In
the secret heart of Gülizar’s story, there is this very fact of the rape, working
as the more or less repressed motor of the whole story. Resistance is first and
foremost against rape, both affirming its very possibility (likeliness) and the
necessity of overcoming it.
In a nutshell, we here have two lines of time: something happened in history,
but this event is at the same time a past that doesn’t pass. The refrain repeats
and keeps alive the meaning of this event, adapting the meaning to present
circumstances, intertwining the two modes of temporality. The mythical past
of Gülizar’s captivity and struggle and the present of oppression and resistance
intertwine and interfere with one another, but the very interference becomes
a unity. In the present, Gülizar’s presence is an indestructible past, just as she
herself carried the burden of her own past all through her life. As a survivor, one
becomes a normal person again, except for this indestructible past that doesn’t
pass, and which is perceptible for others only through discrete signs such as the
refrains, the ellipses, the absences. This past, in other terms, is the presence of
death within the surviving person.

The witness is dead, but her refrain is alive

According to common sense, a witness has to be alive in order to bear witness.
This seems obvious—a judge would not be taken seriously calling a dead per-
son to testify in court . . . But when the content of the testimony is of such

5 “Kemal Pasha” is an ancient Ottoman way to evoke Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the modern
Turkish Republic. The appearance of this character is of course anachronistic in a story that happened
in the late nineteenth century, but this is a typical feature of oral traditions.
6 Güle, or Gulo, are diminutives of Gülizar, the use of which signals an affective proximity.

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 Anna Barseghian and Stefan Kristensen

significance to the living, the very pattern of the refrain requires the central
phenomenon, much more and way above the singular life of the person having
lived through the event. As a transmitter of sensations and relations, the wit-
ness herself, as such, is dead. Even if it is the same person, there is a splitting
between the person as witness and the person as storyteller. Her testimony is
necessarily carried by others, and even if Gülizar herself survived her captivity
and lived a rather long life until her real death in 1948, she would be a stranger
to herself while narrating her story. She was haunted by the young girl that she
once was, who in a sense died at the hands of Musa Bek. And this haunting
continues as long as this story carries an important meaning to people in this
country, in Armenia, and wherever else.
The witness herself is a ghost in the sense that as a witness she is no longer
present where the event happened. Speaking about this event implies also the
absence of the event. This is why the subjectivity of the witness can be carried
onto subsequent generations and become a living myth. When a dengbej sings
about the event, she or he is Gülizar, singing from her point of view, in her name.
We then listen to a dead person, listen to the ghost indirectly, which is speaking
through the voice of the singer. The death of the witness thus expresses noth-
ing but the irreversibility of the event, the simple fact that the event defined a
rupture in collective history and changed the very possibility of dwelling and
unfolding a human life. In other words, the ghost is a political agent—the issue
is to be able to listen to it.

References
Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. 1987. champ non discursif.” Seminar, 12 March
L’écorce et le noyau. Paris: Flammarion. 1985. Accessed 13 June 2017. http://www.
Abridged translation by Nicholas T. Rand revue-chimeres.fr/guattari/semin/semi.
published as Abraham and Torok 1994. html.
———. 1994. The Shell and the Kernel: Kévonian, Arménouhie. (1993) 2005. Les
Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Edited and noces noires de Gülizar. Edited by Anahide
translated by Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago: Ter Minassian and Kéram Kévonian.
University of Chicago Press. Abridged Translated by Jacques Mouradian.
translation of Abraham and Torok 1987. Marseille: Éditions Parenthèses.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. Translation first published 1993 (Éditions
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Parenthèses).
Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Pons, Christophe. 2002. “Réseaux de
Massumi. Minneapolis: University of vivants, solidarités de morts: Un système
Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as symbolique en Islande.” Terrain 38:
Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2 127–40.
(Paris: Minuit). ———. 2011. Les liaisons surnaturelles: Une
Despret, Vinciane. 2014. “Les morts utiles.” anthropologie du médiumnisme dans l’Islande
Terrain 62: 4–23. contemporaine. Paris: CNRS Éditions.
Guattari, Felix. 1985. “Machine abstraite et

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 )( Z )(
Lucia D’Errico
Orpheus Institute, Ghent

The world (the body) is made of convex and concave shapes, and the rearrange-
ment of one into the other.1 Concavity is perishable and open, an unclear and
fleeting sensation. Convexity is abstract fixation, assertion, a strong and rigid
continuity. The paradoxical point of coexistence between the two—eternity
paired with mortality—is what one is alert to. The insistence on ephemeral-
ity can elicit durability. Duration cannot but be expressed in transient terms,
as the least possible lapse between a before and an after—an empty space
between parentheses. How can it be provoked, how can the walls of meaning,
of language be thinned down to the point that what is not contained in them,
not containable in them, can be made visible, audible?
A ragged line is drawn, along which some shapes appear. It is a ghostly walk,
the pathway traced by a moving figure that has already vanished; or a thread
of smoke, or a snail track. In this evanescent trajectory, something seems to
impart permanence and clarity: the memory of an image—its failed memory?
Oblivion: remembering is a shame! How can something that is forgotten be
represented? Does representation not imply remembrance, a code, a grid, on
which longitudes are appointed in advance in order for us to remember things
forever as they are? Memory is but prefigured knowledge: the safe pathways of
resemblance, traced in advance, demanding to be followed.
There is another kind of trajectory, always on the verge of bifurcation: the
path opened in the darkness of amnesia. What next? One has no plan, no
choice, no expectation, only a fall—a failure. Every step opens the possibility of
a new turn: things grow into something else, and at the same time their some-
thing-elseness grows into what they are. Here, resemblance is an effect, sensi-
ble resemblance, indeterminacy made clear, clarity blurred.
A concave furrow and the blade of the plough that will cut it, both are frozen
in the autonomous unawareness of each other: the darkness in which aberrant
paths are marked, this unfathomable space where inconsistent thoughts move
faster than those of the mind, is the knowledge of art.

1 The text of this chapter is complemented by the series of twenty images that separate the five sections
of this book (see 22–23, 188–89, 288–89, 426–27, 466–67).

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 Digital Folds, or
Cinema’s Automated Brain
Elena Del Río
University of Alberta, Canada

In The Virtual Life of Film, D. N. Rodowick (2007, 127) notes that “the very nature
of a medium . . . is to be variable, not identical with itself, and open to aesthetic
and historical transformation.” As a medium that persists beyond its classi-
cal representational parameters, the cinema ceases to be confined within the
analogue image and continues to morph into a multimedia network of digital
images. The ontology of cinema undergoes a simultaneous and seemingly con-
tradictory process of both self-persistence and transmutation. If, on the one
hand, the materiality of cinema is subjected to digital manipulation and the
logic of its assemblage becomes computational, on the other hand, the appear-
ance of the image in the digital age is still cinematographic. To quote Rodowick
(ibid., 180), the cinema “remains the baseline for evaluating our aesthetic expe-
rience of moving images and of time-based figural expression.” At the same
time, he also admits, digital media change notions of space, movement, and
time both in the way these are materially produced and in the effects they gen-
erate in the audience.
This essay will address the phenomenon of cinema’s digital variations as an
intricate folding of analogue and digital operations into each other. I will do so
by examining two works of remix or found-footage cinema, Gregg Biermann’s
Magic Mirror Maze (2012) and Iterations (2014). Biermann’s digital appropriation
and deformation of Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947) and Alfred
Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), respectively, testifies to the persistence of cin-
ema in the digital age, while also drawing our attention to the qualities that the
digital uniquely extracts and intensifies in relation to the cinema. This analysis
will draw a surprising affinity between Leibniz’s concept of the fold as the priv-
ileged figure of Baroque aesthetics and the algorithmic, computational logic
of the digital image. This affinity involves two interrelated aspects: first, the
fold, with its confluence of divergence and convergence, continuity and dis-
continuity between singularities, models the way the digital image entails both
an extension of and a radical differentiation from the analogue image; second,
the simultaneity of connectivity and heterogeneity that characterises the fold
can also function as the paradigmatic model of assemblage or composition of
digital images. To the first point, the fold can be held as a model for the elu-
sive/virtual, yet real, ways in which analogue and digital, rather than moving
away from each other, circle around their respective operations. I will there-
fore begin by examining this cooperation, which Brian Massumi (2002, 143),

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also evoking the model of the fold, has described as a “self-varying continuity”
between analogue and digital.

The analogue-digital-analogue process

If we want to understand how the interaction between the analogue image
and its digital reconversion may be conducive to an openness of potential
rather than to its foreclosure, we cannot take the meaning of the “analogue”
for granted. By reconsidering what is at stake in the “analogue” we can bet-
ter assess the difference between analogue and digital. Echoing Rodowick’s
emphasis on the variable nature of all media, Massumi (2002) submits us to the
everyday sense of the “analogue” as “variation on a model” (135). The analogue
is not about similarity, mimesis, or representation, as we sometimes assume
when we apply the term to classical cinema, but about the way in which thought
operates through/as qualitative difference. Thus the analogue is “a continu-
ously variable impulse or momentum that can cross from one qualitatively dif-
ferent medium into another” (135). This means that, even as a mathematical
program may carry out a quantifying conversion of a qualitative mode, it always
leaves a “qualitative remainder” (135) in its trail.
As we see in Biermann’s Maze and Iterations, these digitised moving images
are not reducible to the codifications of data entered into their original form
as analogue archival material. Rather, they yield new diagrams that produce
qualitative sensations and virtual effects such as we may find in analogue cin-
ema as well. If the analogue is “always a fold ahead” of the digital (Massumi
2002, 143), it is because it involves thought processes that are inherently crea-
tive and transformational. These thought processes take place at three stages:
the media artist’s selection of the original work and of the compositional idea
deployed towards its digital transformation—a stage at which human interven-
tion and manual override remain essential; the more automated, yet equally
creative stage at which the digital program interacts with the original work;
and, finally, the audience’s reception of the piece. Thus, although we are deal-
ing with the digital tampering of the analogue, the processes of experiment-
ing with and reading the digitally tampered video images take us back to the
analogue. Reading, thinking, and feeling these images entails a qualitative,
analogue transformation involving experiential, interpretive relays that exceed
codification. As Biermann (2015) admits, “the formal development of the work
is quite systematic,” yet “the act of interpretation . . . is intuitive” and “creates
a complex conceptual task for the viewer.” Echoing the cartographic complex-
ity Deleuze attributes to the Leibnizian fold, Biermann (ibid.) notes that “we
are both looking at the image and looking at how we are looking at the same
time”—the very spatial and temporal disorientation pushing us to “find new
paths of thought.” Thus Biermann’s highly invasive, programmed transforma-
tions of classical films testify to the “paths of cooperation” between analogue
and digital (Massumi 2002, 143) through perceptual, mental, and affective
operations that are themselves of the order of the analogue. These operations
take place in the preindividual brain system formed by the digitised images

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 Elena Del Río

themselves as well as in the brain of those who receive these images, giving rise
to a world of complex captures rather than closures.

Digital assemblage, or immanent composition

One of the most distinctive and dramatic effects achieved in applying algorith-
mic formulas to film classics lies in the reconfiguration of editing patterns. In a
way that is almost obscenely literal, these patterns and their effects speak to the
intensely immanent ontology of the digital. In contrast with the binary model
of editing possibilities in analogue cinema, where the shots either embrace
an ideal of continuity and perceptual realism or break away from this ideal in
favour of creative disjunctions, the impression a digital work like Maze gives is
that it composes or assembles its images ontogenetically and immanently, that
is, through a self-generative process. This impression is both inaccurate and
quite true. Insofar as the logic of digital assemblage is based on algorithmic
modulations that are programmed in advance, it is just as externally imposed a
model of composition as the editing systems used in analogue cinema. Yet, at
the same time, once the algorithmic program has been entered, it is left to do
its work on and with the images in an entirely automatic and autonomous way.
As Biermann (2015) puts it referring to his own practice, “these works . . . set
something systematic into motion and then the work very much propels itself.”
Moreover, in experimental digital works, the algorithmic modulation becomes
so exhibitionistic, so ostentatiously exposed, that it subsumes the effect of the
image in its entirety. Algorithmic modulations can infiltrate the image directly
and totally, leaving little, if any, room for the mediating presence of referential-
ity, representation, or ideological meaning.
This complete identity of the image and the system that modulates its move-
ment can also account for the ways in which algorithmic editing, while involv-
ing utterly codified and codifying processes, can figure as an extension of the
avant-garde (Enns 2012), which is always more interested in formal mecha-
nisms and techniques than in the indexical properties of the image. As I noted
earlier, as a model of composition, algorithmic modulation does not preclude
the possibility of unexpected results that exceed the prescriptive appearance of
codifying processes (Enns 2012; Munster 2006; Shaviro 2010). But, it is just as
crucial to remember that the unpredictable aesthetic and sensational effects
that we may obtain from the application of a software program to the analogue
image are the result not of the software itself, “a numerically based form of
codification” (Massumi 2002, 137), but of the quasi impossibility of the digital
superseding or obliterating the prevailing nature of the analogue—its excess of
activity and intensity in relation to the digital.
To reiterate, the excess potential—of creativity, of intensified sensation
and accumulated speed—does not inherently belong/reside within the auto-
mated, systematised application of an editing pattern to a sequence of ana-
logue images. It is not in the formula, but in the way these images interact with,
and transform, the formula itself into their own activity of immanent creation.
When editing is immanent to the image, rather than functioning in the service

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of realist representation or symbolic association, it becomes purely a material

basis for sensations. As in avant-garde cinema, this materiality is auto-poetic
in the sense that it speaks of nothing but itself. It gestures towards no outside,
but is instead synonymous with the image as a body that is extensible and con-
tractible, as pliable as matter. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s comments on
art in What Is Philosophy? one may say that these continually decomposing and
recomposing images form a sensory chaos—a materiality that is synonymous
with sensation (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 193). Detached from any referent,
the algorithmic modulation is not about the image, but rather it performs the
image. Medium and message, material and sensation, coincide.

M agi c M i r r o r M a z e : extracting the virtual folds of

Welles’s L a d y f r om S h a n g h a i
Rather than choosing between the polarities of continuity and discontinuity,
the digital modulation and assemblage of images resembles the concept of
the fold in its paradoxical simultaneity of continuity and discontinuity. As we
watch Maze literally unfold its folds, we see its chaotic grid of images continu-
ously change and become other, yet the point where the before turns into the
after escapes our attention; for, in its serially connected, continuously folding
universe, the before is always preserved in the after, the after is foretold in the
before. The principle here, as in the Leibnizian fold, is to produce transitions
that will release a maximum of difference within a maximum of continuity from
point to point, moment to moment. Thus, in contrast with analogue cinema,
or Lady from Shanghai in this case, the algorithmic logic of the image in Maze
implies an intensification of the virtual that exposes the continual composition
and decomposition of bodies and forces—the constant movement of becom-
ing that breaks things away from themselves while insisting on this permanent
break as their vital and only sustenance.
Biermann’s piece reappropriates, while also paying homage to, Welles’s
already intensely experimental work.1 Maze may be said to come from the oppos-
ite side of, and produce opposite effects to, Hollywood’s typical deployment
of digital images. While Hollywood tends to convert cinematographic exper-
tise into manipulable algorithmic functions (Rodowick 2007, 9) that increase
the transparent immediacy of the image, Maze favours the use of algorithmic
functions to highlight the sensational uncanny already underpinning Welles’s
famous hall of mirrors sequence. Maze takes up a film sequence that already
effectively distorts the comprehensible spatial and temporal parameters of
classical editing and splinters these even further. With its chaotic firing of

1 In Biermann’s own words, Maze was composed out of “a series of four different (but related) algorithms
. . . it begins with a grid of twelve frames each of which is flipping horizontally and vertically at a particu-
lar rate. Additionally, each individual rectangle of the original material is moving at a different speed.
. . . The second composition ( . . . separated by a dissolve from the first) has nine separate rectangles. . . .
The third section is again separated by a dissolve from the second. Here we go to a mosaic of six frames.
And again after a dissolve we go to a pattern of four frames. The moment of transition between each of
the four sections was determined by what was suggested by the structure of Welles’s original sequence”
(Biermann 2016).

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 Elena Del Río

shots among sinister Everett Sloane, femme fatale Rita Hayworth, and doomed
lover Orson Welles, the final sequence in Welles’s film precludes a distinction
between subjects and objects, positions of agency and passivity, while also
destroying any sense of spatial centre and perspective. Because the mirror no
longer occupies a frontal position in relation to the body, but is now an all-
enveloping surface, any distinction between the body as physical subject and
the body as specular object disappears. We don’t see who fires and who gets
shot, but rather a series of mirrors being splintered and, simultaneously, spec-
ular images being destroyed. The death belonging to narration is thus equated
with a purely cinematic disappearance of the body. Thus, already in Welles’s
film, materiality trumps representation. This scene’s intense perceptual
dislocation contains a seed of virtuality. Arguably classical in some respects,
Welles’s cinematic sequence surprisingly unfolds the body as a series of virtual
singularities. And it is this seed of virtuality that Biermann’s digital piece zeroes
in on and intensifies.
Maze bypasses the epistemological disarray contained in Lady from Shanghai
by deploying the algorithm against our very desire for knowledge or intelligibil-
ity. A desire for epistemological clarity is pre-emptied and replaced by a chaoid
series of compounds of sensations—autonomous percepts and affects that are
valid for themselves. In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 168)
describe percepts and affects as “autonomous and sufficient beings that no
longer owe anything to those who . . . have experienced them.” The aim of art,
they say, is “to wrest the percept from perceptions of objects and the states of
a perceiving subject, to wrest the affect from affections . . . to extract . . . a pure
being of sensations” (167). The conversion from perception to percept, from
affection or feeling to affect, exactly describes the actions that Maze undertakes
with respect to Welles’s cinema. Maze performs a displacement from the actual
dimension of narrative actions and psychological states of affairs to the vir-
tual plane where these actions and states become a reservoir of pure qualities
open to manifold recombining possibilities. Despite its computational logic,
the digital image proves capable of exceeding the code’s deterministic path. It
acts as such a creative force by opening the original work onto a plane of com-
position that produces new signals through variations and recombinations. In
short, it produces new affects.
To trace the deframing work that Maze undertakes vis-à-vis Lady from
Shanghai, it is rather useful to examine the distortion of noir conventions in
Biermann’s piece and to draw some conclusions as to the aesthetic and politi-
cal effects of this distortion. Welles’s film is set on preserving the femme fatale,
for instance, as a centrepiece of its emphatically gendered narrative. In her
role as Mrs. Bannister, Hayworth remains a cold, unreadable surface until the
very last scene, when her murderous designs are exposed. This disclosure of
the woman’s evil nature, however, simultaneously spins a formal chaos that
reaches the peak of both narrative disintegration and cinematic creativity. As I
have argued in a piece on noir women (Del Río 2012), the woman’s lack of con-
cern for Oedipal law and morality unleashes a destructive force that coincides
with narrative inventiveness and aesthetic exuberance. Lacking any representa-

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 Digital Folds, or Cinema’s Automated Brain

tional ties or morally charged significance, Biermann’s piece only magnifies

the potential for aesthetic exuberance present in Welles’s film. Furthermore,
it converts the noir assignation of moral blame to the woman into a free-float-
ing affective eeriness evenly distributed among all bodies, images, and sounds
rather than simply organised along gender polarities.
The modulated distortions that affect the visual track are also vehemently
applied to the audio track, bringing out “the madness of . . . conversation”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 188) and further diminishing the rationality
already compromised in Welles’s film. Together, sound and image bring forth
an unconscious stream of affects and sensations that underpin not only the
noir genre, but an entire architecture of gender codes, fantasies, and projec-
tions defining a period of American culture and history. Maze surpasses the
distribution of narrativised emotions along gender lines by abstracting and
expanding its affective arc. Thus, the alignment of eroticism and death and the
enforced, sadistic conflation of woman with this alignment produce affects
steeped in culture and history, and not merely circumscribed within a fictional,
personalised context. Commenting on Biermann’s works Spherical Coordinates
(2005) (based on Hitchcock’s Psycho, 1960) and Labyrinthine (2010) (based on
Vertigo, 1958), Eivind Røssaak invokes a similar postcinematic quality in these
works, which he describes as a “sensitive system [that] is collective or more
than human” (Røssaak 2011, 198). Thus, in a paradoxical way, the affective arc in
Biermann’s piece expands in scope at the same rate as it intensifies its imper-
sonal qualities.

Iterations: dismantling and intensifying

R ear W i n d ow ’ s voyeurism
Taking up Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Biermann’s Iterations cuts the frame
lengthwise into nineteen vertical strips, each extracted from different shots
within a single scene.2 Echoing the voyeuristic discourse of the original film,
each of these strips functions like a narrow slit that opens onto the world of
the original film while reinforcing the restrictions of vision already empha-
sised in Hitchcock’s classic. In their verticality and narrow aperture, each panel
offers a partially open, partially obstructed view that mingles in simultaneity
with the equally open and obstructed views of the adjacent panels. As is well
known, Hitchcock constructs most of the scenes in Rear Window on the basis of
the point-of-view shot, alternating between shots of James Stewart looking out
his window and shots of the objects of his vision across the courtyard. It is this
subject/object structure as the basis for the essentially cinematic operation of
voyeurism that Iterations destroys by augmenting the sensational affects that are

2 This is Biermann’s (2016) description of the compositional idea for Iterations: “The sequence from Rear
Window is superimposed over itself nineteen times and masked into nineteen equal vertical columns.
Each of the vertical columns is moving at a slightly different speed, getting progressively faster from left
to right. The center column is moving at the same speed as the original film. The result is that there is
an increasing temporal reverberation out from the temporally central point where for a single instant
the frame is whole.”

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 Elena Del Río

produced through a dizzying temporal simultaneity of subject and object. The

superimposition of object seen onto seeing subject, no less than the co-tempo-
rality of multiple speeds and views separated by minimal degrees of temporal
distance, creates a constantly folding and unfolding image that collapses the
distance between the voyeur and his object. Instead, the two are perceived to
inhabit each other.
The success of Hitchcock’s film lies in the irony immanent to the voyeur’s
claim to perceptual mastery—an irony deeply felt in a few scenes where Stewart
is asleep while key actions continue to unfold in front of his window. Iterations
zeroes in on these scenes of perceptual loss and extends the condition to the
spectator, as it decomposes and recomposes a film world that does not allow us
a single or stable perspective. Ironically, for the spectator, the loss of percep-
tual stability results in an excessive multiplication of relations between frag-
ments—a frenzy of split images commingling in the unpredictable wave pro-
pelled by the algorithm. As in Maze, this uncanny oneness of images split apart
while unfolding together in simultaneity resonates strongly with the structure
of the Leibnizian fold—as in the fold, no image here is entirely obscure or
distinct. Obscure perceptions and distinct ones are always contained in each
other, prefigured by each other, impossible to separate. On this literal screen
of the fold, the labour of seeing becomes exhaustive and exhausting—the
objects looked at crowd over the looking subject, wearing out and blinding
his consciousness. The final moments of Iterations echo this exhaustion: the
ripple effect that heretofore animated Stewart’s body in his voyeuristic frenzy
succumbs to a deep wave of sleep. The video ends as it begins, not with one
shot but with many vistas closing by infinitesimal degrees. In place of individ-
ual consciousness—revealed as a black hole of sleep and oblivion—Iterations
gives us a manifold glimpse into the transindividual, automated consciousness
of the cinematic brain.
In a digital regime of the visible that experiments with the materiality of the
image, the political activity of the work can only be understood as immanent to
this materiality. Through a continuous activity of self-reconstitution, the dig-
itally processed images in these videos are obsessively engaged in a displace-
ment of forms and in the uncovering of the movement of forces behind those
forms. The immanent force of sensations displaces not only the rigid outlines
of recognisable forms and their accompanying clichés, but also the transcen-
dental work of judgements and opinions. Without the mediating presence of
referentiality or ideological meaning, the aim of the work, and the basis for its
destabilising potential, is to produce new affects rather than to reproduce the
appropriate ethical or emotional responses (Ravetto-Biagioli 2014, 16).
The initial premise of this essay, that cinema’s digital becomings enact a
paradox of self-assertion and mutation, recalls Gilbert Simondon’s idea that
the nature of individual existence is to unfold its potential for transformation:
“The domain of the living being is defined by the fact that the individual main-
tains the metastability of the system in which it arose” (Combes 2013, 28). As
in the workings of the fold, persistence and mutation are not mutually exclu-
sive and fixated terms, but rather, of necessity, are simultaneously sustained

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operations. If we transpose this idea onto the scene of accelerated becomings

that cinema is now undergoing, we may conclude that these becomings do not
involve any exceedingly radical break or ending, but rather a continuous line
of variation that propels itself away from classical paradigms of knowledge and
identity, inviting us to imagine unsuspected possibilities and attunements in
our relations with a world of others.

I wish to thank Gregg Biermann for his generosity in giving me access to his
work and making himself available to answer my questions.

References
Biermann, Gregg. 2015. Interview in Art 66–72.Massumi, Brian. 2002. “On the
Habens (Summer). Accessed 15 December Superiority of the Analog.” In Parables
2016. https://issuu.com/arthabens/docs/ for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation,
art_habens_art_review_summer_2015_e. 133–43. Durham, NC: Duke University
———. 2016 Email correspondence with Press.
Elena Del Río, 22 and 30 November. Munster, Anna. 2006. Materializing New Media:
Combes, Muriel. 2013. Gilbert Simondon Embodiment in Information Aesthetics.
and the Philosophy of the Transindividual. Hanover, NH: University Press of New
Translated by Thomas LaMarre. England.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. First Ravetto-Biagioli, Kriss. 2014. “Noli me
published 1999 as Simondon, individu tangere: Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s)
et collectivité: Pour une philosophie du Cinéma.” In A Companion to Jean-Luc
du transindividuel (Paris: Presses Godard, edited by Tom Conley and T.
universitaires de France). Jefferson Kline, 456–87. Oxford: Wiley-
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1994. Blackwell.
What is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Rodowick, D. N. 2007. The Virtual Life of Film.
Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
New York: Columbia University Press. Press.
First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la Røssaak, Eivind. 2011. “Algorithmic
philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). Culture: Beyond the Photo/Film
Del Río, Elena. 2012. “Feminine Energies, Divide.” In Between Stillness and Motion:
or the Outside of Noir.” In Deleuze and Film, Photography, Algorithms, edited by
Film, edited by David Martin-Jones and Eivind Røssaak, 187–203. Amsterdam:
William Brown, 155–72. Edinburgh: Amsterdam University Press.
Edinburgh University Press. Shaviro, Steven. 2010. “Post-Cinematic
Enns, Clint. 2012. “Navigating Algorithmic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and
Editing: Algorithmic Editing as an Southland Tales.” Film-Philosophy 14 (1):
Alternative Approach to Database 1–102.
Cinema.” Millennium Film Journal 56 (Fall):

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 Beyond Artist and Artisan
Performing Unformed Sound
in the Art Machine
Lilija Duoblienė
Vilnius University

Introduction
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), What is
Philosophy? (1994), and other joint and solo texts discuss various musical con-
cepts, applying them to philosophy and reinventing them from a new philo-
sophical perspective. Most importantly, they discuss the concepts of refrain
(ritournelle), rhythm, and sound. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari
(1987, 323) describe different types of refrain (optical, gestural, motor, etc.) and
ask: “In the narrow sense, we speak of a refrain when an assemblage is sono-
rous or ‘dominated’ by sound—but why do we assign this apparent privilege
to sound?” To answer this question, they refer to the capacity of sound to be
“more refined,” to be “specialized and autonomous” (347), and to take “leave
of the earth” (348).
The movement of refrain (territorialisation–deterritorialisation–reterritori-
alisation) and the configuration of different musical assemblages on the way
contain numerous cracks, ruptures, and tensions between cosmic and chaotic
forces. The main purpose of the music is to harness the chaotic forces through
and within a piece of art, a piece of music, in order to bring novelty to the crea-
tion of art and to let the music stand up on its own, actualising the virtual cosmic
sound, no matter whether musical or not. This Deleuzo-Guattarian thought—
namely, music standing up on its own—has been questioned by many musicol-
ogists (Bidima 2004; Gallope 2010). It can be understood only when consid-
ering another Deleuzo-Guattarian concept—the abstract machine, which also
can be perceived as an art machine. Guattari, who in some cases was the initial
inventor of Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts of music philosophy, designed the
scheme of relationship between content and expression, form and matter, as
well as in the flow of affects and movement of a refrain in the abstract machine.
This creates a new aesthetics of the world and helps escape a stratified regime
and the determination inherent in a creational process, and in that way it per-
mits a polyphony of enunciation (Guattari [1990] 1996, 1995). Stephan Zepke
(2012), writing on Deleuzo-Guattarian and especially Guattarian philosophy of
the abstract machine, outlines a political aspect, which, according to him, is
dominant when considering the aestheticisation of the cosmos. The political

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is related to the social and cultural, and in all cases, it works to open territories
to new forces.
Affects and percepts are important for the creation of art. They are pro-
duced and produce in the art machine. While describing the creation of an
art machine, Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 65) write, “the great aesthetic fig-
ures of thought and the novel but also of painting, sculpture, and music pro-
duce affects that surpass ordinary affections and perceptions, just as concepts
go beyond everyday opinions.” In a broader sense, according to Deleuze and
Guattari, “harmonies are affects. Consonance and dissonance, harmonies of
tone or color, are affects of music or painting” (164). Affects are not personal;
they work as movers in the art machine and incorporate new outside forces
through the deterritorialisational process: any work of art tries to find cracks
for its line of flight. In describing musical phenomena, they emphasise that
“the most important musical phenomenon that appears as the sonorous com-
pounds of sensation become more complex is that their closure or shutting-off
(through the joining of their frames, of their sections) is accompanied by a
possibility of opening onto an ever more limitless plane of composition” (190).
The unlimited compounds increase in accordance with increasing intensities
and affectations. The artist takes part in the creation of “blocs of percepts and
affects, but the only law of creation is that the compound must stand up on its
own” (164).
Michael Gallope (2010) and Jim Vernon (2014), as well as Jean-Godefroy
Bidima (2004), do not completely agree with such a description of the com-
pound and creation of the art machine that stands up on its own, without the
control of the artist. The standing of music on its own and its production by
the art machine poses many questions. Vernon doubts whether it is at all possi-
ble, especially when it combines both musical and non-musical sound. Deleuze
and Guattari (1987) break the distinction between musical and non-musical
sound, and in this way open a perspective onto thinking about art in relation
to ordinary life, the everyday, the readymade, breaking the distinction between
the natural and the cultural, allowing their followers to work with analyses of
happenings, installations, performances, and other contemporary genres of
art, already exemplified in the works of George Maciunas, John Cage, Allan
Kaprow, Alvin Lucier, Marina Abramović, and many other presenters of con-
ceptual and non-conceptual art. To explain the art machine and the possibility
that it can stand on its own, Guattari uses the ideas of Humberto Maturana and
Francisco Varela: similarly to autopoetic reproductive capacity, also proposed
by Maturana and Varela, Guattari defines two-faced machinic entities and two
types of ontological consistency (the first and the second autopoetic foldings),
where one is passive and the other is active, both being in tension (Guattari
1995). Their interrelation ensures an abstract machine that gets out of control.
The movement of the refrain allows a permanent interchange of the stable and
the unstable, the safe and the dangerous, cosmos and chaos, and transforms
identity into a state of becoming—becoming art, becoming music, becom-
ing minority. What does this allow to be grasped? The unrepresentable; the
unheard; the virtual, nevertheless waiting for actualisation. This ability to fall

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into adventure, to be part of a creational process—the process of becoming, or

line of flight in the Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective—should be a musician’s
main feature, at the same time as he or she always remains an artist who risks
falling into a black hole.
For the explication of sound expression, sound grouping and regrouping,
and multiple ways of their composition, including natural sound, Deleuze and
Guattari offer concepts including assemblage, abstract machine, and aperson-
alisation taken partly from Edgard Varèse’s understanding of sound production:
“Varèse’s procedure, at the dawn of this age, is exemplary: a musical machine
of consistency, a sound machine (not a machine for reproducing sounds), which
molecularizes and atomizes, ionizes sound matter, and harnesses a cosmic
energy” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 343).
Nevertheless, it is not clear how this scheme of an apersonalised sound
machine works on an actual plane in relation to the artist. To resolve this query,
in the following section I will describe the role of the artist, the artisan, and the
dark precursor in the art machine, and in the last two sections I will analyse a
multimedia composition, Silverdust, which uses unformed sound.

Music artist, artisan, and dark precursor

The main question concerns the extent to which a musical artist is an individ-
ual creator and how good he or she is as a performer in a technical sense. The
Deleuzo-Guattarian response to this matter would be that he or she must be an
artisan-artist, and not a creator-artist. Moreover, Deleuze invested the musical
artist with what is beyond either of them—the dark precursor.
Modern artists, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) state, are different from art-
ists in the time of Romanticism: modern artists are rather artisans, they are in
the midst of the universal and the singular, trying to harness the creative forces
of chaos and actualise their potential existence. The artisan in Deleuze and
Guattari’s terms is the itinerant, the ambulant. To follow the flow of matter he or
she needs intuition in action: “To be an artisan and no longer an artist, creator,
or founder, is the only way to become cosmic, to leave the milieus and the earth
behind. The invocation to the Cosmos does not at all operate as a metaphor;
on the contrary, the operation is an effective one, from the moment the artist
connects a material with forces of consistency or consolidation” (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987, 345). The art is created on “a cosmic earth—that is the wish of
the artisan-artist, here, there, locally,” while “the earth must be like the vectors
of a cosmos” and “then the cosmos itself will be art” (ibid., 346).
Working in affectation, being part of the creational machine, an artisan-
artist overcomes thresholds between different lines and segments and performs
with everyday non-musical sounds and silence, in this way creating novelty. An
artist, who is the artisan, “detaches some material, frees the motif so that it can
attract and compose new sensations and senses—new affects—according to a
new refrain” (Zepke 2005, 157). The artisan is a nomad who goes on a journey
together with other musicians and music objects, improvises and allows others
to improvise, which in Deleuzo-Guattarian terms means not imitating.

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The risk of falling into chaos or a black hole is always a risk for the art machine
and an artisan-artist. Despite the danger, there is only one way to break repro-
duction, imitation, and the way to death. Jason Wallin, following Deleuze, gives
examples of music, presenting how refrain and repetition help in risky situ­
ations. For Wallin (2010, 66), “The expression of the refrain or repeated block
of content ‘proper’ to music is thus a way to confront death without giving one-
self over to its potentially disastrous powers. . . . In this vein, the territorializ-
ing aspect of the refrain functions to stabilize Being, warding off the forces of
transformation.”
Forces are at the centre of creation. Anne Sauvagnargues (2013, 69), bor-
rowing Gilbert Simondon’s semiotics of forces, substitutes force-material for
form-matter: “the modest capture of immanent forces replaces the invention
or reproduction of forms.” So art is defined as a captor of forces, which are
expressed in material as singularities, and the logic of sensations refers to “the
relationship between the work of art and the spectator in terms of affects and
sensations, which must also be understood as modulation” (ibid., 70). Despite
Deleuze’s insufficient attention to the listener, nevertheless he or she is part of
the event along with the artisan-artist. The Deleuzian ontology of sound and
its cognition still seeks to clarify his access to sound perception in relation to
its existence. The Deleuzo-Guattarian turn to sound and music themselves
probably was influenced most by John Cage, who claimed that the purpose
of composition is not to exercise a creative process, ordering chaos, but to let
sounds be themselves, and by Varèse, who “while others were still discriminat-
ing ‘musical’ tones from noises, . . . moved into the field of sound itself, not
splitting it in two by introducing into the perception of it a mental prejudice”
(Cage 1961, 84). Obviously, Cage’s and Varèse’s views differed from Deleuze’s:
Cage was influenced by Zen Buddhism and meditation practice, giving priority
to everyday sounds, while Varèse was obsessed with sound modification. From
the Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective, art consists of sensations, but sensations
can exist without being sensed: they are producers that help render and cap-
ture forces. That allows Deleuze and Guattari to escape directing questions
straight at the listener, involving him or her as well as the artisan-artist into the
machine.
Deleuze and Guattari prefer non-personal agents in art, impersonal and
pre-individual instead of individual, when an artist’s personality and individ-
uality are erased by the work of an art machine and by a moving assemblage
(territorialisation–deterritorialisation–reterritorialisation). Nevertheless,
according to them, an artist has a special role: he or she becomes part of the
art machine—not for the purpose of control but for creative ethical-aesthet-
ical intervention. The creation is always between cosmos and chaos, harmony
and disharmony, its feature is being in between different lines, searching for
the resonance in a creational process. An artisan works within and for the art
machine, within and for the affects and percepts. While Guattari in “Ritornellos
and Existential Affects” ([1990] 1996) designs the entire scheme of the abstract
machine, the movement of refrain, and its cosmisation, Deleuze in Difference
and Repetition (1994) finds out what keeps heterogenic elements together until

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they give effect in resonance. That is beyond the mission of an artist or artisan,
who allows forces to come into abstract machines but never knows when they
will have an effect. This is the work of the dark precursor. It appears and dis-
appears, and in this way creates new couplings and clinches and provides the
appearance of new singularities. “What takes place in the system between res-
onating series under the influence of the dark precursor is called ‘epiphany’”
(Deleuze 1994, 121). Deleuze explains it as a thunderbolt: it appears suddenly,
unpredictably, uncontrolled. Moreover, “the dark precursor is sufficient to
enable communication between difference as such, and to make the different
communicate with difference” (Deleuze 1994, 145). Nevertheless, as Deleuze
(ibid.) warns us, “the dark precursor is not a friend,” which means the effect can
be death, collapse, and destruction as well as a new combination of heteroge-
neous series. Thus, the role of an artisan-artist is more like that of a shepherd,
not a hero or creator.

Multimedia composition: Andrius Šarapovas’s

S i lv e r du st
A number of experimental art projects, combining music and visual arts on the
basis of Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas, are being created all over the world. They
are all different, but at the same time they have something in common and
are recognisable for those familiar with these ideas. As an example, we can dis-
cuss a project created by musicians and visual artists and headed by Andrius
Šarapovas.
The Lithuanian project Silverdust seeks to reveal and in a special way expose
what is hidden under ordinary audio and visual demonstration, to capture what
is between hearing, seeing, and narrating and, even more, what is unheard,
unseen, not narrated, and only expected in sensations. It is an effort to catch
what is not represented. The project works with music, poetry, and dance, and
is edited using montage and sound post-production. The composition and
production of the project are by Lithuanian artist Andrius Šarapovas. The other
artists involved in this project—Vytis Nivinskas (double bass), Andrius Navakas
(poetry), Lora Juodkaitė (dance), Algis Mikutėnas (camera)—are all well known
in Lithuania and other countries. The project is formed from twelve short
pieces and was presented to the public in Vilnius and Copenhagen. According
to Šarapovas, the pieces should be treated as separate compositions that can
be assembled in many ways, though by watching each of them in sequence one
may feel a common rhythmic pulsation and be led to treat all the pieces as one
composition.

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 Beyond Artist and Artisan

Figure 2.8.1.

The project is framed by following several of Deleuze’s ideas. Šarapovas has

been interested in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, having studied their
work, and now tries to apply their concepts and test their ideas in short films
and musical compositions. Music is very important in his films. He experiments
with “running lines,” series of repetitions, creating and observing nomadic
movement and the journey of sound, waiting for the resonance of different
series in composition and expected events and lines of flight. In Silverdust dif-
ferent arts run separately, parallel, or in different directions. They are full of
breaks, cracks and ruptures, and at the same time they create unity through the
invisible links.
An interview I conducted with the author (Šarapovas and Duoblienė 2014)
in part allowed me to investigate Silverdust. During the conversation about
sound crystals and time crystals, the author placed emphasis on unexpected
sounds—that is, sounds that come and go and, though potentially in a compo-
sition, sounds about which it is impossible to know whether, when, and in what
form they will appear.
Discussing ideas of non-structured sound and noise from the perspectives
of Jacques Attali and R. Murray Schafer, Paul Hegarty demonstrates historically
how such sounds went from being “unwanted” and “unpleasant” in the period
of industrialisation to becoming cultural, at the same time linking the natu-
ral and the cultural. Non-structured sound and noise comes to and arrives in
modern aesthetics as a “hypergenre,” greatly influenced by Japanese culture
(Hegarty 2007, 138). In agreement with Deleuze, in the expression of noise
Hegarty finds minoritarian hybridity, the path to open identities, to be in the
process of becoming.
The main interest in relation to Deleuze lies in investigating how Deleuze
and Guattari’s mention of “raw sounds” in What is Philosophy? stimulates the
appearance of the art machine and the vibration and entwinements between

359

Figure 2.8.1. Andrius Šarapovas, Silverdust, performance, 2013.

 Lilija Duoblienė

different art lines in Silverdust. How much raw sound and how much sound
modification during the sound editing is needed to deterritorialise the refrain
of composition, mentioned in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus? How
does this machine erase the boundaries between natural and artificially mod-
ified sounds in music and produce clinches with dance and poetry? Is it the
work of an artist, an artisan, or a dark precursor that is described in Deleuze’s
early work Difference and Repetition?
The most important aspect was to find out how the raw unframed sound in
a musical sense—which Deleuze and Guattari called “non-musical,” but which
we would term “unformed”—comes to multimedia composition. The main
proposition behind Silverdust is to understand unformed sound in a broader
way: as unpredictably interrupting the conventional musical sound of a com-
position with sound from the everyday—musically unorganized sound—which
comes into composition as a reminder of the potentiality of sounds, their multi­
plicity and singularity, and their infinite series and univocity. It can be heard
as noise. Raw sound, noise, as well as inaudible sound in silence is significant
in Silverdust. During the entire composition, one hears sounds such as the rub-
bing of a surface, the scratching of the floor, squeaking doors, the grinding,
strange sound of an old double-bass bow, and so on.
The pulsation of rhythm and time is very important in the arrangement of a
composition. In the analysis of its rearrangement into the art machine, includ-
ing the unformed sound, raw sound, and raw image, the Deleuzian compar-
ison of work with sound and image is helpful. In A Thousand Plateaus, Cage is
mentioned as the person “who first and most perfectly deployed this fixed
sound plane, which affirms a process against all structure and genesis, a float-
ing time against pulsed time or tempo, experimentation against any kind of
interpretation, and in which silence as sonorous rest also marks the absolute
state of movement”; meanwhile, Jean-Luc Godard is described as “effectively
carr[ying] the fixed plane of cinema to this state where forms dissolve, and all
that subsists are tiny variations of speed between movements in composition”
(Deleuze 1987, 267), directing us to a visual image, which lacks a fixed plane just
as it lacks sound. In Silverdust’s context, we are interested in the image mostly as
unformed, as well as the unformed sound, presented as raw material, material
behind the scene (in other words image noise/trash) and how these interrelate,
and eventually how that helps develop pieces of composition until they come
to the event in a common rhythm, not a beat. The emphasis is transferred from
the external compositional arrangement onto the internal rearrangement,
when characters from different art lines interact during the composition: they
come close and move away, vibrate and resonate. To understand their move-
ment and flow, it is first of all helpful to distinguish unformed sound or noise.
As Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 302) state: “The difference between noise and
sound is definitely not a basis for a definition of music, or even for the dis-
tinction between musician birds and nonmusician birds.” While agreeing with
the previous statement, we are talking about this distinction to understand
how this helps create a smooth space. Noise and natural or raw outside sounds
come to a composition unexpectedly and unpredictably and fill space, making

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it smooth. For example, in Silverdust’s third piece, we hear cracking, tapping,

rapping, rubbing against a surface, and grinding, as well as the vibration of
some sounds we do not hear (a kind of silence) but feel are potentially there.
“Smooth space is occupied by intensities, wind and noise, forces, and sonorous
and tactile qualities, as in the desert, steppe, or ice,” as Deleuze and Guattari
(1987, 479) state.
In Silverdust, unformed sounds are welcomed into the composition. As
Šarapovas stated in an interview, “When everything is said and all harmony,
rhythmic things, step aside, there is nothing in front of you; the new briefing
and intensity for creation approaches” (Šarapovas and Duoblienė 2014), and
the pre-text for that is raw sound (the wrong type of sound: an old double-bass
sound, a phone call, and the sound of a door opening are played). Strange
sounds include those sounds that are outside what is expected. These sounds
are the cracks of a circle (the refrain of the composition), a bridge to counter-
point, and a condition for experimenting with the intensity of frequencies, the
variation of pitch, timbre, and rhythm in the process of deterritorialisation.

Unformed sound in the art machine

When noise or unformed sounds occur and intrude into the composition, they
create an out-of-control art machine. This inspires the musicians and other
project artists of Silverdust to react to the interruption as an inclusive detail.
From this perspective, the musically unformed sounds (in other words, raw
sound) and probing images (or raw images, image noise, or trash) that occur
at the beginning of each of Silverdust’s pieces and that look like a rehearsal are
more significant for the development of the art machine than the framing of
the pieces by the author. This marks the transversality of different characters.
A particular variety of raw sound has its own way in this art machine and
creates couplings and divisions. “Sound owes this power not to signifying or
‘communicational’ values (which on the contrary presuppose that power), nor
to physical properties (which would privilege light over sound), but to a phylo­
genetic line, a machinic phylum that operates in sound and makes it a cutting
edge of deterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 348). In this process
“it is necessary for the nonmusical sound of the human being to form a block
with the becoming-music of sound, for them to confront and embrace each
other like two wrestlers who can no longer break free from each other’s grasp,
and slide down a sloping line” (ibid., 309).
The non-musical sound of a human being can be the voice, but it does not
have to be. It could also be other sounds that derive from bodily movement—
breathing and coughing—or from the body encountering the environment: a
wooden floor scratching while standing with an instrument or dancing, a door
squeaking, the noise coming through an open window. These sounds come
naturally into compositions, allowing these sounds to become part of a block
of becoming-music sound. These sounds are recorded by Silverdust’s author
and later multiplied using montage and sound post-production. Unformed
sound deterritorialises the musical refrain (inside music assemblage).
Deterritorialisation using cracks of unformed sound is also applied to dance

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assemblage, performed according to the music, while poetry with its very clear
rhythm tries to keep its territorial line.
If in the process of deterritorialisation the unformed sound is a crack, the
interference of unformed sound or noise and its transmission in a creational
process is treated as a motor for development, but first of all as a thought
(Higgins 2010, 54). In the situation of affect it could be treated as flesh, which
leads to blocks of sensation, percepts, and affects, using cosmic forces. As
Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 183) state, “Flesh is only the developer which dis-
appears in what it develops: the compound of sensation.” As mentioned before,
unexpected and unformed sounds inspire the Silverdust performance team to
improvise; thus, first of all, Šarapovas reacts to the moment. Deleuze (1994, 120)
mentioned such a moment, “the one which ‘is lacking in its place’ as it lacks its
own identity,” when he talks about the dark precursor. There is not a very clear
connection between flesh, which appears in affect, and the work of the dark
precursor when different series communicate and come to resonance and give
an effect. Both act with strong invisible forces, differentiation, and capturing
pre-existence, though the moments stress different things: affect and effect.
Unformed sound as flesh provokes the further work of the art machine in
the process of sound editing and montage. As Šarapovas said in our interview
(Šarapovas and Duoblienė, 2014), he quiets (turns down) text (words of poetry),
sometimes framing them in repeating series, he modifies musical sounds into
noise, and he leaves a lot of visual noise (preparatory, working moments in the
image). Erasing or quieting some words of poetry in the art machine sets free
other sounds (music and additional non-musical sounds). In the second piece
from Silverdust, tuning the instruments and a demonstration of the filming
process as image noise/trash delivers a message about the multiplicity of ele-
ments that are on and under the surface; some of these elements are potential,
waiting for their appearance in the process of creation. Experimenting with
unformed sounds (noise) and images lets them move from one assemblage to
another, to rupture different series, to capture and lose sound in the middle
of the journey between absence and presence. On one side, “noise loses itself
in its transmission” and, “at the same time, it operates outside of power rela-
tions, as it brings the world as other, and other to itself ” (Hegarty 2007, 138).
Hegarty’s insights on sound, noise, and music may be applicable in rethinking
sound in recent composition. Consequently, as Deleuze and Guattari state,
sounds are held in their “extinction,” their “production and development,”
by the multimedia art machine and in experimenting with different pitches,
timbres, and rhythms. The art machine, with the help of Šarapovas as part of the
machine, tries to compound raw sound/noise within music assemblage, and
keeps the connection with other assemblages of poetry and dance. Montage in
Silverdust allows an interconnection between the raw sound/noise in music and
poetry and the image noise or fragmented/split image, opening the conditions
for vibrations and couplings between heterogeneous elements as well as a divi-
sion. Thus we have the process of creation, new intraconnections and intercon-
nections between different art characters in the assemblage while playing with
sound and image modification. Such an experiment, which partly continues

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Cage’s suggestion to explore “not only hitting, but rubbing, smashing, making
sound in every possible way” (Cage 1961, 87) to emancipate sound and rhythm,
has been taken a step further and applied to working with images in the art
machine.
That happens in the process of becoming: becoming music, becoming art.
It is the work of the artisan, as Deleuze and Guattari say. Commenting on his
work, Šarapovas remarks: “My idea is like a freely rolling ball that, in encoun-
tering the environment, gives rise to a new product” (Šarapovas and Duoblienė
2014). So it depends on Šarapovas, as the author and producer of the idea, and
also on the dark precursor, because no one knows when the resonance will hap-
pen, when the play will come to the event, when all series will be harmonised
in one chaosmic rhythm.
This is very nicely expressed in “Comfort,” the ninth piece from Silverdust,
where the mix of image fragments and repetitions is demonstrated, alongside
playing with the text, which is “filled with sound,” and musical sound to create
a kind of mosaic. The art machine displaces and removes some characters in
the assemblage and multiplies some sounds that might seem to be noise but
which remind us of sound multiplicity and cosmic potentiality—the sounds
that move between chaos and cosmos. This happens in the process of editing,
erasing all boundaries between raw and produced, music and non-music, nat-
ural and artificial, noise and musical sound, and consequently between com-
posed image, image noise, and fragmented image. All the different types of art
in Silverdust (music, poetry, and dance), which in the final production are per-
ceived as being part of the same composition, communicate according to the
appearance of differences, which come unexpectedly: a strange sound includes
something new from the outside, or a strange visual image includes what is out-
side the official image. These differentiations disappear in their communica-
tion and play, opening a smooth space and creating a vibration between differ-
ent arts, their exposed and hidden characters, and their resonance in another
moment, that moment of the appearance of flesh. Are all these transmutations
the creation of artist Andrius Šarapovas and his team? In my view, they are all
artisans, especially Šarapovas. The art machine and its production depend on
artists as much as they depend on the art machine. It erases the thresholds
between opposite poles or poles of different milieus. In Hegarty’s (2007, 200)
words, “noise transvalues listener and object, noise and music, hearing and
listening, perception and its failure, performance and its failure, noise and its
failure to be music. And the transvaluation itself, only as it could ever be. As if it
really were noise, after or before, all.” Although Hegarty emphasises the role of
listeners and their perceptions of noise and music, in my view artisans become
listeners and listeners becomes artisans.
Šarapovas did not stop at this point and has advanced even further. He con-
tinued developing his artistic idea and produced a short film featuring inter-
views with Silverdust’s performers. This was a rhizomatic move; that is, upon
completion of his composition he tried to unfold the potential thoughts of his
artistic team. Their comments were simple: “just good,” “mood,” “sensibility,”
“job,” “living everyday,” and the like. Did they perceive themselves as part of an

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art machine in Silverdust as it was perceived by Šarapovas? Yes and no. They were
primarily artisans in the traditional sense of the word artisan (i.e., perfect tech-
nical performers in their fields); during this performance, they became artisans
who transmitted forces flowing around them.
In conclusion, we can state that Šarapovas’s project comes very close to
Deleuze and Guattari’s insight, when Deleuze (1994, 119) says: “All that, how-
ever, would be possible only because the invisible precursor conceals itself and
its functioning, and at the same time conceals the in-itself or true nature of
difference.” This happens because of the displacement and disguise of the dif-
ferentiator, which in our interpretation can be provoked by unformed sound,
bringing up the potentially existent singularity, expressed in a unique way just
for one time, and on the other side reminding us of its gradual compositional
connection to the universe.

References
Bidima, Jean-Godefroy. 2004. “Music and Farnham, UK: Ashgate.
the Socio-Historical Real: Rhythm, Guattari, Félix. (1990) 1996. “Ritornellos
Series and Critique in Deleuze and O. and Existential Affects.” Translated by
Revault d’Allonnes.” Translated by Janice Juliana Schiesari and Georges Van Den
Griffiths. In Deleuze and Music, edited Abbeele. In The Guattari Reader, edited
by Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swiboda, by Gary Genosko, 158–71. Oxford:
176–96. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Blackwell. Essay first published 1989
Press. as “Ritournelles et effects existentiels”
Cage, John. 1961. Silence: Lectures and Writings. in Chimères 7 and in Cartographies
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University schizoanalytiques (Paris: Galilée), 251–68.
Press. This translation first published 1990
Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and (Discourse 12 [2]: 251–68).
Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New ———. 1995. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic
York: Columbia University Press. First Paradigm. Translated by Paul Bains and
published 1968 as Différence et répétition Julian Pefanis. Bloomington: Indiana
(Paris: Presses universitaires de France). University Press. First published 1992 as
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. Chaosmose (Paris: Galilée).
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Hegarty, Paul. 2007. Noise/Music: A History.
Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Higgins, Sean. 2010. “A Deleuzean Noise/
Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as Excavating the Body of Abstract Sound.”
Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2 In Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and
(Paris: Minuit). the Theory and Philosophy of Music, edited
———. 1994. What is Philosophy? Translated by Brian Hulse and Nick Nesbitt, 51–77.
by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Farnham, UK: Ashgate.
Burchell. New York: Columbia University Šarapovas, Andrius, and Duoblienė, Lilija.
Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que 2014. Interview with Andrius Šarapovas
la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). by Lilija Duoblienė. 15 October.
Gallope, Michael. 2010. “The Sound of Sauvagnargues, Anne. 2013. Deleuze and
Repeating Life: Ethics and Metaphysics Art. Translated by Samantha Bankston.
in Deleuze’s Philosophy of Music.” In London: Bloomsbury. First published
Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the 2005 as Deleuze et l’art (Paris: Presses
Theory and Philosophy of Music, edited by Universitaires de France).
Brian Hulse and Nick Nesbitt, 77–103. Vernon, Jim. 2014. “Deleuze on the Musical

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Work of Art.” In Intensities and Lines of London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Flight: Deleuze/Guattari and the Arts, edited Zepke, Stephen. 2005. Art as Abstract Machine:
by Antonio Calcagno, Jim Vernon, Steve Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and
G. Lofts, 55–66. London: Rowman and Guattari. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Littlefield. ———. 2012. “Art as Abstract Machine:
Wallin, Jason J. 2010. A Deleuzian Approach Guattari’s Modernist Aesthetics.” Deleuze
to Curriculum: Essays on a Pedagogical Life. Studies 6 (2): 224–39.

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 Hollywood Flatlands
Taking a Line for a Walk*
Verina Gfader
The Contemporary Condition, Aarhus University

[This chapter documents an image lecture, with sound by Mikhail Karikis,

delivered at the Dark Precursor conference. Here presented in the format of
a lecture script, image/slide references are made throughout corresponding to
the conceptual contents. Descriptions of the slides’ contents are listed at the
end of the chapter.]

In this session we will do a line reading: we will look at different conceptions

of the figurative line in motion. There are various possibilities of how figura-
tion comes into being, for example, through special effects such as the morph,
through metamorphosis, or through erasure. In relation to such figurative pro-
cesses, we will discuss concepts of a vital and poetic line, understood here as
the appearance of a lively quality in figures made of static lines—as if the lines
have a life on their own. This will lead us to identify a particular quality of ani-
mation, namely animation’s dedication to reproduction and lifelikeness.
Russian film director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein’s concept of “plasmat-
icness,” which revolves around the infinitely elastic cartoon line, establishes
the ground for this session. Eisenstein is chiefly known as a film-maker and
for his concept of montage; but he was also a big fan of Walt Disney and some
of the paragraphs of his Disney study introduce a series of ideas about the link
between animation and certain fields of socio-political thought, including
labour issues, animation production, and conceptions of an organic life—that
is, the line running across human, animal, plant.
Film and media theorist Thomas Lamarre (2010) takes Eisenstein’s concep-
tual contribution to animation further in his analysis of the shōnen manga
Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen, 1973–87) in the article “Manga Bomb.” For
Lamarre, the concept of plasmaticness essentially supports developing a sys-
tem of categorising moving lines through their specific qualities: he differenti-
ates the “plastic line” from the “structural line,” suggesting that the plastic line
assumes a polyformic (multiple forms) character and produces polymorphic

*
This chapter originates from an extensive lecture script for the seminar “Vital Lines,” given as part of
the fine art critical studies programme at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2015–16. Some sections
have appeared in other publications (Gfader 2006, 2013). The excluded sections include those dealing
with explorations of agency, from creator to line as (material) agent; the consciousness of animation;
ghostly projections; the creator giving life; or metaphors of life and death.

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 Hollywood Flatlands

(multiple transitions) characters on the page or screen. If there is a sort of vital-

ity—autonomous energy—built in here, the line becomes an agent reproduc-
ing “life’s” unpredictability from within itself.
Next, we move on to Rosalind Krauss’s (2000) discussion of William
Kentridge’s figurative animations, which are based on single constantly
reworked charcoal drawings. Her focus on erasure, improvisation, and discov-
ery reveals the political-mnemonic underpinnings in the artist’s work.
Within the digital realm, questions of the morph also animate concepts of
memory. Morphing is a special effect in motion pictures and animations that
changes—or morphs—one image or shape into another through a seamless
transition. We will look at a specific (early and potentially limited) concept of
the morph, through an analysis around “aesthetics of continuity” by media art-
ist and theorist Lev Manovich, mostly in relation to the arguably specific aes-
thetics of the digital image.
Last, let me mention another animation concept concerning filming cells
and how this provokes a kind of media archaeology—the shifting relation of
narratives of domineering media and our examinations of the past. In their
essay, “A Theory of Animation: Cells, L-Systems, and Film,” Christopher Kelty
and Hannah Landecker (2004, 32) look into the genre of microcinematog-
raphy, where living cells were captured on film in early twentieth-century la­-
boratories; they claim, “What interests us here is not the status of these images
of life in relation to the real—some ontological existent to which they do or
do not correspond as life-like—but their status as images in relation to knowl-
edge; in particular, in relation to the systematized knowledge of the biological
sciences of the nineteenth and twentieth century.” Other discussions include
the recording of cell life on film, the representation of the cell inseparable from
connecting stillness and movement, and animation “forc[ing] a theory of cellu-
larity to become visible” (ibid., 57)—animation as cell, found in the histories of
cell biology, microcinematography, and life.
I conclude by examining “plasticity” as a more current phenomenon and
concept linking the neo-liberal subject or subjectivity (us) with the operations
and readaptability of our brains (neuroplasticity) and its visual appearances.
Finally, I introduce how this understanding of a plastic brain and subjectivity
is taken up by artists, with reference to Hito Steyerl’s video Liquidity Inc., 2014.

Yuichi Yokoyama’s garden

[Slides 1–4] Organic and nonorganic objects, concrete as well as indeterminate
figures, populate the garden landscape in Yuichi Yokoyama’s cartoon-manga
Garden from 2011. Exact machinic lines create and define a series of pattern-like
images, scenes in which colourless human and nonhuman forms are strangely
interwoven and merge with topological spaces: the properties of space are
preserved under continuous deformations. Filmic zooms further abstract an
already abstracted architecture. The image framing undergoes radical cutting.
It is as if the single images of this graphic novel are extracts from a huge unifying
image, segments of a surface that cannot be seen in its totality. The characters

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are made from geometric forms and bodily extensions. Lacking singular facial
components, they remain a crowd. Heads are of round shape or are planet-like,
sometimes they are formed as a cube with a hole in the middle, sometimes with
animal-like extensions such as a beak. If eyes are drawn, they appear as simple
dots or similar; occasionally they also appear as technological devices, as a cam-
era or as a telescope.
These are characterless beings, a group of travellers exploring a mutating
environment. There is constant movement achieved by lines extending across
the paper surface, and by the perceptually rapid actions of the figures (climb-
ing, jumping, walking), which results in an assemblage of compressed “stories”
within an overall story. The complete story is put into question by a lack of lin-
earity the novel suggests. Here the page of the cartoon becomes a catalyst, a
playground for energies animating geometrical forms.
How can vital lines, understood as lines that embody or express a lively qual-
ity, be read in relation to modes of vitality, life forms, and power? In what way
does drawing—with the animated line—contribute to the formation of agency:
human/nonhuman, material/immaterial?
Looking at specific figurative animation works and types of drawings, we
can perhaps think about drawing as a movement, by its very nature nonstatic
or vital/lively. But with the animated line, there may be an additional move-
ment, which brings in a different kind of movement. This movement is based
on when drawing opens up the possibility of autonomy in relation to its condi-
tions, when it proposes a form of life, a quasi-autonomous life form. As we will
explore, drawing is caught in a state of being both—that is, drawing as a politics
of movement/vitality and drawing as a form of life as such.

Line architecture
The vital line is a way in which animation can exist as architecture or topology.
Lamarre’s discussion of the plastic line in contrast to the structural line in the
cartoon invests this idea. His analytic observations on animate lines move far
beyond the spacial limit that comics and animation seemingly occupy—at least
when regarded in a more traditional way as non-artistic, non-academic, and
non-historical (there has been no major history of animation). Comics and ani-
mation in Lamarre’s view have always been affected by but have also nourished
the scepticism derived from more established fields and disciplines. Lamarre’s
elaboration on the “plastic line” in the Japanese manga Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no
Gen, 1973–87) forms an enquiry that resonates with the status of geometry and
spatiality, as well as action and affect, in the wider context of narrative works.
To push principles of plasticity as constitutive, fundamental elements in
cartoons and manga, more precisely, shōnen manga,1 Lamarre engages with
Eisenstein’s regimes of forming in his project around “plasmaticness.”

1
Lamarre’s (2010, 280–81) understanding of “cartoon” covers both comics and animation; and his use of
the term “manga” encompasses more than cartoons and manga films as it also refers to animation and
print comics.

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[Slide 7] Plasmaticness was a concept identified and developed by Eisenstein

in his unfinished study of Disney, written between 1941 and 1946 (Leyda 1988),
in order to “theorize the attraction of fantastic and often elastic figures that
frequent the world of Disney animation. By the term ‘plasmaticness’ Eisenstein
meant two things: first, the protean quality of ‘the protoplasm,’ or the organic
substance that is capable of assuming any form, and second, the elasticity of
drawn figures that can stretch, squash or twist into impossible contortions.
Many of Disney’s animated films exhibit both dimensions of plasmaticness”
(Furuhata 2011, 26).
Eisenstein’s conceptual contribution to an infinitely elastic cartoon line is
centred on the capacity of stroke drawing to assume any form whatever in a con-
tinuous, amoeba-like contour. In contrast to a structural or ruled line, which
maintains its precise shape and would break under pressure, the plastic line
assumes a polyformic character, and it also produces polymorphic characters on
the page or screen. Both bending and springing back, as Lamarre notes, the flu-
idity and flexibility of form gives the line agency.2 This active plastic line defines
the painterly and filmic picture plane against figure–ground principles. What
this version of a line interestingly introduces is a kind of surplus of motion.
If we follow Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s differentiation between a
“line between two points” and a “point between two lines,” the amoeba-like
contour exemplifies, Lamarre (2010, 282) says, “one kind of a point between
two lines. The contour creates the sense of a center of motion within it. It
makes for an animate center, as if there were a point within the contour that
at once grounded and provided the impetus for mobility and elasticity of the
line on either side of it (or with the amoeba, on all sides of it). With its ani-
mate center, the cartoon line doesn’t tend toward the efficiency and propriety
of Euclidean geometry.” Vitality and a sort of liveliness here combine with a
plastic quality and an active inhuman formation, thereby reproducing “life’s”
unpredictability.
[Slide 9] Through his analysis, Lamarre provides a new reading of cartoon
and shōnen manga. He emphasises the embodied, dialectical relation between
plastic line and structural line, the cartoon line and ruled line, the point
between two lines and the line between two points, figure and form, character
and panel . . . fabulation and representation. Two points can be identified here
(Lamarre 2010, 286): if vitality, understood as the possibility of life, is punctual
and cellular, as in the case of the animate centre of the amoeba-like contour,
and if a line is constituted by a varying number of dots, then drawing is always
already movement, is by its very nature non-static, and is vital.3
[Slides 9–11, 12–11, 24, 23, 25, 26]

2 In particular, see Lamarre (2010, 280–84). The extensive literature on the outline includes an interesting
account on figuration generated through something different and inaccessible to what it constitutes:
the line. Between the inside and outside of the figure (the outline or contour is seen as a “tracing”) one
sees either the line or figuration (see Derrida 1993, 54). We might find this typical for animation, where
one sees either the line or the figure.
3 On qualitative movement, time structures, turbulent flows, cinematic movement, and flip-books, see
Orlow (2011).

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 Verina Gfader

Aesthetics of continuity—morph
From the point of view of the digital and more recent media, the morph intro-
duces another concept of a transforming or metamorphosing thing. In The
Language of New Media, Lev Manovich (2001) discusses what he calls the “aes-
thetics of continuity” (144) where moving images on a computer screen pro-
vide the illusion of a movie or moving image without a cut. There is a “lack of
montage,” he says, where “the continuity of a human experience, guaranteed by
the laws of physics . . . is simulated” (143).4 The moving image is centred in the
“continuous transition between two images” (142), as opposed to the moving
image that consists of images linked in various ways.
[Slide 27] In Manovich’s understanding there is a contrast between the film
cut and the digital morph or digital composite, and it originates in identifying
two unequal, distinctive images: the first image and the second image, which
with the digital morph is a transformation of the first. His point suggests a
reconsideration of the image, namely that of a photograph, an image taken of
what is before the camera or eye, which is an indicator of time upon which dis-
continuity and continuity depends. The continuous transition Manovich pro-
poses does not consist of a series of “complete photographic” (or, in semiotic
terms, indexical) images, where the image is identical to a particular moment in
time.5 The morph instead is a question of permanence. If one stops the motion,
each frame or each moment of a morph shows a strange combination of the
first and the second image to the point of erasing the photographic image, or,
more precisely, the photographic quality of an image. So while there is a trans-
formation from a first to a second image, there is a further transformation that
regards the nature of the image: with the morph there is an image that changes
qualitatively. Manovich suggests that there is a replacement of the film cut by
a digital morph or digital composite; this means that the image is no longer a
photograph. This undoing of photography can be defined as an engagement
with the materiality of the digital image, rather than in relation to the moving
image as generated from different instances in time put into sequences. To see
the moving image is to see the same image in different variations, in its differ-
ent possibilities to transform, that is, to morph. The image we see exists as an
ongoing process of how a form can indicate an object. Manovich (2001, 144)
highlights these dynamic states of an image when he says, “Compositing aims
to blend [different elements] . . . into a seamless whole, a single Gestalt.”
Two years later, Scott Bukatman (2003, 229) took morphing into other
realms. In Matters of Gravity, Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century, he
notes: in “contemporary science fiction . . . morphing . . . alters physical reality,

4 Manovich describes the replacement of montage by “compositing” (in the 1990s sense), where the aim is
to combine different collective objects/images into a single object/image. Anti-montage principles are
found either in these smooth “compressed” objects or in the coexistence of separate windows on the
computer screen (Manovich 2001, 143).
5 This model of photography’s temporality refers to the realist model of the photograph as index, based
on the model of the fingerprint or the death mask, associated with film theorist André Bazin (see Bazin
1967). In contrast, Ulrich Baer (2002) argues that the duration of the photograph should be conceived
not as a frozen “slice of time” but rather as a narrative flow, unfolding over time.

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 Hollywood Flatlands

which then affects memory and thus the self. In today’s cyberworld of digitally
produced and stored multiple realities, the mere fact of physical existence no
longer guarantees the persistence of a fixed self.” But, and this may be some-
thing to discuss in relation to “plasmaticness,” Bukatman (ibid., 245) considers
the digital morph “an inadequate, overly literal gesture toward change without
pain, without consequence, without meaning.”

Erasure
Erasure leads to another concept of thinking about the perception of figura-
tion in animation: of becoming figure and alive. [Slide 28] White South African
artist William Kentridge asks us to encounter the actual image as a visible com-
bination of the “images before” it and its present state. In his animations, such
as Mine (1991) or Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris (1989), the whole film
consists of a number of charcoal drawings that are constantly reworked and
adapted, and also rediscovered and reinterpreted. The images are linked to
construct meaning through leaving previous states of the drawing half or imper-
fectly erased. These imperfect leftovers are traces and they are incorporated in
the formation of the actual image. The erasure expresses both a stillness (when
it refers to an image that no longer exists) and a movement (when it contributes
to the actual image and the film’s continuity). Writing on Kentridge, Rosalind
Krauss (2000, 9) suggests that as a “derivative of drawing” the films describe an
ambiguous relation between stillness and movement where the image divides
into two media, that of drawing and that of film.
Foregrounding the technical features and impact of Kentridge’s work leads
to other aspects, namely, animation in relation to memory. Erasure here does
not involve a concept of invisibility, disappearance, or discontinuity. On the
contrary, because these so-called traces indicate a state of the image different
to the present, they open up the concept of the image, and consequently that
of the film, as becoming. The film’s capacity to restore, keep, and preserve what
is lost with the drawing is important for the meaning of the work. Kentridge’s
drawings and films are a reflection on South Africa under apartheid, and an
urban public sphere whose hidden history is also one of mourning. In the lay-
ers of the trace of the drawing, the animated image marks the ambiguity of a
memory: what we read in bits of lines and in incomplete and imperfectly erased
figures is also how individual and collective history and knowledge always
divide. According to Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (in Kentridge and Christov-
Bakargiev 2005, 8), in the potential of animation to process these traces and
thus prevent the closure of a single narrative, the work deals with “subjugation
and emancipation, guilt and confession, trauma and healing through memory.”
This model of animation involves two references to time: time articulated as a
compression (different states within one single visual field), and “the improvi-
sational character of . . . discovery” (Krauss 2000, 7), in which becoming equals
erasure.

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[Slide 32] Another example of the principle of erasure equalling forming,

which is closer to the characteristics of a morph, is an animation by avant-garde
film-maker Oskar Fischinger. In the seven-minute black-and-white silhouette
film Seelische Konstruktionen (Spiritual Constructions) (1927–29), the flattened
image shows the shapes of two men, a table, and drinks. They smoothly trans-
form into all kinds of extensions and formations of this one single shape. The
fluidity of the elastic form without volume is underscored by the use of clay
and the flat silhouettes. It is of interest that precisely because one figuration
perceptually replaces a former one, but also is derived from it and represents
an instant image, the image gives way to a complex interdependency: the inter­-
dependency of a built environment (the aesthetic commitment) and the
formed narrative that undercuts this. Besides alluding to this hybrid element
in cell animation, the dynamic state of the image symbolises the perceptual
incompleteness achieved by this animation, and in turn it symbolises a mental
image and the relation to the medium’s capacity to express itself.

Conclusion
[Slides 29, 30, 31, 32] I conclude by returning to relations of plasticity and plas-
maticness: earlier we referred to plasticity in its historical relevance and as a
more current phenomenon and scientific-philosophical concept. When it links
the neo-liberal subject/subjectivity (us) with the operations and readaptability
of our brains (neuroplasticity), and subsequently when it further produces its
artworks or aesthetics/visual appearances; investigations by artists such as Hito
Steyerl or Zach Blas around a liquid, metamorphosing, plasmatic, body-subjec-
tivity, can be seen as exemplary here.
Pasi Väliaho (2014) in Biopolitical Screens: Image, Power, and the Neoliberal Brain
conceptualises the imagery that composes our affective and conceptual real-
ity under twenty-first-century capitalism. Väliaho investigates the role screen
media play in the networks that today harness human minds and bodies—the
ways that images animated on console game platforms, virtual reality tech-
nologies, and computer screens capture human potential by plugging it into
arrangements of finance, war, and the consumption of entertainment. Väliaho
draws on current neuroscience and political and economic thought when he
argues that these images work to shape the atomistic individuals who populate
the neo-liberal world of accumulation and war.
In the section, “Brain Plasticity and Immunopolitics,” Väliaho (2014, 83)
refers to Catherine Malabou’s idea that “the contemporary conception of the
brain as self-organizing and self-reparative networks [—its very plasticity—]
closely corresponds to the economic order of present-day societies and the
neoliberal rationalities sustaining them, most especially, to the current mana-
gerial strategies of decentralization and openness and to the material organiza-
tion of work premised on constant adaptability, connectedness, and flexibility.”
Steyerl’s video work-animation Liquidity Inc. can be read in this light, and can
be used to discuss the effective use of animation: animation as a force (aligned
to this dynamic—problematically operating precisely in this neo-liberal cap-

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italist mode . . . ). This work, with its essential forms of simulations of water
and “liquidifications” on several levels, looks at a financial advisor called Jacob
Wood who lost his job during the last financial crisis, and who then embarked
on a career in mixed martial arts. But this is the subject of the next seminar . . .

Slides
1–4: Yuichi Yokoyama, Garden, 2011 (cartoon- 23: Gustav Metzger, Liquid Crystal
manga book, extracts). Environment (detail), multimedia
5–6: Paul Klee line drawings. installation, 1965/2005.
7: Walt Disney, Steamboat Willie, 1928, 7 25: Osamu Tezuka, Astro Boy / Mighty Atom
minutes 22 seconds. The first Disney (Tetsuwan Atomu), Japanese manga series
sound cartoon (film still). https://www. written and illustrated 1952–1968.
youtube.com/watch?v=BBgghnQF6E4. 26: Qiu Anxiong, Cake, 2014 (animation still).
8: Thomas Lamarre, chart from “Manga 27: Pierre Huyghe, Human Mask, 2014 (video
Bomb: Between the Lines of Barefoot still).
Gen” (2010). 28: William Kentridge, animation stills.
9–11: Seth Price, Silhouettes, http:// 29, 30: Zach Blas, Facial Weaponization
sethpriceimages.com/tagged/silhouettes. Communiqué: Fag Face, 2012 (video stills).
12–22, 24: Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher, https://vimeo.com/57882032.
film stills and installation shots, 31: Hito Steyerl, Liquidity Inc., 2014 (video
including Murmur, 2003–4. Five 16 mm still).
animation film projections; or Nothing Is 32: Oskar Fischinger, Seelische Konstruktionen
. . . , 2013, 16 mm film and harp, 5 minutes (Spiritual Constructions), 1927–29 (film
48 seconds. still).

References
Baer, Ulrich. 2002. Spectral Evidence: The Furuhata, Yuriko. 2011. “Rethinking
Photography of Trauma. Cambridge, MA: Plasticity: The Politics and Production
MIT Press. of the Animated Image.” Animation 6 (1):
Bazin, André. 1967. “The Ontology of 25–38.
the Photographic Image.” In What is Gfader, Verina. 2006. “Doubling in a Practice
Cinema? Essays; Volume 1, selected and of Animation.” PhD Thesis, Central Saint
translated by Hugh Gray, 9–16. Berkeley: Martins, University of the Arts London.
University of California Press. Essay first ———. 2013. “On the Fabulation of a Form
published 1945 as “Ontologie de l’image of Life in the Drawn Line and Systems
photographique” in Les problèmes de la of Thought.” In “Tezuka’s Manga Life,”
peinture, edited by Gaston Diehl (Paris: special issue, Mechademia 8: 61–71.
Confluences), 405–11. Kelty, Christopher, and Hannah Landecker.
Bukatman, Scott. 2003. Matters of Gravity: 2004. “A Theory of Animation: Cells,
Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th L-Systems, and Film.” Grey Room 17:
Century. Durham, NC: Duke University 30–63.
Press. Kentridge, William, and Carolyn Christov-
Derrida, Jacques. 1993. “Memoirs of the Bakargiev. 2005. “In Conversation—
Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Autumn 1998.” In pressPLAY: contemporary
Ruins.” Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault artists in conversation, 6–35. London:
and Michael Naas. Chicago: University Phaidon, 2005.
of Chicago Press. First published 1990 Krauss, Rosalind. 2000. “‘The Rock’: William
as Mémoires d’aveugle: L’autoportrait et Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection.”
autres ruines (Paris: Réunion des Musées October 92: 3–35.
Nationaux). Lamarre, Thomas. 2010. “Manga Bomb:

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Between the Lines of Barefoot Gen.” Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
In Comics Worlds and the World of Comics: Orlow, Uriel. 2011. “Flicker, Blink, and Time:
Towards Scholarship on a Global Scale, edited Towards the Zero Degree of Movement.”
by Jaqueline Berndt, 263–307. Kyoto: In Adventure-Landing: A Compendium of
International Manga Research Center. Animation, written and edited by Verina
Leyda, Jay, ed. 1988. Eisenstein on Disney. Gfader, 238–46. Berlin: Revolver.
Translated by Alan Upchurch. London: Väliaho, Pasi. 2014. Biopolitical Screens: Image,
Metheun. Power, and the Neoliberal Brain. Cambridge,
Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New MA: MIT Press.

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 Bacon and the Cartoonist
The Emergence of the Figure
through Two Opposing Diagrams
John Miers
Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London

Introduction
This paper is an attempt to find points of compatibility, or at least useful com-
parison, between two apparently fundamentally opposed depictive practices:
that of Francis Bacon as described by Gilles Deleuze in The Logic of Sensation
(2003), and that of cartoonists. I will begin by outlining the concepts of “figure”
and “diagram,” as employed in Deleuze’s book, and comics scholar Thierry
Groensteen’s concept of “gridding.” Next, I will introduce an earlier attempt
to bring these two practices into relation with one another, and will use the
specifics of that article to set out my own account in more detail. We will then
consider comics scholar Andrei Molotiu’s concept of “sequential dynamism”
before returning to Groensteen’s concept of gridding in order to draw out
more connections between this and Bacon’s concept of the diagram. I will con-
clude with some brief words on my own cartooning practice.
A quick note on terminology is necessary because my art form is burdened
with an ill-defined set of clumsy descriptors that carry unwieldy cultural and
historical baggage. I make “comics,” a term I use as an umbrella that includes
graphic novels, newspaper strips, manga, and bande dessinée (Franco-Belgian
comics). People who make these sorts of artworks are cartoonists. I follow
Simon O’Sullivan (2009) in using “Deleuze-Bacon” as shorthand for “the prac-
tice of Francis Bacon as described by Gilles Deleuze.”

Figurative givens, clichés, figures, and the diagram

On the face of it, it is difficult to imagine two depictive practices that are more
distant from one another than Bacon’s and the cartoonist’s. Deleuze (2003,
86) tells us that “it is a mistake to think that the painter works on a white
surface.”

375
 John Miers

Figure 2.10.1.

The painter is already present in the canvas, which is crowded with what
Deleuze calls figurative givens, pictorial clichés. These givens are the accumu-
lated modes of representation and ways of seeing by which we are constantly
surrounded. Deleuze-Bacon pays particular attention to photography as a con-
straining source of pictorial clichés, but the representational habits that are
created through centuries of art history are no less of a burden to the painter.
The painter’s first task then is to remove, even to exorcise, these clichés. And
how is this to be done? Deleuze-Bacon says this: “make random marks (lines-
traits); scrub, sweep, or wipe the canvas in order to clear out locales or zones
(color-patches); throw the paint, from various angles and at various speeds”
(Deleuze 2003, 99–100).

376

Figure 2.10.1. John Miers, Bacon and the Cartoonist, watercolour on paper, 2014.
 Bacon and the Cartoonist

Through these acts, which precede painting itself (but belong fully to it), the
artist creates what Deleuze-Bacon calls the diagram. The diagram as employed
in this particular book differs somewhat from the fundamentally abstract
notion of the diagram employed elsewhere in Deleuze’s philosophy (Vellodi
2014, 80) in that, in The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze is happy to describe the dia-
grams operating in the practices of different painters in terms of sets of mate-
rial forms. In Van Gogh’s practice, for example, the diagram is identified as “the
set of straight and curved hatch marks that raise and lower the ground, twist
the trees, [and] make the sky palpitate” (Deleuze 2003, 102).
In Bacon’s practice, the diagram is a set of nonrepresentative traits and col-
our patches. These marks are not yet elements of depiction. At this stage they
are asignifying. What they do is clear out the canvas of the clichés and givens,
and, second, they create zones of possibility on the canvas. Marks made at this
diagramming stage begin to focus the painter’s attention on particular areas
and suggest depictive gestures that may be made there. For Deleuze-Bacon
this struggle in painting is fundamentally a struggle to avoid narrative, to avoid
illustration. Depiction that exists in relation to a pre-existing referent or that
narrates a story is what Deleuze calls the “figurative.” For Deleuze-Bacon the
task is to transcend or escape the figurative by creating not a representation
that signifies through its employment of existing ways of seeing, but one that
creates a sense of presence that is physically felt, that acts directly on the nerv-
ous system.
The cartoonist, by contrast, is intensely concerned with narrative and illus-
tration. Indeed, practitioners of this art form are usually pleased when they dis-
cover or invent a material form that can be used reliably to signify a character,
emotion, or gesture. Rather than seeking to exorcise the clichés that crowd the
drawing surface, the cartoonist’s development of his or her own operative dia-
gram can be seen as the creation and embrace of a set of clichés that will then
be employed in the serial depictions the cartoonist must create to produce a
comic. Thierry Groensteen, in The System of Comics (2007, 144), gives the name
“gridding” to the initial, pre-pictorial, work that is done by the cartoonist. He
describes gridding as “a primary repartition of the narrative material.” In this
account the narrative material is already present, is necessarily present, and the
cartoonist seeks to give this form. Like the intense pre-pictorial work done by
the painter, this work, as Groensteen says, is “not necessarily incarnated” (ibid).
The very first act of gridding may be, for example, the first idea a cartoonist has
about the chapters into which a long narrative may be divided, or, at a smaller
scale, gridding may consist in the decision to divide narrative material into a
particular sequence of depictions. The emergence of the figure, then, depends
on the presence of figurative material. Deleuze-Bacon readily acknowledges
that, of course, bodies are pictured within Bacon’s paintings. The figure, how-
ever, is not wholly contained within these depictions, cannot be extracted from
these picturings by a process of decoding established signifying forms.
It is my contention here that in comics the figure arises from images in
sequence, from the multiple networked depictions that constitute the comics
page. If, for example, you look at the set of six caricatures of Francis Bacon at

377
 John Miers

the bottom-right of figure 2.10.1 and imagine these six depictions not to be dis-
tinct subjects or figures but to be multiple depictions of a single subject, and if
you read these six caricatures as depicting the same subject that is represented
at the top-left and centre of the image, then what you have in mind is an idea
of human presence that arises from specific picturings but is not contained
within any one of them.
While the individual images within comics overwhelmingly tend to embrace
and reinforce illustration and narrative, and do so through the deliberate use
of a set of figurative givens, it is in the resulting accumulation of networked
images that something like the figure can emerge. By characterising the opera-
tion of these terms in comics in this way, my account differs significantly from
that offered in the only other attempt of which I am aware to connect Deleuze-
Bacon with the cartoonist.
The account in question was provided by Pierre Sterckx in his 1986 article
“The Magnifying Glass or the Sponge.” Sterckx (2014, 139) opens his article with
comments that I could very well have used to open this paper: “Theoretically,
painting and comics should be mutually exclusive, and completely averse to
each other. The former has constantly eliminated any traces of narration from
its hieratically-posed figures, and the latter is obliged to narrate, as clearly and
energetically as possible.” However, Sterckx chooses not to address serial depic-
tions, instead arguing that the cartoonist’s diagram is best observed when one
examines individual panels in isolation. A key example he employs is the work
of Roy Lichtenstein. He argues that by isolating and enlarging individual com-
ics panels and by turning the Ben-Day dots pattern into something approach-
ing geometric abstraction, narrative is removed and the marks that constitute
the panel in question can be seen as a collection of asignifying traits. Within
comics more specifically, Sterckx highlights two panels from Hergé’s album The
Secret of the Unicorn (Hergé [1959] 1974), both of which depict states of delirium.
In the third panel on page 25, Tintin’s dog Snowy, who has become drunk after
sipping some rum left lying around by Captain Haddock, sees two superim-
posed images of Tintin and Haddock.1 In the fifth panel on page 27, Haddock
has worked himself into such a frenzy in his description of the exploits of one
of his ancestors that he is perceived by Tintin as temporarily possessing eight
arms.2 By presenting scenes that are, if taken literally, incoherent or impossible
within the constraints of the narrative being presented, Sterckx argues, these
images escape figuration and become figures. I would argue, however, that the
figure cannot emerge from a single panel, because this presents us only with
the operative set of givens. The space between them is needed to allow the dia-
gram to take its place on the surface.

1 Image available at http://johnmiers.com/wp-content/gallery/bacon-and-the-cartoonist/miers02.

jpg. All the images cited in this chapter can be viewed as a slideshow at http://johnmiers.com/ba-
con-and-the-cartoonist/.
2 Image available at http://johnmiers.com/wp-content/gallery/bacon-and-the-cartoonist/miers03.jpg.

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 Bacon and the Cartoonist

Sequential dynamism
In recent years interest has grown in abstract comics in both cartooning and
comic scholarship. Andrei Molotiu, who we turn to in a moment, has made
productive use of this non-standard practice as a means of analysing modes of
reading that are fundamental to the form.
Being a relatively young field, comics scholarship has been intensely con-
cerned with what Aaron Meskin (2009) has called “the definitional project”:
much ink has been spilled in what is generally now recognised as the fruit-
less search for a set of formal features that can be reliably used to distinguish
comics from other art forms (Witek 2009, 149). Definitions proposed within
this project often follow Scott McCloud’s (1993) identification of sequential
depictions as the defining characteristic of the comics form. As Christian
Metz ([1974] 1991, 46) has asserted, it is frequently observed within such dis-
cussions that when looking at two juxtaposed pictorial images, “the human
mind . . . [is] incapable of not making a connection between two successive
images.” Deleuze-Bacon makes this observation when discussing the ways
in which the use of multiple figures in a painting presents challenges to the
painter seeking to escape figuration. Such an account of the way in which nar-
rative meaning is derived from sequential images depends on a two-stage pro-
cess of decoding. The reader will first identify the potential narrative content
of each image by comparing it with an established set of ways of seeing, and
then, having converted both images to narrative material, will propose syntag-
matic links between the two. Molotiu takes a different approach. He says that
comics such as Benoit Joly’s Parcours (1987)3 that represent movement but not
moving bodies show that sequentiality is “independent of represented tempo-
rality, and the medium of comics can achieve the former without the latter”
(Molotiu 2012, 88). We should not conceive of panels as individual moments in
time arranged in sequence, he argues; rather, “our sense of sequence is derived
from the graphic forces on the page which carry us across the grid of panels; we
see movement but this movement is only noticeable when we take in, visually,
more than one panel at a time” (Molotiu 2012, 89). Our sense of sequence or
seriality, in this account, is therefore derived directly from the physical marks
with which we are presented. This sense is not created by individual attention
to each image in a prescribed sequence; rather, it emerges from a physically felt
sense of the graphic movement across the page’s surface.

3 Image available at http://johnmiers.com/wp-content/gallery/bacon-and-the-cartoonist/miers04.jpg.

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 John Miers

Figure 2.10.2.

Abstract comics like Joly’s make this process explicit; however, it is no less dif-
ficult to discern in a pictorial sequence such as the chase scene depicted on
pages 224–25 of the one-volume edition of Jeff Smith’s epic fantasy Bone (Smith
2014).4 While a great part of the pleasure of reading such a sequence is the way
in which Smith’s precise depictions allow the reader to observe highly specific
movements of bodies in space, the initial sense of movement and presence is
received when looking at the tabular arrangement of panels as a whole, and
even once the sequence has been read in detail one can still enjoy the free sense
of movement by removing one’s attention from any individual depiction and
scanning the rhythm of graphic forms with which we are presented.
The term Molotiu gives to this process is “sequential dynamism.” Molotiu
relies in particular on the work of artist Steve Ditko, and especially Ditko’s
depictions of action sequences in Spiderman, to provide examples of its opera-
tion. One spread he discusses in detail is pages 15–16 of Amazing Spider-Man 23
(Lee and Ditko 1965),5 in which the serial appearances of Spiderman and his

4 Images available at http://johnmiers.com/wp-content/gallery/bacon-and-the-cartoonist/miers05.jpg.

5 Image available at http://johnmiers.com/wp-content/gallery/bacon-and-the-cartoonist/miers06.jpg.

380

Figure 2.10.2. Jeff Smith, Bone (2014, 224–25).

 Bacon and the Cartoonist

antagonist the Green Goblin create a robust graphic rhythm across the page
that is apprehended before any individual image is read. It is this rhythm that
gives the viewer the sense of an active figure whose physical exertions carry and
construct the sequence. To borrow a phrase from Erin Manning’s chapter in
the present volume, it is “a mobility that dances before it signifies.” And this
rhythm is all the easier to observe because of the bold and consistent colour-
ing and design of the two combatants. In this way we see how the cartoonist’s
embrace of figurative givens actually enables rather than obstructs the emer-
gence of the figure.
To summarise the foregoing, then, the cartoonist does not seek to escape
narrative, illustration, and depictive cliché. Rather, the cartoonist works from
pre-existing narrative material, which is repartitioned through a process of
gridding, and as he or she moves from this often abstract process to the more
elaborated and incarnated processes of breakdown, layout, and finally depic-
tion and design, it is the sequentially dynamic employment of a set of figurative
givens that the cartoonist him- or herself has assembled that allows the figure
to emerge.

Christianity, superheroism, and privileged zones of

probability
There are other, less fundamental aspects of Deleuze-Bacon’s description of
painting that bear comparison with the work of the cartoonist. Early in The
Logic of Sensation, Deleuze describes the ways in which Christian art escaped
the figurative and presented the figure. He offers, as what he calls an extreme
example, El Greco’s The Burial of the Count of Orgaz,6 of which Deleuze (2003,
9) says, “in the lower half, there is indeed a figuration or narration that rep-
resents the burial of the count. . . . But in the upper half, where the count is
received by Christ, there is a wild liberation, a total emancipation: the Figures
are lifted up and elongated, refined without measure, outside all constraint.”
The religious sentiment that permeates Christian painting is what in the past
has made possible “a liberation of Figures, the emergence of Figures freed from
all figuration” (ibid, 10).
In one of the narrative genres most strongly associated with the comics form,
that of the superhero, we may observe in the work of some artists a comparable
liberation of the figure. In such narratives, religious sentiment is replaced with
the expression of power—physical power, of course, but also, in the hands of
artists such as Jack Kirby, a more cosmic or abstract power (Hatfield 2012, 58).
In a spread such as pages 2–3 of OMAC (One Man Army Corps) (Kirby and Berry
1974),7 figures are subjected to multiple deformations, even where these defor-
mations take the form of a figurative given already established within the par-
ticular artist’s visual lexicon, as in the squared-off foreshortening of the hand
at the left edge. As with the examples from Smith and Joly, the feeling of move-

6 Image available at http://johnmiers.com/wp-content/gallery/bacon-and-the-cartoonist/miers07.jpg.

7 Image available at http://johnmiers.com/wp-content/gallery/bacon-and-the-cartoonist/miers08.jpg.

381
 John Miers

ment expressed through a graphic sequential dynamism precedes the identifi-

cation of any of the marks on the pages as signifying particular referents.
In an example such as the fight scene presented on page 8 of Tales of Suspense
85 (Lee, Kirby, and Giacoia 1967),8 the abstract nature of the expression of
power that operates in superhero comics is fully evident. The exchange of
blows between Captain America and his antagonist Batroc is experienced pri-
marily not as specific impacts of one body upon another, but rather as a set of
moments of intensity produced by the collision of opposing forces.
The examination of a page of Kirby’s pencils, before they have been clarified
by an inker, makes this operation of forces even more apparent.9 Absent Joe
Sinnott’s inking, the long central panel in page 19 of Fantastic Four 1 (61) (Lee,
Kirby and Sinnott 1967) is difficult to read coherently as anything other than an
abstract collision of embodied forces.
I mentioned earlier that Bacon’s construction of his diagram through ran-
dom and asignifying marks creates zones of varying probabilities across the
painting surface. Gridding creates and responds to such variations in proba-
bility too. Nevertheless, according to Groensteen (2007, 29) these variations
are much more prescribed in the case of comics; in particular, there are “places
on the page that enjoy . . . a natural privilege, like the upper left hand corner,
the geometric center or the lower right hand corner.” He goes on to observe,
“numerous artists have assimilated this fact and made, in a more or less system-
atic manner, key moments of the story coincide with these initial, central, and
terminal positions, to ‘rhyme’ the first and last panels of a page” (ibid., 29–30).
The lower right-hand corner of a two-page spread is privileged not only
because it marks the end of a semantic unit within the comic as a whole, but
also because it prompts a specific physical action on the part of the reader: the
turning of the page. We see a notable example in a recto/verso pair of pages
from the Tintin adventure King Ottokar’s Sceptre (Hergé [1958] 1979). In the final
panel of page 15,10 Tintin is running through a doorway affixed to its frame by
hinges on its left side, echoing the position of the book’s binding relative to the
page that holds this panel. In the first panel of page 16,11 Tintin has entered the
building and is rushing towards a staircase. Here, the reader’s action directly
mirrors the action of the door shutting behind Tintin. To reinforce again my
overall theme of the figure emerging from a diagram that embraces and empha-
sises narrative rather than exorcising it, the prescribed movements in this case
produce a sensation within the reader that is physically both felt and enacted.

8 Image available http://johnmiers.com/wp-content/gallery/bacon-and-the-cartoonist/miers09.jpg.

9 Image available at http://johnmiers.com/wp-content/gallery/bacon-and-the-cartoonist/miers10.jpg.
10 Image available at http://johnmiers.com/wp-content/gallery/bacon-and-the-cartoonist/miers11.jpg.
11 Image available at http://johnmiers.com/wp-content/gallery/bacon-and-the-cartoonist/miers12.jpg.

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 Bacon and the Cartoonist

Coda: the figure in my own artistic research

Figure 2.10.3.

My own use of comics as an artistic research method also seeks to present a

physically felt sense of human presence. The theoretical framework in which
Starts Out Vague, the comic that forms the practical component of my doctoral
thesis, is primarily based is cognitivist approaches to metaphor (for example,
Lakoff and Johnson [1980] 2003; Kövecses 2010), which there is not space to
discuss here further. Images like those that make up its opening spread do not
begin from observational drawing, but rather from my own performance of the
movements depicted. To construct these pages I perform these movements
repeatedly, attempting to generate something akin to a muscle memory of
these movements. I then transfer these movements to a digital three-dimen-
sional model, much as one would pose a wooden artist’s mannequin; screen-
shots of this provide the basis for watercolour drawings that eventually form
the completed page. My use of non-standard reading orders depends on the
structuring action of sequential dynamism: the graphic rhythm that populates
the page, rather than the established habit of reading left to right in rows, is the
element that guides the reader’s eye.

383

Figure 2.10.3. John Miers, Starts Out Vague, watercolour on paper (2015, 1–2).
 John Miers

Figure 2.10.4.

These pages bear some similarity to Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of human

motion, such as Animal Locomotion Plate 442 of 1887 (see figure 2.10.4). Muybridge
is identified by Deleuze-Bacon as a rare photographer who escapes photogra-
phy’s tendency to reduce sensation to a single level. However, Muybridge does
not produce a figure because his multiplication of photographic images results
only in what Deleuze (2003, 91) describes as a transformation of the cliché,
or a mauling of the image. The figurative clichés that operate in Muybridge’s
sequences are still the clichés that belong to photographs as representative
objects that “impose themselves upon sight and rule over the eye completely”
(ibid). Where comics, which I identify as a drawing practice that creates narra-
tives (rather than a narrative practice that employs drawings), differ from this
is that the clichés in operation are devised and assembled by the hand of the
cartoonist and do not rule over sight in this way. The fact that these clichés are
created by drawing rather than by being drawn expressions of existing referents
is crucial. In a spread like Starts Out Vague (Miers 2015, 1–2), the abandonment
of established reading orders and the presentation of complementary and con-
tradictory narrative sequences of action emphasise that sequential dynamism,
structured through the process of gridding, creates a comics-specific diagram
that enables the emergence of the figure.

384

Figure 2.10.4. Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion Plate 442, collotype, 1887. Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania.
 Bacon and the Cartoonist

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385
 al niente—a dissolution
Thinking in Images and Sounds
Adreis Echzehn
Independent artist

Elfie Miklautz
Vienna University of Economics and Business

Our work is part of the project “Other Spaces—Knowledge through Art.”1 This
project brought together nine artists and scientists with their various means of
world approach, working on the topic “other spaces.” The different products
of the collaborations—and especially the process of producing them—were
the starting point for identifying, comparing, and reflecting on the different
approaches. We were oriented by Deleuze’s notion that the process of becom-
ing is essential in thinking about philosophy, art, and science. Therefore the
means at our disposal were those that artists and scientists use when writing,
composing, doing philosophy, and so on. Thus, the question of which aspects
might be seen as common and/or different was not asserted beforehand
through already formulated theories, but was instead left open, thereby enlarg-
ing the possibility for the unexpected or surprising. We wanted to experience
the differences in working together on a common topic. We formed an echo
space between the arts and sciences, a manifold space of thought for different
perspectives.
What was the outcome of an artist, a composer, and a cultural sociologist
working together on the topic of silence? The result was the audio-visual pro-
duction al niente—a dissolution. The Italian musical phrase al niente literally
means “to nothing”—a diminuendo that fades until nothing is heard anymore.
It is a sort of “living silence.” At the start, our focus was upon finding spaces
in which everyday temporality is decomposed, in which silence becomes audi-
ble. We were interested in experiencing the atmosphere of a place through the
senses, through seeing, hearing, smelling, touching. It was a search for corre-
spondences between exterior spatial experiences, on the one hand, and sound
spaces and interior experience spaces, on the other hand. And—finally—we
wanted to show these experiences, make them visible, audible, and reflectable.
One could ask why it makes sense to create a relationship between our work
and that of Deleuze. Possible answers are manifold. First, the video is an out-
come of thinking in images and sounds instead of thinking in concepts, thus

1 The project was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). For further information, see www.spacier-
gang.org.

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 al niente—a dissolution

following Deleuze’s assumption that moving images and sounds are ways of
thinking. Deleuze (1986, xix, 151ff.) claimed that there are similarities between
philosophy and cinema, because both produce images—the one thought
images, the other movement and time images. Second, we think that there are
similarities and correspondences between the strategy and the hidden basis
of our work. One example of this is the way our cooperation worked. We think
it is comparable to the way Deleuze and Guattari wrote their books together.
According to Deleuze (1995, 7, 13ff.), it was not a sort of communication, not a
dialogue about a certain topic, but an encounter of thoughts and affects that
crashed into each other, that met and lost each other, producing something
new and unexpected: a field of thoughts with fragments and disparate parts
without any force of unification.
Our cooperation was difficult because we came from different disciplines.
The scientist’s first idea was to search all available previously written texts
on other spaces, on silence, and so on, and than translate these findings into
images and sounds including quotations of the most interesting passages. In
short, Elfie, the scientist wanted to work with familiar resources. Adreis, the
artist, instead wanted to work without any explicit references. Our different
perspectives led to a radical shift in the scientist’s way of working on this pro-
ject—trying to work without a safety net, without reference to written texts,
and accepting the risk of failure. More than that, Elfie decided completely to
renounce working with words.
The challenge was to work without any concepts and definitions, for exam-
ple, concepts of silence or nothingness, but instead to experiment with con-
templating: trying to find the passage from affections and perceptions to
affects and percepts with the aim of creating a bloc of sensations standing for
itself, untranslatable into words and assumptions. Contemplating in this way
means becoming the perceived part of the world, having passed into it—“We
are not in the world, we become with the world; we become by contemplating it.
. . . Becoming animal, plant, molecular, becoming zero” (Deleuze and Guattari
1994, 169, our emphasis). In our work this meant for example becoming the
wall of a house, becoming a river, and so on. One has to approximate to the
extent that one nearly crosses the border.
The decision we took that allowed us to give one another space to realise
our ideas was to work with two independent image spaces—therefore, one
can see a double-screen video and a soundtrack, produced independently of
the moving images. We worked with a triple-blind concept. What we arranged
as a common base was a story that each of us had to tell and the materials
(videos, compositions, sounds, photographs). Most of the videos and photos
were made at locations we found together. The sound material consisted of
natural sounds, found at the locations, and compositions by Hannah Eisendle
and Jacopo Asam. We used this common stock of resources as a quarry. And
we agreed upon a strict time structure: a rhythm that determined the order of
moving and still images, interstices, black screens, sound and silence. The two
of us told the story visually on one of the screens; Hannah Eisendle produced
the soundtrack, using the collected sounds and her own compositions, trying

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 Adreis Echzehn and Elfie Miklautz

to tell the story acoustically. None of us knew what kind of material and in what
order the others would use.
The video is the outcome of cooperation between artists and a scientist
working independently of one another with the aim of creating a common
result beyond the differences. Our creation is, one could say, an example of
answering the question raised in the call for the conference: “the question of
how a communication between heterogenous systems, ‘of couplings and reso-
nance,’ occurs without being predetermined.” Watching al niente one does not
see a work about dissolution, but the becoming of dissolution.
Let us add some remarks on the properties of thinking in images and sounds.
According to Deleuze, thinking in images and sounds means to be driven by
unconscious desires—it’s a way of thinking that must be passionate. And in
being so it differs completely from the rationalistic idea of aseptic thoughts. In
his cinema books, Deleuze (1986, 1989) dealt with the specifities and relations
of percepts and concepts, or, in other words, of images and thoughts. He differ-
entiates between two moments that are constitutive for moving images.
The first moment goes from image to thought, meaning that moving images
force thinking; the second moment goes from thought to image, from concept
to affect—it’s a form of sensualising concepts, of giving passion back to the
intellectual process. So one can move from images to clear thinking, on the
one hand, and to sensory thought, on the other. Deleuze (1989, 159) described
the second moment—the one from thought to image—as follows: “we go from
a thinking of the whole which is presupposed and obscure to the agitated,
mixed-up images which express it. The whole is no longer the logos which uni-
fies the parts, but the drunkenness, the pathos which bathes them and spreads
out in them.”
Both dimensions are intertwined. Interestingly, it’s an oscillation between
the highest degree of consciousness and the deepest level of the unconscious.
In making the film we sometimes experienced this oscillation as struggling
between two working strategies. Especially for the scientist, it was strange to
trust the being driven by the unconscious. Deleuze (1989, 165) refers to Antonin
Artaud, who claimed a strong accordance between cinema and automatic writ-
ing, both of which have to be understood not as “an absence of composition but
[as] a higher control which brings together critical and conscious thought and
the unconscious in thought.” Moving images thus relate to a thought whose
peculiarity is not yet to be; they are, as Deleuze wrote, “directed to what does
not let itself be thought in thought, and equally to what does not let itself be
seen in vision” (ibid., 163).
In our opinion, the crucial point is to be found in what happens between the
images, between the images and the sound and so on. What counts are the
interstices, the breaks and cuts. In our film, the interstices are on each screen
and between the two screens, and the same is audible on the soundtrack in
the way it was mixed. Working in this way produces—to again quote from the
conference call—“new couplings that are not accidental but rigorous and at
the same time indeterminate.”

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 al niente—a dissolution

References
Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The ———. 1995. Negotiations 1972–1990.
Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Translated by Martin Joughin. New
Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. York: Columbia University Press. First
London: Athlone Press. First published published 1990 as Pourparlers (Paris:
1983 as Cinéma 1: L’image-mouvement Minuit).
(Paris: Minuit). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1994.
———. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. What is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh
Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Tomlinson and Graham Burchell.
Robert Galeta. London: Athlone Press. New York: Columbia University Press.
First published 1985 as Cinéma 2: L’image- First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la
temps (Paris: Minuit). philosophie? (Paris: Minuit).

389
 Drawings from
A Thousand Plateaus
Marc Ngui
Independent artist, Toronto, Mexico City

“1914: One or Several Wolves?” Paragraph 13

What does it mean to love somebody? It is always to seize that person in a mass,
extract him or her from a group, however small, in which he or she participates,
whether it be through the family only or through something else; then to find that
person’s own packs, the multiplicities he or she encloses within himself or herself
which may be of an entirely different nature. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 35)

390
 Drawings from A Thousand Plateaus

“1914: One or Several Wolves?” Paragraph 15

We can no longer even speak of distinct machines, only of types of interpenetrating

multiplicities that at any given moment form a single machinic assemblage, the
faceless figure of the libido. Each of us is caught up in an assemblage of this kind,
and we reproduce its statements when we think we are speaking in our own name;
or rather we speak in our own name when we produce its statement. (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987, 36)

391
 Marc Ngui

“1914: One or Several Wolves?” Paragraph 16

The Arabs are clearly associated with the father and the jackals with the mother;
between the two, there is a whole story of castration represented by the rusty
scissors. But it so happens that the Arabs are an extensive, armed, organized mass
stretching across the entire desert; and the jackals are an intense pack forever
launching into the desert following lines of flight or deterritorialization (“they are
madmen, veritable madmen”); between the two, at the edge, the Man of the North,
the jackal-man. And aren’t those big scissors the Arab sign that guides or releases
jackal-particles, both to accelerate their mad race by detaching them from the mass
and to bring them back to the mass, to tame them and whip them, to bring them
around? Dead camel: Oedipal food apparatus. Counter-Oedipal carrion apparatus:
kill animals to eat, or eat to clean up carrion. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 37)

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 Drawings from A Thousand Plateaus

“1914: One or Several Wolves?” Paragraph 17

There are no individual statements, there never are. Every statement is the product
of a machinic assemblage, in other words, of collective agents of enunciation (take
“collective agents” to mean not peoples or societies but multiplicities). (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987, 37)

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 Marc Ngui

References
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as
Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Mille plateaux (Paris: Éditions de Minuit).

394
 The Image as a Process
of Invention within
Artistic Research*
Andreia Oliveira
Federal University of Santa Maria, Brazil

Felix Rebolledo
Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Introduction
To think about the image is already to activate and engage in artistic research.
And to think about artistic research in a hybrid world, we need a different
approach to thinking about the image—one that considers both the natural
and the technological milieu. In the face of the complex, hybrid, expanded real-
ity we find ourselves in, the polarised relation between human and machine is
no longer tenable. In this perspective, we look to elaborate on a concept of the
image that goes beyond the anthropocentric scheme and takes into account
the process-based, mutable, and systemic thinking of a hybrid and expanded
world.
We argue that the image occurs within an associative concretisation that
integrates a hybrid actuality. Here, hybrid refers to the acknowledgement of
the simultaneous co-existence of the natural and the artificial in the thought of
Gilbert Simondon (1989) and Jean-Luc Nancy (2005), of the actual and virtual
in the thought of Deleuze and Guattari (2004), of the human and non-human
in the thought of Bruno Latour (2006), and of physical space and cyberspace
in the thought of Roy Ascott (2003). We bring these questions on the image to
the field of art and technology at a moment in which we find ourselves consti-
tuted by physical and digital dimensions. How can one maintain the division
between mental images and concrete images? Or between images related to
the imaginary, memory, and mental constructs and images related to invention
within a technological poetics at the junction of cyberspace and geograph-
ical space? How can one maintain the division within technological poetics,
which builds cyborgs and crosses the animal, human, vegetal, and micro- and
nano-biological with the machinic to create expanded minds and bodies? We
speak of informational territories, of cybercities, cyberspace, telematics, mixed
realities, augmented realities, expanded systems, alter-organised systems, eco-
systems, artificial life, nano-art, neuro-art, the semantic web, biological soft-

*
We gratefully acknowledge the support of FAPERGS/Brazil and CAPES/Brazil.

395
 Andreia Oliveira and Felix Rebolledo

ware, evolutive hardware, bio-art, the Internet of things—notions that bring us

to think of our existence in a hybrid and expanded way, without invoking other
spatio-temporal conceptions that are exclusively physical or measurable within
closed systems.
We note that initial considerations in the field of art and technology tend
towards affirmations that separate the real and the virtual, as if the virtual were
not part of the real, as if we could separate the real as the physical dimension
and the virtual as the digital dimension. However, these positions become
more and more tenuous in the face of increasing hybridisations between both
dimensions. From a Deleuzian standpoint, whether we speak of physical space
or cyberspace, there are always virtual potentialities to be actualised, as well as
actualised experiences to be virtualised. Thus, we can understand the image as
a composite, layered experience in a multifaceted and hybrid reality and the
artwork as a cause/effect of the activity of imagination and invention within
the artistic process. Within such an approach, the image is not restricted to the
usual optical perception of objects but is directly related to systems of associ-
ation within the milieu to which it belongs. From these foundations, we can
articulate the ideas of image, milieu, and invention as a process of individua-
tion within artistic research.
Assuming that images exist between the subject and the milieu, that images
are open to becoming, and that images not only belong to consciousness, we
can discern similarities between Deleuze’s and Simondon’s approaches to the
image. In discussing the image of thought in Difference and Repetition (1994),
Deleuze considers a process of eliminating all presuppositions to thought as a
way to begin philosophy. He writes that this entails at the very least a regression
to perceptual experience as pure being in order to constitute a beginning, even
if it is only by virtue of referring all its presuppositions back to a sensible, con-
crete empirical being that can be known implicitly without concepts. And in
trying to explain consciousness as a reflection of experience, experience comes
to be expressed as imagistic—that is, as an image that fully expresses our being
with, through, and in the world—even if expressing experience solely in terms
of the optically “pictorial” short-changes its indescribable fullness: to be con-
tended with are not only the sense data of the other five senses but also their
combined inexpressible affectual elusiveness, as well as the indiscernible “hid-
den” of the stratified plateaus understanding experience.
Simondon (2008) presents a theory of the image in light of the notion of
invention, and invention in light of the notion of the image. His ideation of
the image also steers away from a static conception. The image is understood
as emergent within the associated milieu through a transductive, four-phased,
cyclic process that includes the motor-image, the perception-image, the men-
tal-image, and the invention-image.
Through these phases, one can modulate the relation between the human and
the milieu and thus eliminate any polarising hierarchical importance between
participating elements in the genesis of the image. The image is thus under-
stood as a transient, intermediate reality between individuals and milieus exist-
ing within an evolutive technological multiplicity. Echoing Bergson, Deleuze

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 The Image as a Process of Invention within Artistic Research

(1986) points out that we don’t perceive things in our minds, we perceive things
where they are, in the world. Jean-Luc Nancy (2005) points out along the same
lines that the image is that which we can distinguish from the background.
Hence, within the speculative approach, image is not restricted to the usual
visual perception of objects but is directly related to systems of relationship
within the milieu—to experience itself.
Things exist as a polymorphic, evolutive, and temporal diversity in a trans-
ductive relationship between the co-existent memory image of the past, the
perception image of the present, and the invention image of the future. The
image appears in the directed interaction between participants and the envi-
ronment they are in: it is not just produced by a subject. Rather, the image pro-
duces and develops the subject and allows it to manifest itself as an immanent
function of creation while being relatively independent from it. We live in a
world of images: they inhabit us and create our worlds, they actualise us and
virtualise us according to different realities.
We understand the image not as an individualised given to be analysed, but as
a process of individuation. The genesis of the image is conceived within a sys-
temic, cyclic, and processual approach to reality where the cycle is made up of
four co-existing phases (Simondon 2008): (1) motor-image, (2) perception-im-
age, (3) mental-image, and (4) invention-image. One important aspect to keep
in mind is that the milieu is not a single, homogeneous image. Although the
associated milieu can be seen as a unitary subjective imagistic process, the
milieu is composed of a multiplicity of simultaneous subsidiary imagistic pro-
cesses at different stages of phasic becoming interacting imagistically with one
another. Each type of image is productive of specific results that serve as objec-
tive imagistic raw material towards the production of new images. Depending
on what they do and how they relate to the type of image being produced, these
intermediate imagistic hybrids go by different names: objects, motricity of
nervous excitation, signs, symbols, and so on. And, as will be seen later, these
intermediate hybrid images are the hinges that allow the transition from one
phase to the next.
With the motor-image, the conditions are created for the adaptation of the
living and the non-living elements to the milieu. Through a constant effect of
motor activity, the image creates an a priori situation for the future perceptive
identification of the object. Motor movement precedes sensory perception so
that, for the stimulus/response to occur, a high level of organisation is required
for the reception of the signs within the milieu. Hence, it is the image that
makes the object emerge for the subject, and precedes the object itself. It is
the very genetic programming of an organism over its milieu (Simondon 2008).
To provide examples of the motor-image, we offer situations that refer to
adaptations to the milieu—attunements that directly link motricity to instinct.
We know that when babies are born, they initially do not recognise the figure
of their mothers—instead, there’s an indefinite form that satisfies the baby’s
motor need for suction and food. Only later will the infant have the capacity to
recognise the mother figure, the breast object, the nipple, and so on.

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 Andreia Oliveira and Felix Rebolledo

Activities carried out automatically and unconsciously, that is, without the
intercession of conscious thought, go through the various senses—the gus-
tatory, the ocular, the tactile, the olfactory, the synesthetic—to satisfy motor
needs brought on by instinct as stimulus. Jean-Luc Nancy (2005, 4) points out
in agreement with Simondon that “the image is not only visual: it is also musi-
cal, poetic, even tactile, olfactory or gustatory, kinesthetic, and so on.” Image
is not only visual, it is a motricity produced automatically through the senses
functioning together.
In complexifying the motor-image, we can involve issues related to art and
technology. We bring forth propositions that put in question the relation
between the natural and the artificial, the human and the non-human, the
structure of bodies and their actions and connections.
As Latour (2006, 107) writes, “Art and nature have merged, folding into one
another and forming a continuous sensorium.” In the interaction with new
technologies, the body expands its motor structures and its physical and men-
tal functions. It acquires others means of feeling, of perceiving, of acting, and
of thinking. For Gianetti (2006, 13), from a postbiological perspective, what
currently “makes sense is no more the freedom of ideas, but the freedom of
forms: the freedom to modify and to change the body. People assembled of
fragments . . . are post-evolutionary experiences.”
From the motor-images produced by motricity, bodies are able to develop
sensorialities in relation to the milieu, which gives rise to the perception image.
Perception is “real movement, because something has happened: the body has
been capacitated. It’s been relationally activated” (Massumi 2008, 5).
The perception-image enables the interaction of a subject with the world,
and the object emerges from the experience as a subsequent phasing. But
because the milieu is a multiplicity, the process is not so linearly straight-
forward: intermediary images are produced from the imagistic interaction
of images in different phases. From the action of signs on the living and the
non-living within the associated milieu, a number of responses will result; the
images will organise themselves progressively as an effect of experience and
repetition. The image is not passive: it is differential activity that is constantly
emerging. The perception image evokes an action with the object, on the basis
of the perception of the milieu’s signs. The object appears through the percep-
tion image of the signs of the milieu, which in turn become objects. Perception
is not an action of the subject outside and above a milieu that contains objects,
but an effect of non-hierarchical systemic relations that include subjects, sub-
sidiary images, objects and milieus. “Perception exists between that which per-
ceives and what is perceived” (Massumi 2002, 90).
Perception arises from this relational process between things, making
explicit that these things are always becoming something in the action of living.
A creature’s perceptions “are its actions in their latent states. Perceptions are pos-
sible actions” (Massumi 2002, 91). As such, the everyday images that we perceive
are essentially technological images (analogue and digital) which hybridise our
experience as imagistic process. Technological devices alter our perceptions
and refashion the production of signs, thereby transforming our relational

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 The Image as a Process of Invention within Artistic Research

poiesis with the world. By incorporating digital technological devices such

as goggles, tablets, smartphones, and so on, we are entrained into the hybrid
milieus of interactive installations, multi-level cartographies, and augmented
reality through the construction of heterogeneous images.
With experience in telematics, Roy Ascott (2003) speaks about the faculty of
postbiological cyber-perception. Through cyber-perception, we can perceive
our capacity to be outside our bodies, or act out a mental symbiosis with oth-
ers in fields that can articulate our multiple natures or a new understanding of
non-linear or non-categorial patterns in rhizomatic assemblages.
The mental-image arises in an analogous manner in relation to the world.
Afterwards, the motor images and perceptual images are mentally organised
and systematised according to an affective-emotional attunement with the
external milieu as memorial process. As Simondon (2008, 108) intimates, mem-
ories consist of images that have been retained when the situation and the
experience no longer exist. To think of memory as an imagistic process with
digital technologies requires that we expand our understanding of these tech-
nologies to include hybrid or collective memories. With the Internet, we are
faced with a collective memory that is fed continuously from data produced in
various media and shared by certain modes of data visualisations.
Mental images produce collective symbols that when saturated generate
invention images. The symbol is a pseudo-object between the living and the
milieu, so that the symbol is an instrument for invention but not an invention
in itself. The invention image produces a spatio-temporal imagistic shift within
the environment. The invention image is directly related to technical and aes-
thetic invention, where the creative imagination is the ability to invent tech-
nical and aesthetic objects from the capacity for symbolisation and communi-
cation. As Simondon (2008, 13) writes, in the very production of the image, all
objects produced by man are image-objects which the imagination concretises.
The aesthetic object is an effect of the activity of invention, but mainly it is
an opening to unforeseen primitive realities. Thus, the invention image mod-
ifies the conditions of its natural existence (ibid., 179). We understand inven-
tion as a mode of human and non-human becoming that activates potentials
that inflect the present through the action of the future as openings to new
possibilities.
Emphasising the difference between human and non-human has become
pointless now that active objects are increasingly taking the place once occu-
pied by humans. When we talk about the Internet of things and generative or
artificial intelligence, we need to shift our anthropocentric understanding and
make room for objects.
Thus, Simondon refers to the genesis of the image as a cycle that does not
close on a specific phase. The invention-image is not the end of the cycle of suc-
cession but an unprivileged phase among others characterised by a prefiguring
within the contingent advance. Following invention, which is the fourth phase
of the becoming of images, the cycle begins anew with a fresh anticipation of
the encounter with the object, which may result in its production (Simondon
2008, 3). In the images we have discussed are made by the four phases of the

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 Andreia Oliveira and Felix Rebolledo

image; in all of them there are aspects of the motor image, perception image,
mental image, and invention image.
Deleuze and Simondon present concepts of the image that leave the
image open as an immanent process that emerges as its own individuation.
Understanding the process of individuation directs us towards an ontogene-
sis of being, of individuals and milieus, of the human and the nonhuman—
towards a genesis of the image concerned with how things become rather than
what they are or what their final configuration will be. This is a thought that can
sustain artistic research that modifies itself over time and enters into the raw
process of matter taking form. Thus, we consider that the work, the artist, the
spectator, and the milieu are compound associations that aggregate through
a process of concretised individuation that determines becoming as imagistic
process.

References
Ascott, Roy. 2003. Telematic Embrace: M. Gonçalves, 9–19. São Paulo: FILE.
Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, Latour, Bruno. 2006. “Air.” In Sensorium:
and Consciousness. Edited by Edward Embodied Experience, Technology, and
A. Shanken. Berkeley: University of Contemporary Art, edited by Caroline A.
California Press. Jones, 104–7. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual:
Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC:
Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone Duke University Press.
Press. First published 1983 as Cinéma 1: ———. 2008. “The Thinking-Feeling
L’image-mouvement (Paris: Éditions de of What Happens: A Semblance of a
Minuit). Conversation.” Inflexions 1 (1). Accessed 9
———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. May 2017. http://inflexions.org/n1_The-
Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Thinking-Feeling-of-What-Happens-by-
Columbia University Press. First Brian-Massumi.pdf.
published 1968 as Différence et répétition Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2005. The Ground of the
(Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Image. Translated by Jeff Fort. New York:
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. Fordham University Press. In part, first
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and published 2003 as Au fond des images
Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian (Paris: Gaililée).
Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Simondon, Gilbert. 1989. Du mode d’existence
Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as des objets techniques. New ed. Paris:
Mille plateaux (Paris: Éditions de Minuit). Editions Aubier. Translated by Cécile
Gianetti, Claudia. 2006. “O sujeito-projeto: Malaspina and John Rogove as On the
metaformance e endoestética/The Mode of Existence of Technical Objects
Subject-Project: Metaformance and (Minneapolis: Univocal / University of
Endoesthetics.” In FILE Rio: Festival Minnesota Press, 2017).
Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica/ ———. 2008. Imagination et Invention:
Electronic Language International Festival, 1965–1966. Edited by Nathalie Simondon.
edited by Ricardo Barreto and Paula Chatou: Éditions de la Transparence.
Perissinotto, translated by Luiz Roberto

400
 Matter-flow
Studies of Minor Composition
Federica Pallaver
Goldsmith, Italy

we are led, I believe, in every sense,

to no longer think in terms of form–matter.
—Gilles Deleuze (2007, 159, translation modified)

Among Deleuze’s encounters with art, jewellery has certainly never had any
particular importance, if compared with literature, painting, cinema, or music.
And yet, jewellery-making, and more widely metal arts (metallurgy, smithery,
metalworking), appears at a crucial juncture of A Thousand Plateaus. First, metal
arts are considered to relate strictly to nomadism: “something lights up in our
mind when we are told that metalworking was the ‘barbarian,’ or nomad, art
par excellence, and when we see these masterpieces of minor art” (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987, 401). But behind this relation, there is a further and more
profound reason why jewellery, metallurgy, and metalworking have a decisive
importance. Furthering several of Gilbert Simondon’s analyses, Deleuze and
Guattari point out how, despite appearances, metal arts have always been
irreducible to the dominant tradition of hylomorphism (410–11), the view that
individuation is the result of the union of form and matter. This conception is
indeed the essential feature of what they call major or royal science, as opposed
to minor or nomad science. “Royal science is inseparable from a ‘hylomorphic’
model implying both a form that organizes matter and a matter prepared for
the form” (369). In other words, metal arts are “minor science in person” (411),
in that they definitely break with form–matter dualism.
According to Simondon (2005), the hylomorphic model rests on a static
and abstract representation of the process of individuation. On this model,
the natural and artificial individuation or production of beings and objects is
conceived as the determination and organisation of an undetermined matter
or even a prepared matter by a fixed, transcendent, pre-given form. The par-
adigmatic example of this view is notoriously that of the mould. The problem
is, Simondon (2005) argues, that since both form and matter are presumed
to pre-exist the process of individuation, hylomorphic thinking is unable to
explain the actual genesis of beings and objects (23, 48, 61). This immediately
appears, he remarks, when one simply notes that by putting some sand in a
mould and then waiting for a while, one will obtain a sand pile, not a brick (40).
In other words, rather than generating a forming process, the mould instead

401
 Federica Pallaver

limits, interrupts, and stabilises the diffusion and potential deformation of

matter by giving it a “definite contour” (42–45, my translation).
This critique might suggest that metal arts are paradigmatic of such hylo-
morphic thinking. From prehistory to contemporary industrial design or even
artistic production, the use and development of all casting or moulding tech-
niques (from lost wax casting to electroforming) entirely feature the history of
metallurgy, metalworking, and jewellery (Forbes 1950; Gainsbury 1979; Hunt
1980). All such forming processes indeed need the preliminary elaboration or
selection of a model, which the mould is charged with realising in a prepared
metal. As a result, any moulding operation is in fact a re-production of some-
thing; it does not produce, let alone create, anything. As Deleuze and Guattari
(1987, 372) point out, “reproducing” is one of the defining features of major
or royal science, which rests on the “ideal of reproduction” of the traditional
model–copy, form–matter, dualism. The hylomorphic model seems therefore
to dominate metal arts, absolutely preventing us from thinking of it as a genesis
of forms.
Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that metal arts are minor science possessing
a potential to break with the form–matter dualism of hylomorphic thinking
appears thus paradoxical. The key point of their claim lies in a radically dif-
ferent understanding of metal arts, beginning with what metal itself is. Metal,
Deleuze and Guattari (1987) argue, is the pure matter-movement, or matter-
flow; it is a “destratified, deterritorialized matter” (407). As such, metal is “the
conductor of all matter” (411) as well as “the pure productivity of matter” (412).
Metal arts are therefore paradigmatic of minor or nomad sciences “because
they subordinate all their operations to the sensible conditions of intuition
and construction—following the flow of matter” (373). In contrast to royal
science’s ideal of reproduction, minor science indeed involves “itineration,”
which instead of searching “to discover a form” looks for “the ‘singularities’ of
a matter, or rather of a material” (372). The “first and primary itinerant” (411)
is then the artisan-metallurgist, who follows the flow of metal “by connecting
operations to a materiality, instead of imposing a form upon a matter” (408).
“Metal,” Deleuze (1979) says in one of his lectures, “is what compels us to think
matter, and it’s what compels us to think matter as continuous variation” (my
emphasis).
Thus, while form–matter dualism has always been seemingly the most rigid
in metal arts, the contrary is the case. Indeed, in metal arts “the succession of
forms tends to be replaced by the form of a continuous development, and the
variability of matters tends to be replaced by the matter of a continuous vari­
ation” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 411). In other words, metal arts operate
a “continuous development of form” and a “continuous variation of matter,”
which, instead of imposing a form to matter through a fixed, static, moulding
that can be repeated in an ordered succession, allows a dynamic genesis of form
through continuous processes of matter deformation. These processes involve
a modulation (ibid., 409), or a modulating of matter, rather than a moulding
of a given form as model. Simondon clearly states this contrast. “Moulding,”
he writes, “is modulating in a definite manner; modulating is moulding in a

402
 Matter-flow

continuous and perpetually variable manner” (Simondon 2005, 47, my trans-

lation). In metal arts, Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 410) argue, the “operations
are always astride the thresholds,” that is, between matter and form, “so that an
energetic materiality overspills the prepared matter, and a qualitative deform­
ation or transformation overspills the form.” The form, in other words, emerges
immanently from matter through the intensive forces exerted on it. In this way,
the static relation, form–matter, of the hylomorphic model is replaced by the
dynamic relation, material–forces (ibid., 95, 342, 364, 369).

Figure 2.14.1.

Figure 2.14.2.

403

Figure 2.14.1. Brooch, 2015. Oxidised silver, sand fulgurite. Photo: foto-dpi.com.
Figure 2.14.2. Brooch, 2015. Gold, sand fulgurite, steel wire. Photos: foto-dpi.com.
 Federica Pallaver

“Matter-flow: Studies of Minor Composition” is an artistic research project in

contemporary jewellery, in which I look for a non-hylomorphic approach to
metal and jewellery-making. The work is composed of a series of brooches,
necklaces, pendants, and rings, in which metal (gold and silver) has been
dynamically deformed and modulated without presuming any model and any
use of casting or moulding techniques. This has been obtained by experiment-
ing with repoussé, one of the most ancient techniques in goldsmithery. The
French word repoussé means “pushed up,” and comes from the Latin pulsare,
“to push,” or rather “to pulsate.” This meaning perfectly expresses the idea
of a dynamic modulation, since the repoussé technique precisely consists of
a continuously variable deformation or folding of thin metal leaves obtained
through a rhythmic hammering of the metal with a punch, which is ceaselessly
and fluidly “pushed up.” This rhythmic gesture is an intensive, pulsating flow,
which follows, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 408) say, the singularities of the
material “that are already like implicit forms that are topological, rather than
geometrical, and that combine with processes of deformation.” The resulting
metal forms are therefore generated by local variations of the metal, by plastic
deformations produced by the forces performed on it.

Figure 2.14.3

404

Figure 2.14.3. Pendant, 2015. Oxidised silver, sand fulgurite. Photo: foto-dpi.com.
 Matter-flow

The repoussé technique was known to the Egyptians and widely used by the
Greeks and the Romans, for instance. Moreover, and particularly interesting
for Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of minor and nomad art, there are exem-
plars of jewels (necklaces, bracelets) and other ornaments (plaques, fibulae)
decorated with repoussé technique made by nomadic peoples, famously the
Scythians (Eluère 1985). In these artworks, however, such technique was used
to represent forms and motifs in raised relief, absolving a decorative, figurative,
or narrative function. Thus, by maintaining some “organic representation”
(Deleuze 2003), the approach was still hylomorphic. This remnant of hylomor-
phism is completely absent in “Matter-flow,” in which the repoussé technique
ceases to have any reproduction and representational function.

Figure 2.14.4.

In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) famously define art as the
creation of “blocs of sensations” (176) or “a compound of percepts and affects” (164).
In this creation, however, the “artist’s greatest difficulty,” they emphasise, lies
in how to make the compound “stand up on its own” (164). An artwork, in other
words, needs to attain a consistency enabling it to compose percepts, affects,
and blocs of sensations. It is thus a matter not of technical composition but
rather of aesthetic composition. Indeed, while the former is “the work of the mate-
rial,” only the latter is “the work of sensation” (191– 92). The technical and the
aesthetic composition are therefore irreducible to each other, like the material
and the sensation. And yet, in the end they appear to be “indiscernible,” since
sensation is “the percept or affect of the material itself ” (166). “It is the affect
that is metallic, crystalline, stony, and so on” (167). Famously following Klee’s
formula “Not to render the visible, but to render visible,” for Deleuze (2003,
56) art “is not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing
forces”; it is a matter of rendering sensible “insensible forces” (ibid., 57), mak-
ing “perceptible the imperceptible forces that populate the world” (Deleuze
and Guattari 1994, 182). “It is on this condition that matter becomes expres-
sive” (ibid., 196).

405

Figure 2.14.4. Brooch, 2015. Gold, sand fulgurite, steel wire. Photos: foto-dpi.com.
 Federica Pallaver

In “Matter-flow,” I attempt to address this compositional problem by con-

sidering some aspects of Deleuze’s concept of the dark precursor. In Difference
and Repetition, the dark precursor is precisely defined as the “invisible, imper-
ceptible” agent, the “force,” which relates “heterogeneous series”; it is the
“differently different,” or the “differenciator” of difference (Deleuze 1994,
119). How then can the dark precursor be rendered visible and perceptible?
In explaining what the dark precursor is, Deleuze uses the example of light-
ning, which “flashes” as a “sign” of a difference of intensity. He uses the French
word foudre for lightning, and he often uses the verb fulgurer to express how
it “flashes” (ibid., 20, 22, 57, 118, 222). Both terms come from the Latin fulgur,
that is, “lightning.” This suggested to me the idea of coupling the metal forms
with fragments of sand fulgurites from the Mauritanian desert. Fulgurites, also
popularly known as petrified lightning, are indeed hollow glass tubes formed
by the melting of silica sand induced by lightning strikes. They are therefore
fragments of the branched paths of a lightning’s event, as the materialised sign
of the force of the dark precursor’s intensive difference. The coupling of these
two heterogeneous material elements (metal and fulgurite) results in a series
of “consolidated aggregates” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 329), of “coupled fig-
ures” (Deleuze 2003, 65–66). These form a bloc of sensations of matter-flow, a
compound of percepts and affects of deformed, modulated, folded metal and
of petrified lightning, melted glassy sand, desert, as expression of “nonhuman
forces” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 183); in short, of the “nonorganic life of
things” (ibid., 180).

Figure 2.14.5.

406

Figure 2.14.5. Pendant, 2015. Oxidised silver, sand fulgurite. Photo: foto-dpi.com.
 Matter-flow

This last point leads us to a final, crucial aspect of Deleuze’s encounter with
metal arts. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that what is peculiar to
metal arts is their capacity to let emerge “a life proper to matter, a vital state
of matter as such, a material vitalism” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 411). This is
because “metal is neither a thing nor an organism, but a body without organs,”
so that the proper invention and intuition of metal arts is precisely the idea
of a “Nonorganic Life” (411). The artisan-metallurgist as a nomad following the
flow of metal creates “the vital forms of nonorganic life” (413). These forms,
however, are definitely irreducible to the form–matter dualism, since, as Elie
Faure writes in a truly “splendid text,” as Deleuze and Guattari label it, the
artisan-metallurgist “does not exact the affirmation of a determined ideal
from form. . . . He extracts it rough from formlessness, according to the dic-
tates of the formless” (quoted in Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 413). Ultimately,
metal arts create vital forms from the formless nonorganic vitality of matter.
“Matter-flow” is an example of this; or, at least, so I hope.

References
Deleuze, Gilles. 1979. Seminar of 27 (Paris: Minuit).
February 1979. Translated by Timothy S. ———. 1994. What is Philosophy? Translated
Murphy. Accessed 10 May 2017. https:// by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham
www.webdeleuze.com/textes/186. Burchell. New York: Columbia University
———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que
Translated by Paul Patton. New York: la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit).
Columbia University Press. First Eluère, Christiane. 1985. “Goldwork of the
published 1968 as Différence et répétition Iron Age in ‘Barbarian’ Europe.” Gold
(Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Bulletin 18 (4): 144–55.
———. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Forbes, Robert J. 1950. Metallurgy in Antiquity.
Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. 2 vols. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
London: Continuum. First published Gainsbury, Peter E. 1979. “Jewellery
1981 as Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation Investment Casting Machines.” Gold
(Paris: Editions de la Différence). Bulletin 12 (1): 2–8.
———. 2007. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts Hunt, L. B. 1980. “The Long History of Lost
and Interviews 1975–1995. Edited by Wax Casting: Over Five Thousand Years
David Lapoujade. Translated by Ames of Art and Craftsmanship.” Gold Bulletin
Hodges and Mike Taormina. New York: 13 (2): 63–79.
Semiotext(e). First published 2003 as Simondon, Gilbert. 2005. L’individuation à la
Deux régimes de fous (Paris: Minuit). lumière des notions de forme et d’information.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. Grenoble: Editions Jérôme Millon. In
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and part, first published 1964 as L’individu et sa
Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian genese physico-biologique: L’individuation a la
Massumi. Minneapolis: University of lumière des notions de forme et d’information
Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as (Paris: Presses universitaires de France).
Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2

407
 perpetual doubt,
constant becoming
Mhairi Vari
Artist, London

The philosophical proposition of the rhizome offers a “structure” (or anti-struc-

ture) that goes some way to describe the often unnameable, intangible pro-
cesses required for the production of art—establishing a set of conditions that
support the necessity for unknowingness and uncertainty as methodology.
In taking the rhizome as a basic principal for considering the generation
of physical work, employing emergent process rather than construction by
design, my practice engages this key concept from Deleuze and Guattari in
multiple ways.
In aiming to be composed “not of units but of dimensions, or rather direc-
tions in motion” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 21), the work consists of many
strands, structured from hundreds of thousands of coloured rubber bands, that
wrap, stretch, loop, hang, and twist around and across an architectural space.
The work exists in the space between, growing among things, opportunistically
inhabiting and encompassing architecture as part of its structure where the
work “forms a rhizome with the world” (ibid.)—rather than existing separately
from it.
The work does not rest within a single discipline: the lines act like drawings
in three dimensions, it consumes and melds with architecture, the push and
pull of effusive colour in space emphasises painterly qualities while often ref-
erencing—in its analogue form—digital technologies and the vastness of “the
web.” The practice exists more broadly within the expanded field of sculptural
installation, where ideas and processes for generating art are not separable into
constituent parts but exist in symbiosis.
The entangled network of filaments from which the work is constructed are
like threads of visual organisation “connect[ing] any point to any other point”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 21) in a meshwork and bit coding of information.
The vibrating strands become a fluid diagrammatic—“a shifting map” (ibid.,
19)—of the performative act that constituted its construction.
There are different timescales embedded in the work. The piece may take
only minutes, hours, or days to install, although the strands, with their hand-
made morphology, have been hundreds, thousands, of hours in the making.
The elastic band is a unit of variable measure and therefore the work lacks
exactitude as its overall length is immeasurable and is relative to the amount of
tension and weight exerted upon the ropes. The strands are still being made:
there is no definable number, no given end to the making of the material: “It
has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle from which it grows and

408
 perpetual doubt, constant becoming

which it overspills” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 21). There are many beginnings
and ends lost among the mass metreage of loops that expand or contract across
space.
Nomadic in nature, the work can be packed down and installed (almost)
anywhere. It takes shape for a finite period of time until rolled up ready to be
remade in a unique but relative existence in another time and space—much as
worm-casts, which represent the aftermath of movement through the ground,
exist for a while on the surface until they are washed down again by rain. They
may reform, but each time will be different.
The title of the work reflects the overarching uncertainty of process through
which one may burrow to arrive at the production of an artwork. The work is a
processual murmuration where any seeming point of arrival quickly loses itself
as it melds into a point of departure—the journey to seek form continues—
arrested momentarily by fleeting instances of articulation.

* * *

In the basement of the Orpheus Institute lies a complex of interconnected

open-plan spaces, irreverently described to me as “a recreation room for bored
researchers.”
For the fourth iteration of perpetual doubt, constant becoming I spent a concen-
trated day in the bowels of the building, getting familiar with the ups and downs
of the architecture, moving through apertures from room to room, looping
strands of bands around natural fixtures and features. The lines become a trace
through the space of the activity, a temporary remnant. The threads follow
routes from chair leg to ceiling, from fridge-efficiency rating label to conduit
pipe, connecting random points.
The spilled bands on the floor and drooping swags at first appear like the
leftovers from a party, a hangover from some social exchange—reflecting the
celebratory nature of the conference as a whole. I could not have predicted the
final form of this temporary hang, which came as response to the people and
the place tethered to this event.
Packed down and rolled into a wheeled suitcase the work sits in compact
darkness until opportunity pops up to unfold again, an aftermath of The Dark
Precursor.

409
 Mhairi Vari

Figure 2.15.1.

Figure 2.15.2.

410

Figure 2.15.1. Mhairi Vari, perpetual doubt constant becoming (Lydney), 2015, multi-
coloured loom bands.
Figure 2.15.2. Mhairi Vari, perpetual doubt, constant becoming (John Street), loom bands,
steel rods, 2015. Photograph by Andy Keate. Courtesy domobaal.
 perpetual doubt, constant becoming

Figure 2.15.3.

Figure 2.15.4.

411

Figure 2.15.3. Mhairi Vari, perpetual doubt, constant becoming (Longos), 2015, multi-
coloured loom bands, water.
Figure 2.15.4. Mhairi Vari, perpetual doubt, constant becoming (Ghent), 2015, multi-
coloured loom bands.
 Mhairi Vari

Figure 2.15.5.

Figure 2.15.6.

412

Figure 2.15.5. Mhairi Vari, perpetual doubt, constant becoming (Ghent), 2015, multi-
coloured loom bands.
Figure 2.15.6. Mhairi Vari, perpetual doubt, constant becoming (Ghent), 2015, multi-
coloured loom bands.
 perpetual doubt, constant becoming

Figure 2.15.7.

Figure 2.15.8.

413

Figure 2.15.7. Mhairi Vari, perpetual doubt, constant becoming (Ghent), 2015, multi-
coloured loom bands.
Figure 2.15.8. Mhairi Vari, perpetual doubt, constant becoming (Ghent), 2015, multi-
coloured loom bands.
 Mhairi Vari

Figure 2.15.9.

References
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as
Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Mille plateaux (Paris: Éditions de Minuit).

414

Figure 2.15.9. Mhairi Vari, aftermath, 2016, reprocessed “The Dark Precursor” catalogue,
invisible thread, graphite nuclear core.
 The Fold
A Physical Model of Abstract
Reversibility and Envelopment
Elisabet Yanagisawa
Academy of Design and Crafts, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

For artistic research, the model of “the fold” is exceptionally interesting

because it deals with how form and content intertwine in a physical model, and
how concrete and abstract interrelate on the plane of consistency. This chapter
focuses on chapter two—“The Folds in the Soul”—of Gilles Deleuze’s short
but important book The Fold (1993). According to Deleuze, “We are moving
from inflection to inclusion in a subject, as if from virtual to the real, inflec-
tion defining the fold, but inclusion defining the soul or the subject, that is,
what envelops the fold, its final cause and its complete act” (ibid., 23). In other
words, the theory of the fold is best understood as a progression, from inflec-
tion to envelopment. Each different fold captures a certain metaphysical con-
dition. The concept of the fold also finds expression in Deleuze’s book Foucault
(1988a), in the chapter “Foldings, or the Inside of Thought (Subjectivation)”
(ibid., 94–123), which concerns reality and virtuality and how they indiscernibly
turn into each other as in a grading scale. Framing the question of the meaning
of the fold, Deleuze (1993, 26) writes: “Finally, in order that the virtual can be
incarnated or effectuated, is something needed other than this actualization in
the soul? Is a realization in matter also required, because the folds of this mat-
ter might happen to reduplicate the folds in the soul?” The fold is an abstract
thought, but the study can likewise start from the reverse, from fold making.
My own encounter with the metaphysics of the fold began with exploring
physical fold making (figure 2.16.1). By letting folds coagulate, I “freeze” the
process to a fixed form to let “‘a nondimensional point’ ‘between dimensions’”
be visible (Paul Klee quoted in Deleuze 1993, 15). This first series is made as
spontaneous events with melted beeswax and fabric, wherein natural laws of
gravity and matter in conjunction with each other form the folds by themselves;
it is an “autopoietic”1 method. Along with this theoretical presentation, I will
demonstrate the outcome of my explorations in matter.

1 This term is used by Brian Massumi (2002, 280n13, in part quoting Guattari 1995, 7): “self-giving, or ‘au-
topoietic,’ . . . ‘with processes of the realization of autonomy.’” The term “autopoietic” is also employed
by Félix Guattari (1995).

415
 Elisabet Yanagisawa

Figure 2.16.1.

Spinoza’s two attributes

One needs to recognise Deleuze’s metaphysical ground, which derives from
Spinoza’s two attributes (figure 2.16.2). According to Spinoza, two attrib-
utes exist, namely, extension or matter, and thought in the immanent strata.
Corresponding to the attributes in strata, the attributes exist in a parallel realm
that Spinoza names “the power of the attributes.”

Figure 2.16.2.

In the immanent cosmology Spinoza presents in his Ethics, the attributes of

thought and matter belong to the same dimension, namely, strata, or reality.
Spinoza correlates strata with the power of the attributes, which is an abstract
dimension parallel to the concrete attributes of thought and matter. This is why
Spinoza’s philosophy is often term “parallelism.” The consequence of parallel-

416

Figure 2.16.1. Elisabet Yanagisawa, Folded Object, cotton fabric, pigment, beeswax. Photo
by Elisabet Yanagisawa (EY). Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 2.16.2. Spinoza’s two attributes and the power of the attributes. The “vertical line”
is perforated. There are passages between the attributes and the power of the attributes.
Illustration by Elisabet Yanagisawa. © Elisabet Yanagisawa.
 The Fold

ism is a horizontal reality with passages between the attributes. A model of this
metaphysics is the fold. The theory of the fold concerns power that is present in
two dimensions: the power in the actual (that is, the visible reality) and power in
the virtual (that is, the invisible power of the attributes). Effects are the attrib-
utes and the causes are the power of the attributes (Deleuze 1988b, 18–19).

The four folds

Deleuze (1993, 18) writes, “The fold is Power. . . . Force itself is an act, an act of
the fold.” Power is the base of everything existing in reality. Power can be trans-
formed into both thought and matter. Power can also emerge into all different
folds; the perspective depends on what fold one is situated in. Deleuze pre-
sents four different types of folds, and each type manifests a certain subjective
perspective.
The first fold Deleuze describes is the inflection (figure 2.16.3). Through a
simple S-formed sketch, Deleuze demonstrates how the point of inflection is
the point where the concave turns to be convex. He refers to Paul Klee’s study
on folds: “It is the point of inflection itself, where the tangent crosses the curve.
That is the point-fold” (Deleuze 1993, 14). The inflection has two potential
curves—the concave or the convex—two different powers that go in diametri-
cally opposite directions. This point is what Leibniz calls “an ambiguous sign”
(Leibniz quoted in ibid., 15). Why is it ambiguous? Because it is not possible
to know the outcome of the direction from the start, line, or point. For Klee,
this point is the beginning, “‘a site of cosmogenesis,’ ‘a nondimensional point’
‘between dimensions’” (Klee quoted in ibid., 15). It captures the fundamental
conditions of existence, the double forces of development: plus and minus,
concave and convex. The first fold, the inflection, is thus vectorial and operates
with symmetry. Inflection provides the elementary level of power constructed
by a tension between opposite powers.

Figure 2.16.3.

The second fold is similar to the inflection, but there is a slight change—
between the curves is a distance (figure 2.16.4). Deleuze (1993, 22) calls this
kind of fold “projective” or “flat projection.” It is depicted as two mirroring
curves that have a distance in between them. The space in between the curves

417

Figure 2.16.3. Inflection. Illustration by Elisabet Yanagisawa, referring to the illustrations in

Deleuze’s The Fold (1993).
 Elisabet Yanagisawa

is optional. Without this space, there is no extension. This is the condition of

the fold in living matter wherein morphology is seen in “the fold; the crease;
the dovetail; the butterfly; the hyperbolic, elliptical, and parabolic” (ibid., 16).
It captures the general mode of existence, so to speak—the condition of the
spatial mode of existence in strata.

Figure 2.16.4.

Figure 2.16.5.

The third fold is a variation of an infinitely variable curve known as Koch’s

curve, which is a series of “rounding angles” (Deleuze 1993, 16) (figure 2.16.5).
This type of curve “never admits a tangent,” in other words, it remains con-
cave and convexity never gets in: “It envelops an infinitely cavernous or porous
world.” Deleuze calls these folds “Gothic arch and return” (ibid.). “Everything
changes,” he writes, “when fluctuation is made to intervene in the place of
internal homothesis” (ibid., 17). This fold captures an infinite, closed space; it
is not totally closed, but the curvature is only of one kind, concave, a “homo-
thesis.” How can everything change in this condition? The curve is made from
inside the curve; in other words, it concerns a change of mind, a change of con-
sciousness. I understand Koch’s curve as a conical object (figure 2.16.6).

418

Figure 2.16.4. Projection. The illustration refers to Deleuze (1993, 16).

Figure 2.16.5. Concavity—Koch’s Curve. The illustration refers to Deleuze (1993, 16).
 The Fold

Figure 2.16.6.

The fourth fold shifts in another way, a rarer type of folding. Deleuze (1993,
17) writes, “Transformation of inflection can no longer allow for either symme-
try or the favored plane of projection. It becomes vortical” (figure 2.16.7). This
fold seems to avoid the inflection and instead forms a spiral. Deleuze does not
present a figure of the vortex, but according to his description one arrives at a
DNA helix: “The line effectively folds into a spiral in order to defer inflection in
a movement suspended between sky and earth, which either moves away from
or indefinitely approaches the center of a curve and at each instant ‘rises sky-
ward or risks falling upon us’” (ibid.). The fourth fold is about power relations
between “sky and earth,” which is another way of saying two powers in a sus-
pension. The line turns to a plane and bends into a spiral—two parallel lines
that are connected. They never meet but interrelate through passages. This is
now the model of parallelism, a plane of consistency that is twisting to a vortex.
No inflection, no concavity, no convexity, no curvature mirroring: the revers-
ibility is only rendered as parallel lines that are infinitely twisting (figure 2.16.8).

Figure 2.16.7.

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Figure 2.16.6. Elisabet Yanagisawa, Folded Object—Cone, cotton fabric, pigment, beeswax.
Photo by EY. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 2.16.7. Vortex. Illustration by Elisabet Yanagisawa, © Elisabet Yanagisawa.
 Elisabet Yanagisawa

Figure 2.16.8.

Objectile
After giving a basic description of the theory of reversibility and the images
of four different folds, Deleuze considers the conditions of the folds and the
relationships between the two dimensions. First, he presents the idea of the
objectile: “The new status of the object no longer refers its condition to a spatial
mold—in other words, to a relation of form-matter—but to a temporal modu-
lation that implies as much the beginning of a continuous variation of matter
as a continuous development of form” (Deleuze 1993, 19). This indicates a con-
tinuous development of instinctual properties of the mind. This development
changes the form of the fold continuously, because the fold is elastic and in
constant motion—it is a power that is alive.
Deleuze implies that changing things in one dimension reciprocally affects
the other dimension. Thus, modulating things in spatiality affects the tempo-
ral; or, rather, in other words, the virtual. This “is not only a temporal but also
a qualitative conception of the object, to the extent that sounds and colors are
flexible and taken in modulation.” Sounds and colour indicate strata. “The
object here is manneristic, not essentializing,” Deleuze continues, “it becomes
an event” (Deleuze 1993, 19). It is no longer an essential object: it is an abstrac-
tion. It has transformed into an event during the process of folding. But what
is an event? In a parallel reading of Whitehead, “event” means “soul.” In chap-
ter 6 of The Fold, “What Is an Event?,” Deleuze (ibid., 76) draws the reader’s
attention to “the transformation of the concept into a subject” by referring to
“the [Platonic] school” as being “somewhat like a secret society,” in which Plato
is the school’s leader and Whitehead his successor. One now arrives at what
Deleuze (ibid., 12) calls a “Baroque perspective.” Depending on what fold one
is encapsulated in as a subject or soul, one therefore has that perspective of
reality. Thus, there exist different perspectives, which relate to one’s temporal
or virtual condition.

420

Figure 2.16.8. Elisabet Yanagisawa, Folded object—Vortex, cotton fabric, pigment, bees-
wax. Photo by EY. Courtesy of the artist.
 The Fold

Point of view
Deleuze introduces the concept of the point of view, which is related to con-
cavity and Koch’s curve. The point of view is the subject’s potential in a cer-
tain condition; in other words, the potential of the subject that begins first at
the third fold, which is the concave curve, with no convexity. “That is why the
transformation of the object refers to a correlative transformation of the sub-
ject” (Deleuze 1993, 19–20). Stated otherwise, changes in the form of the object
make changes in the subject. Nevertheless, how can a form be modulated so
that the corresponding power of the form is changed? Only through a radical
intervention. In the “first instance” of folds, the subject does not discern the
point of view. It seems that this point of view is a condition that occurs first in
the development of the subject, on its way to emerging as a soul. Perspectivism
does not imply a subjective relativism. “It is not a variation of truth according
to the subject, but the condition in which the truth of a variation appears to the
subject” (ibid., 20). The point of view is about a condition that is described in
other terms as a “proximity of concavity” (ibid.). From this it can be concluded
that this condition starts from the third fold.
Why does Deleuze make these four categories, and why is the soul presented
as gradually maturing? Everything seems to concern the final cause, the envel-
opment. The vortex is also named the “envelopment.”

Spatial distance and virtual proximity

According to Deleuze (1993, 22), “Leibniz can define extension (extensio) as
‘continuous repetition’ of the situs or position—that is, of point of view: not
that extension is therefore the attribute of point of view, but that the attrib-
ute of space (spatium), an order of distances between points of view, is what
makes this repetition possible.” This means that the attribute of matter needs
distance between the points of views. The distance makes the spatium. Distance
at the third fold is concavity. Deleuze states that the fourth fold is without dis-
tance; it is a situs without space, a non-distant space. It is a site of proximity.
Such a site is temporal or virtual, and its condition is different from a three-di-
mensional perspective.
Let us examine more closely the make-up of the fold. First, Deleuze presents
the conical section (figure 2.16.9). The top of the cone is a point of view. There is
no curve that changes into convexity. Deleuze divides the fold groups into folds
of first and second degree. The second-degree folds are inflection whereas the
first-degree folds are point of view and envelopment.

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 Elisabet Yanagisawa

Figure 2.16.9.

The point of view is a certain important fold, according to Deleuze. Why? “In
each area point of view is a variation or a power of arranging cases, a condition for
the manifestation of reality” (Deleuze 1993, 21). The point of view is a point
that opens up a new relation to the soul. It is a passage to the power of the
attributes, or, in other words, to the virtual or temporal. Deleuze continues:
“We would need a more natural intuition to allow for this passage to the limit.
. . . It is an envelope of inherence or of unilateral ‘inhesion’: inclusion or inher-
ence is the final cause of the fold, such that we move indiscernibly from the latter
to the former. Between the two, a gap is opened which makes the envelope the
reason for the fold: what is folded is the included, the inherent” (ibid., 22).
The final aim is the envelopment. To understand this metaphysics, it seems
that one needs to be in the third fold—that is, the point of view—because it is
at this site that things change perspective and are not the same as in the former
folds, namely, the inflections. There is “a gap” between the conditions of the
third and the fourth folds in terms of individual conditions. Simple intuition
is something one might train and develop, if the potential is there. In other
words, Deleuze is stating that intuitive knowledge depends on individual con-
ditions. In reality, what does it mean that the envelope is closed? “It can be
stated that what is folded is only virtual and currently exists only in an envelope,
in something that envelopes it” (Deleuze 1993, 22). This seems to denote that
an individual or a subject exists in reality as one of many (ordinary) individuals,
looking like everyone else, but that “what is folded is only virtual”; that is to say,
a person has the capacity for another perspective for seeing than those in the
first, second, and third folds.

The monad
Deleuze (1993, 22) writes, “Inclusion or inherence has a condition of closure or
envelopment, which Leibniz puts forward in his famous formula, ‘no windows,’
and which point of view does not suffice to explain. . . . It is necessarily a soul,
a subject.” “No windows” means a closed condition (figure 2.16.10). Deleuze’s
aim in this theory is to convey a message about the development of the subject/
soul as a process of individuation. The transversal from fold to envelopment
embraces a development from actual to virtual, but folded within, the subject is
a folded force. Moreover, the first two folds are spatial and the third fold seems
to have a capacity to move between the spatial and the virtual, while the fourth
fold is a non-spatial place, a fully temporal condition, but invisibly enfolded in
a closure.

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Figure 2.16.9. Cone. Illustration by Elisabet Yanagisawa, © Elisabet Yanagisawa.

 The Fold

Figure 2.16.10.

In order not to understand the envelopment as simply a state wherein all indi-
viduals meld into a universal spirit, Leibniz introduced the monad. The monad
is an individual entity and simultaneously a term meaning the universal spirit.
“He borrows this name [“monad”] from the Neoplatonists who used it to desig-
nate a state of One, a unity that envelops a multiplicity, this multiplicity devel-
oping the One in the manner of a ‘series’” (Deleuze 1993, 23). Giordano Bruno
brought “the system of monads to the level of this universal complication: the
Soul of the world that complicates everything” (ibid.). Deleuze’s theory of the
fold is a development in this succession of concepts. Multiplicity means force.
In Deleuze’s interpretation, the One envelops force, and reciprocally the force
develops the One in different series and in different conditions of the fold.
The monad is thus a gate, a passage for the universal spirit to transverse the
two dimensions: the realm of the attributes and the power of the attributes.
Deleuze contends that the immanent plane of consistency is the only way for
these transformations and developments to take place. In the power of the
attributes there exists only power, which is pure virtuality. It is in the immanent
condition that the subject/soul undergoes this process.
Deleuze (1993, 24) writes about the world soul or the Spirit: “It is therefore
enveloped by an infinity of individuated souls of which each retains its irreduc-
ible point of view. It is the accord of singular points of view, or harmony, that
will replace universal complication and ward off the dangers of pantheism . . .
whence Leibniz’s insistence upon denouncing the hypothesis . . . of a Universal
Spirit that would turn complication into an abstract operation in which indi-
viduals would be swallowed up.” The Universal Spirit or the collective mind is

423

Figure 2.16.10. The four folds and their conditions. Illustration by Elisabet Yanagisawa, ©
Elisabet Yanagisawa.
 Elisabet Yanagisawa

the sum of all souls; it has transformed them through the point of view to allow
another perspective. The human soul is divided into two parts, of which one is
virtual and in the power of the attributes, and the other has a body in the plane
of consistency. The perspective of the point of view compels the subject to get
its passage opened for a kind of deep-seated intuition. The point of view is a
gate to the virtual. When the soul is a monad, it distributes a closed and safe
space for the collective mind.

Series
“The world is an infinite series of curvatures or inflections,” writes Deleuze
(1993, 24), “and the entire world is enclosed in the soul from one point of view.”
What is the meaning of the “series”? Each individual is a series of configura-
tions, expressed through a singularity. Individuals are variations that undergo
many “rhythmic and melodic” movements (ibid., 25). It appears that this refers
to a continuous affirmable development, but they can “also follow the contrary,
or retrograde, movement” (ibid.). As can the form of concavity and convexity,
the development too can form in two directions, either forward or backward.
The individual is a configuration in a series of configurations throughout the
plane of consistency that express one’s soul. In the virtual realm, the non-space,
however, the soul is a unique entity, encompassed by the world soul.
Can this understanding become general knowledge? As demonstrated earl-
ier, Deleuze (1993, 24) indicates that the comprehension of this metaphysical
reality is vouchsafed as a condition in the point of view: “The point of view, the
summit of the cone, is the condition under which we apprehend the group of
varied forms or the series of curves to the second degree.” It appears that the
position of the point of view is capable of apprehending both spatial and tem-
poral perspectives, and it also “brings forth the connection of all the related
profiles, the series of all curvatures or inflections” (ibid., 24).
Deleuze poses a seemingly elementary question, why is it necessary to depart
from the world or the serial order? Alternatively put, why is all this concealed
in oblivion? Deleuze’s (1993, 25) response is simple: “If not, the theme of the
mirror and of point of view would lose all meaning.” I only can add that this is
something to contemplate. Perhaps, when it is kairos, we will awake and want
to seek the answer and then we will understand individually as a realisation.
What is the soul? Deleuze (1993, 26) states that the soul is an effect of this
process: “The soul results from the world that God has chosen.” In what way
has the world chosen the monad? The world or God has chosen each monad
because it is the right time (kairos) for God’s life to exist through it. The monad
is a gate between the spatium and the power of the spatium, that is, the virtual.
Thus, the monad is a sensuous entity that perceives and expresses the develop-
ment of the world. “The world must be placed in the subject in order that the
subject can be for the world” (ibid., 26).

424
 The Fold

Conclusion
To develop the world soul, the individual needs to develop from inflections
to envelopment. Envelopment is proximity and a non-distant place, a virtual
entity that is enfolded into the individual carnal body that still lives in strata.
The soul is eternal and never dies, but it can become retrograde, degenerate,
and turn in an opposite mode. If this is so, the development of the soul deceler-
ates, and not without conflict and hostility toward other souls.
By creating folds in strata, new folds in the virtual mode of existence are
made. These constitute new codes, which become inscribed into the virtual
grid. By creating sensible folds in strata, the properties double their existence
into the virtuality. Potentials expand, life expands. The metaphysics of the fold
is in fact the pure metaphysics of proximity and sensibility.

References
Deleuze, Gilles. 1988a. Foucault. Translated Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley.
and edited by Seán Hand. Minneapolis: London: Athlone Press. First published
University of Minnesota Press. First 1988 as Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris:
published 1986 as Foucault (Paris: Minuit). Minuit).
———. 1988b. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Guattari, Félix. 1995. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-
Translated by Robert Hurley. San Aesthetic Paradigm. Translated by Paul
Francisco: City Lights Books. First Bains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington:
published 1970 as Spinoza (Paris: Presses Indiana University Press. First published
universitaires de France), revised 1981 1992 as Chaosmose (Paris: Galilée).
as Spinoza: Philosophie pratique (Paris: Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual:
Editions de Minuit). Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC:
———. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Duke University Press.

425
Part 2
Space
 Urban War Machines*
Manola Antonioli
Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture of Paris La Villette and
Laboratoire Architecture et Anthropologie (LAA) UMR 7218 LAVUE CNRSC

Between 2012 and 2015, I taught in the Design of Spaces department at the
Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art in Dijon, where I directed a research-creation
project, closely linked to pedagogy, entitled LARU (Laboratoire de Recherche
Urbaine—Urban Research Laboratory), which actively involved all the teach-
ers in the department. For over two years, we worked with architects, design-
ers, theorists, and artists who develop theories and practices concerning the
complexity of contemporary urban spaces, and who accept leaving room for
the unpredictable and the unexpected. As I collected the texts resulting from
this project for publication (Antonioli 2015),1 I found that the operating rules
for these experiments very strongly evoked those of the “war machines” theo-
rised by Deleuze and Guattari in 1980 in the “Treatise on Nomadology” from A
Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987).
The war machine does not primarily refer to war and fighting, but rather to
forms of spatialisation and distribution within space, closely linked to nomad-
ism and “nomadology.” Through the notion of nomadism, sedentary peoples,
organised in a State-like fashion, have traditionally called out and condemned
“barbaric” peoples, without State, without territory, and (therefore) with-
out laws. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari turn this into a phil­
osophical concept, which relates to various thought processes and practices
(philosophical, existential, artistic, technical, and political). On the basis of
a reading by Georges Dumézil, Deleuze and Guattari postulate a fundamen-
tal foreignness and exteriority to the war machine at both poles of State-type
political sovereignty (that of the magician-king and that of the jurist-priest).
The legal and military organisation that a State-type army requires is for-
eign to the organisation of the nomad war machine (even if the State can still
“capture” its strength): “In every respect, the war machine is of another spe-
cies, another nature, another origin than the State apparatus” (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987, 352). What truly differentiates them is, above all, another way
of distributing themselves within space. Sedentary space is a space delimited
by stable and fixed landmarks, the parts of which are distributed between its
different occupants in a stable and regulated way; it is a striated space, nec-
essary to the establishment of a State, its bureaucracy, and its powers. The
nomadic space is constantly deployed according to the internal and vari­
able laws of its own movement, oriented by constantly self-modifying refer-

*
Translated from the French by Stephanie Daneels (SD).
1 This chapter partially summarises the work’s introduction.

431
 Manola Antonioli

ence points; it is a smooth space, which no one can claim to own and occupy
definitively.

Deleuze and Guattari mention several possible models and theories about war
machines:
(1) Following a political model (as we have seen), the war machine is irreduci-
ble to State apparatuses, exterior to its sovereignty: the nomad attacks the State
on the basis of its radical exteriority and always in an unpredictable manner.
(2) According to the game theory model, the war machine follows the game
of Go model rather than the (State-type) chess model: while the pieces and
their movements are coded in a game of chess, the stones in a game of Go are
not endowed with intrinsic properties but are elements in an ever-singular and
non-reproducible situation. On the other hand, it is never about opposing, in
a dichotomous way, a State-type organisation and a machinic operation, but
rather is about analysing and understanding, in each singular configuration,
the nature of the perpetual field of interaction between “exteriority and interi-
ority, war machines of metamorphosis and State apparatuses of identity, bands
and kingdoms, megamachines and empires” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 361).
The war machine exists only in its own metamorphoses, and in fields as differ-
ent as industrial or technological innovations, artistic or literary currents, and
religious, philosophical, or political movements.
(3) The exteriority of the war machine can also be understood through an epis-
temological model that opposes a “minor” or “nomadic” science to any “major,”
definitively institutionalised, science. According to Deleuze and Guattari, this
kind of science (or rather an alternative approach to science and technology) is
deployed through singular projects always centred on “problems-events.” But
the most interesting cases (in science, as in technology, philosophy, art, and
politics) are always cases on the fringes, where forms of nomadic organisation
and knowledge exert pressure on forms of knowledge or forms of State-type
powers that try to conjure them without ever succeeding and that then end up
(far too often) appropriating and transforming them.

Among recurrent examples within the book Machines de guerre urbaines (Antonioli
2015), one can find many references to architecture in particular. The Gothic
period saw, for example, companions (tradesmen) moving throughout Europe
building cathedrals in a form of itinerant self-organisation, which could only
trigger States’ hostility. The States’ response was to manage worksites, parti-
tioning new divisions of labour between the intellectual and the manual, the
theoretical and the practical, modelled on the difference between governors
and governed. Through the way in which history tends to repeat itself, the work-
site can once again, in today’s architectural “war machines,” become a place of
life and sharing, and even a place of artistic creation, where these deeply rooted
distinctions in the history of building are challenged anew. Science, technol-
ogy, and travelling or nomadic arts do not seek to seize control, but to subor-
dinate all their operations to the sensitive perspective of intuition, where the
goal is to follow the singularities of a matter and trace and connect elements

432
 Urban War Machines

in a smooth space–time. These are forms of “approximate knowledge,” always

oriented by sensitive evaluations rather than by rational laws, which constantly
bring more issues than they can solve.
(4) The fourth model used for war machines is that of a “noology” (life of
ideas), a shifting history of forms of thought, whose institutionalised structure
(State or royal) systematically encounters nomadic counter-thoughts. In terms
of space and architecture, “the problem of the war machine is that of relay-
ing, even with modest means, not that of the architectonic model or the mon-
ument. An ambulant people of relayers, rather than a model society” (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987, 399).
The contemporary urban world, whose heterogeneous spaces escape the
frame of urbanism and architecture as “royal sciences,” is increasingly traversed
and inhabited by small “war machines” whose rules of operation recall those
mentioned by Deleuze and Guattari in the “Treatise on Nomadology” and try
to create new forms of exchange and communication between overly smooth
spaces (diffuse, generic, or junk-space cities) and others that are overly striated
(gated communities and ghettos of all kinds), aimed at the richest populations
or the poorest populations—streets and public spaces that can no longer per-
form their communication functions. They are stifled by an overabundance of
regulations, vast spaces of concrete with no greenery in sight, and omnipres-
ent safety standards. The small “urban war machines” that are thus invented
around us every day are strategically distributed in an open and non-hierarchi-
cal space (as in the game of Go); they involve very diverse actors (architects, art-
ists, researchers, philosophers, and ordinary city-dwellers who are concerned
by the fate of the environments they live in); they act according to the prin-
ciples of “minor” sciences and techniques, not on the basis of a “project” or
far-reaching urban “planning” (State machine, Grand Paris . . . ) or predefined
laws that would need to be applied, but by constructing their projects or plans
on the ground, in worksites and in town streets and squares, according to a
principle that the Italian architect Francesco Careri (2015, 134) calls “an unde-
termined project”; they are small units, which arrange and invent their own
tools and technical means by “compositions of affects,” in response to “prob-
lems-events” that are always singular.
The texts gathered in Machines de guerre urbaines (Antonioli 2015) aim to give
an overview of the range of new weapons that are being invented: green guer-
rillas, the emergence of new landscapes produced by the new place given to
nature and its spontaneous dynamics in the cities, new forms of urban agri-
culture, artistic and architectural interventions in interstices and “in-between
territories,” urban walks and dérives, cartographies and navigations. These are
“territorial narratives” but also “urban micro-factories” that exploit the tools
offered by the most advanced technologies to create new forms of artisanship
and new relations with the territories and between their inhabitants; they are
artistic strategies that divert the dominant discourse on “Cities 2.0” or “Smart
Cities” to invent new forms of appropriation and sharing of urban life in the
increasingly frequent superposition between built spaces and virtual spaces.

433
 Manola Antonioli

The shifting, multiple typologies of these interventions make them diffi-

cult to map exhaustively; here we will limit ourselves (as in Machines de guerre
urbaines) to giving some examples. To begin with, we can mention the many
forms (artistic or more generally citizen-led), of “green resistance.” This is how
Emeline Eudes and Gabe (2015) describe guerrilla gardening practices, which
proceed through small uprisings and micro-actions of public space appropri-
ation to promote the unauthorised appearance of plants in neglected spaces,
the city’s margins and “latency zones.” Geographers Nathalie Blanc and Cyria
Emelianoff (2015) describe and analyse experiments in occupation of living
spaces (in Russia, the Netherlands, Germany, and France) that use the presence
of plants to reclaim dwellings abandoned by public authorities.
Numerous “urban war machines” are deployed in city streets and interstices
to challenge every aspect of public space and its potential for encounters and
exchanges. Videographer and visual artist Gilles Paté has participated in exper-
iments, conducted by the “Ne pas plier” association since 1991, which bring
together artists, graphic designers, sociologists, semiologists, educators, and
social workers, who are encouraged to propose alternative political and aes-
thetical means to intervene in public spaces of proximity, to work with the
inhabitants of such spaces to create forms of co-production, debate, and shar-
ing regarding occupying these spaces, and to produce visual tools to trigger a
critical reading of city spaces, architectures, and graphic signs. In particular,
Gilles Paté produced a short documentary, Le repos du fakir (Paté and Argillet
2003), which shows “situational prevention” policies aimed at preventing
homeless people or, more generally, all those considered “undesirable” to set-
tle and stay for extended periods of time in store fronts, subway seats, public
benches, and so on.
Among artistic interventions, we can refer to the work of artist Etienne
Boulanger (1976–2008), who died prematurely of a heart attack in 2008 aged
thirty-two. Throughout the 1990s, Boulanger chose to abandon traditional
exhibition sites (museums, art centres, galleries, etc.) to inhabit the “cracks
and crevices” of large cities (Paris, Berlin, Beijing), anticipating a trend that
has since spread to designers, architects, and artists. He also rehabilitated
neglected urban interstices with new uses, interventions, or “programmes”
(see Gagnard 2015).
Forms of dérive and urban cartography, practices already established at
the beginning of the twentieth century by Dadaists and surrealists and later
extended in situationist “psychogeography,” are also based on a reappropri-
ation of streets and squares as common and shared spaces. For more than
twenty years, the architect Francesco Careri (co-founder of the Stalker and
Laboratorio di arti civiche collectives) has proposed the practice of “transur-
bance” (which he also uses as a teaching tool in architecture schools in several
countries) as a method to overcome city dwellers’ countless fears of the “other,”
now evermore voluntarily sedentarised and partitioned into gated communi-
ties (Careri 2015; I refer also to Careri 2013).

434
 Urban War Machines

Public spaces’ accessibility and their understanding and perception have

been profoundly modified by the development of new technologies: “The
public political space, that of deliberation, is more and more virtual due to
the digital revolution and thus unbound from a material and tangible space”
(Mongin 2012, 74, translated by SD). The storytelling around “Smart Cities,”
“Smart Towns,” or “Cities 2.0” is all the rage, and its authors (politicians and
large construction, IT, home automation, or architectural biometrics compan­
ies) seem to take it for granted that the digital city of the future will solve all
today’s ecological problems and will almost miraculously, practically instantan­
eously, guarantee the democratisation of urban life and an increase in every-
one’s participation in public life (as if “connection” and “participation” were
synonyms). The authors whose texts were gathered in “Technotopies,” the fifth
and last part of Machines de guerre urbaines, reaffirm that “machines” are not
always “war machines”—far from it. As emphasised by young designer Joffrey
Paillard (2015), we must learn to circumvent or divert such machines, otherwise
they serve merely as the privileged tools of a controlling society and as security
strategies. According to sociologist Marie-Christine Bureau (2015), the secu-
lar history of confrontations between, on the one hand, “major” sciences and
techniques and, on the other hand, nomadic and “minor” sciences and forms
of knowledge is also being re-enacted in new machines and urban produc-
tion workshops, where today’s makers try to reinvent things in Fab Labs and
other “third places”—open workshops that appear around the world, bringing
together makers, engineers, designers, bricoleurs, artists, and amateur or pro-
fessional architects working on common projects.2
The final topic addressed in this collective reflection was that of heterotopia,
borrowed from the works of Michel Foucault (see Foucault 2009). Philosopher
Christiane Vollaire (2015) explains, according to Foucault’s analyses, that some-
thing in the aesthetic, architectural, or urbanistic gesture can truly trigger and
impart a power of disorder, a power of becoming that deterritorialises spaces in
the permanent consciousness of the spaces’ possible metamorphoses. Contrary
to utopias (places of nowhere), “heterotopias” appoint a model of dissimilarity
and radical alterity, a model that characterises real spaces in all their complex-
ity. The concept of heterotopia is far from having exhausted all the potential it
holds for theories and practices related to the transformation of contemporary
spaces, especially urban spaces. Contrary to “non-places”3 without qualities,
heterotopias are spaces where new social and political dynamics can emerge,
privileged places for the intervention of visual artists, architects, and designers.
If the “heterotopology” that Michel Foucault wished for is yet to emerge, het-
erotopias continue to feed urban imagination.
I would like to conclude with a quotation from Deleuze and Guattari (1987,
500), regarding the arrangements between smooth spaces and striated spaces
that feed the city’s future and that the “urban war machines” help build:

2 On this subject, I refer also to the collective work Poétiques du numérique 4: Les ateliers des possibles
(Antonioli et al. 2016).
3 Concept introduced in urban studies by anthropologist Marc Augé in Non-lieux (1992).

435
 Manola Antonioli

What interests us in operations of striation and smoothing are precisely the passages
or combinations: how the forces at work within space continually striate it, and how
in the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth spaces.
. . . Of course, smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle
is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new
obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries. Never believe that a smooth space
will suffice to save us.

References
Antonioli, Manola, ed. 2015. Machines de ———. 2015. “Walkscapes Ten Years Later.” In
guerre urbaines. Paris: Loco. Antonioli 2015, 130–37.
Antonioli, Manola, Isabelle Berrebi- Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987.
Hoffmann, Marie-Christine Bureau, and A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Michel Lallement, eds. 2016. Poétiques Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian
du numérique 4: Les ateliers des possibles. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of
Bordeaux: Editions L’Entretemps. Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as
Augé, Marc. 1992. Non-lieux: Introduction à Mille plateaux (Paris: Éditions de Minuit).
une anthropologie de la supermodernité. Paris: Eudes, Emeline, and Gabe. 2015. “Aux armes,
Seuil. Translated by John Howe as Non- jardiniers et habitants!” In Antonioli
places: Introduction to an Anthropology of 2015, 29–42.
Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995). Foucault, Michel. 2009. Le Corps utopique;
Blanc, Nathalie, and Cyria Emelianoff. 2015. suivi Les Hétérotopies. Paris: Lignes.
“Formes de renouvellement urbain.” In Gagnard, Katia. 2015. “Dans les interstices:
Antonioli 2015, 43–53. Etienne Boulanger.” In Antonioli 2015,
Bureau, Marie-Christine. 2015. “Les makers 93–104.
fabriquent-ils des machines de guerre?” Mongin, Olivier. 2012. “Métamorphoses de
In Antonioli 2015, 213–20. l’espace public.” Esprit, November, 74.
Careri, Francesco. 2013. Walkscapes: La marche Paillard, Joffrey. 2015. “Vers un nouveau
comme pratique esthétique. Translated by statut du citoyen dans la Smart city en
Jérôme Orsoni (French). Paris: Editions devenir.” In Antonioli 2015, 221–28.
Jacqueline Chambon; Arles: Actes Sud. Paté, Gilles, and Stéphane Argillet, dirs.
First published 2002 as Walkscapes: El 2003. Le repos du fakir. Paris: Canal
andar como practica estetica/Walking as an Marches. Accessed 27 January 2017.
Aesthetic Practice, translated by Maurici http://www.gilfakir.com/fakir.html.
Pla (Spanish) and Steve Piccolo and Vollaire, Christiane. 2015. “Hétérotopies
Paul Hammond (English) (Barcelona: créatrices ou destructrices.” In Antonioli
Editorial Gustava Gili). 2015, 231–48.

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 Transmissibility
A Mode of Artistic Re-search
Jae Emerling
University of North Carolina, Charlotte

After the death of Félix Guattari on 29 August 1992, Gilles Deleuze composed
a short text entitled “For Félix.” In a mere five paragraphs Deleuze conveys
precisely why we should return to and study Guattari’s work, which had com-
pelled Deleuze to experiment with his own concepts along Guattari’s unique
cartographic axis: “territories, flows, machines and universes” (Deleuze 2007,
382). It is the concluding paragraph to which I would like to draw your atten-
tion. Deleuze writes: “Félix’s work is waiting to be discovered or rediscovered.
That is one of the best ways to keep Félix alive. Perhaps the most painful aspects
of remembering a dead friend are the gestures and glances that still reach us,
that still come to us long after he is gone. Félix’s work gives new substance
to these gestures and glances, like a new object capable of transmitting their
power” (ibid., 383).
In a moving passage, Deleuze puts several interesting notions into play for us.
First, that both philosophical and artistic—let’s say, creative—work involves
a movement of “rediscovery,” a movement of repetition and difference. Any
return or rediscovery involves learning how to create new objects, images, and
sounds. Second, note the phrase about past images that “still reach us,” “that
still come to us,” like signals transmitted from a black hole. After reading this
text I was struck by the verb “transmitting” because I had already noted it in
Deleuze’s interviews and at other times in his work. He uses this verb to trans-
mit when discussing affects and signals. Generally, it indicates the movement
of a line of escape, a line of flight, but one that is always creative, aleatory, and
heterogenetic.
As a university professor who teaches studio art, architecture, and art his-
tory students, I have been developing the aesthetic-historiographic concept
of transmissibility as a way to engage students with Deleuze and Guattari’s
ontological and aesthetic philosophy (See Emerling 2013a, 2013b, 2015). For
me, transmissibility is a concept that has the potential to serve as a method for
artistic research that is useful to both cultural practitioners and historians. It
is an approach to art and history that gets at the complications of temporality,
immanent movement, and the creation of sense events that comprise the most
vital artworks.
Artistic research can be defined broadly as a mode of critical and creative
practice wherein one attempts to construct a passage between the past and
the present when dealing with historical precedent or subject matter. But this

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 Jae Emerling

passage has nothing to do with allusion or unconscious stylistic filiation. As

Marquard Smith (2013, 376) has written, “to research, which by definition is ‘to
look for with care,’ is an act of not only interpreting the world but changing it.”1
Even more pressingly for artistic research, he asks that we recognise how and
why “each historical moment has its own épistéme of re-search” (ibid., 377).
Smith hyphenates “re-search” to emphasise this complicated structure of repe-
tition and difference, of searching again, of always being in the middle between
past and future. I would add that to think artistic re-search with a fidelity to the
specificity of our own episteme requires us to understand that an artwork is
what it does: it renders new passages, new modes of production, between past
and future. These passages are always untimely because they are unhistorical
lines of time that flow within the chronological present.
I define transmissibility as a mode of an artwork and thus as a creative aim of
artistic re-search. It posits that ontologically and aesthetically an artwork traces
the lines of time that deframe and compose the present. But, transmissibility
has nothing to do with representing the cultural past. Instead, it has everything
to do with a temporal deframing of any cultural representation and with the
composition of other modes of culture within the present. For me, this is what
makes artistic re-search vital and creative. Artistic re-search is a futural force
that creates ontological, ethical, and epistemic effects, if only because it reveals
how and why varying temporalities and hence different becomings are imma-
nently enfolded within each supposed discrete tense (past, present, future).
Conceiving of transmissibility as an essential mode of artistic re-search—
as a “power of the future” as Deleuze tells us—shuttles us between aesthetic
labour (creation, research, performance) and cultural reception (exhibition,
historiography, criticism). Following Deleuze and Guattari, the aim here is to
conceive of artistic research as a twofold, simultaneous operation: it deframes
the present, meaning it undoes the actual discourse, precedent, received opin-
ions, and clichéd feelings and expressions, as it composes new lines and tempo-
ral linkages, new becomings.2 This operation occurs because an artwork is not
simply an object but is critical thought, a futural material force. This mode of
transmissibility—deframing and composing—occurs in time, opening us to a
multiplicity of temporal durations (the internal difference of time itself). As
such, it opens us to unforeseen, affective sense events—material encounters that
force us to think and to become. To sketch the broad outlines of transmissibility as a
concept I want to focus on two aspects of this concept: the problematic as style
and materiality as immanence.
“The mode of the event is the problematic,” Deleuze writes in The Logic of
Sense (1990, 54). A problematic is what each artist is confronted with as he or
she encounters artistic precedent and futural demands (the desire for origi-
nality, newness, difference) at the same time. Problematics are the ideational

1 Smith’s remarkable essay was preceded by an edited volume, What Is Research in the Visual Arts? Obsession,
Archive, Encounter (Holly and Smith 2009).
2 The simultaneous movement of deframing and composing is essential to how I am conceiving transmis-
sibility. I borrow the terms from Deleuze and Guattari. See their discussion of a “deframing power” and
composition in What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 187–92).

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 Transmissibility

and material conditions—the very state of things—from which art thinks and
creates. The entire critical language Deleuze and Guattari create to discuss
artworks—singularities, sense events, intensities, affects and percepts—is
understandable only within the parameters of a specific problematic that a
given painter, musician, writer, dancer, filmmaker, or architect is trying to solve
creatively. We should add that by definition a problematic is not answerable
with a simple answer in the affirmative or negative. A problematic is not a ques-
tion.3 Rather, it is the act of surveying a section of an actual-virtual immanent
field wherein art produces potentialities, open-ended solutions, which affirm
chance and thereby remind us that “thought and art are real and [as such] dis-
turb . . . reality, morality, and the economy of the world” (Deleuze 1990, 60). But
one must “know how to play” this problematic game, Deleuze (ibid., 60) insists.
One must know how to discern a problematic and create with and alongside
it—in medias res. If an artwork is an event—the infinitive verb of which is to
transmit—then it must be involved in an ontological and aesthetic becoming
that renders the real anew. But this ontological and aesthetic becoming takes
place within a context, within a cross-section of the plane of composition,
because “we can speak of events only in the context of the problem[atic] whose
conditions they determine” (ibid., 56).
It is this relation between a problematic and an event that I have been focus-
ing on as I rethink artistic re-search, in part because it is quite difficult to
explain how an event takes place within art practice. I mean that it is difficult
to present artists with the task of creating an event, especially since events and
singularities are impersonal, non-subjective, becoming. Accepting this as the
endgame of art’s ontological and aesthetic value is easier to do if we can present
artists with how to confront the actual state of things and teach them how to
virtualise the actual. Confronting the actual state of things as a plane of imma-
nence requires one to create a problematic. We should begin here. Especially
by recalling that in all his work on art, Deleuze (2007, 218) defines “original-
ity, or the new,” as “precisely how problems are resolved differently, but most
especially because an author figured out how to pose the problem in a new
way.”
Deleuze offers some advice about what we are calling artistic re-search: (1)
begin with a concrete situation and work toward a problematic, that is, the
threshold wherein actual and virtual fold into one another; and (2) conceive of
re-search as an encounter.
First, artists should begin by confronting the state of things, the actual.
Deleuze (2007, 362–63) encourages beginning with “extremely simple, con-
crete situations” even before getting to problematics. He adds, “stick to the
concrete, and always return to it.” It is from perceptions and affections that

3 A problematic is a conjunction of question and answer beyond the logic of everyday usage and life.
Deleuze (1990, 56) writes: “The question is developed in problems, and the problems are enveloped in a
fundamental question. And just as solutions do not suppress problems, but on the contrary discover in
them the subsisting conditions without which they would have no sense, answers do not at all suppress,
nor do they saturate, the question, which persists in all of the answers. There is therefore an aspect in
which problems remain without a solution, and the question without an answer.”

439
 Jae Emerling

percepts and affects will be created. This is the logic of empiricism-pluralism

that runs through Deleuze’s philosophy. Artistic re-search is nothing other
than a search for the “conditions under which something new is created” (ibid.,
304). But the states of things must be understood neither as a given nor as uni-
ties or totalities; but rather as multiplicities, as actual-virtual compounds. Here
is Deleuze (ibid., 305) on this point, which should be taken as essential to any
definition of artistic re-search: “Bringing out the concepts that correspond to
a multiplicity means tracing the lines that form it, determining the nature of
these lines, and seeing how and whether they overlap, connect, bifurcate, or
avoid the points. These lines are veritable becomings distinguished from both
unities and the history in which these unities develop. Multiplicities are made
of becomings without history, individuations without subjects. . . . Empiricism
is fundamentally connected to a logic . . . of multiplicities.”
Simply put, empiricism means to experiment with experience. This appears
to be the beginning of a method of artistic re-search. However, Deleuze will
insist, rightly, that there is no simple, direct method but only “long prepara-
tion” and chance, which form the two poles of an aesthetic encounter.
Second, an artistic encounter: “When you work,” Deleuze writes, “you are
necessarily in absolute solitude. . . . But it is an extremely populous solitude.
Populated not with dreams, phantasms or plans, but with encounters. An
encounter is perhaps the same thing as a becoming. . . . You encounter peo-
ple (and sometimes without knowing them or ever having seen them) but
also movements, ideas, events, entities. . . . To encounter is to find, to capture,
to steal, but there is no method for finding other than a long preparation”
(Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 6–7). We must address why Deleuze claims that there
is no method. He is hesitant to posit a method because of the chance element
involved in any encounter: he always insists that an encounter is clandestine,
subterranean, fortuitous. But this should only turn us back to the notion of
“long preparation.” Immediately after this Deleuze quotes from a poem by Bob
Dylan that he very much admires. Taking the Dylan poem as a model of artis-
tic production, he continues: “A very lengthy preparation, yet no method, nor
rules, nor recipes. . . . [Only] having a bag into which I put everything I encoun-
ter, provided that I am also put in a bag. Finding, encountering, stealing instead
of regulating, recognizing and judging” (ibid., 8). For Deleuze, “to encounter”
means, in part, multiplying and complicating the content of your problematic
to the point of saturation or perhaps non-sense. Recall when Deleuze cites
Francis Bacon’s statement that the canvas is never empty but always replete
with the lines of all that has come before.4 These lines are the materiality of
the problematic. To encounter requires a material field of lines, the veritable
presence of the virtual past in the present. This allows for creative involution:
the simultaneous erasing and composing of lines, bending and folding lines to

4 Deleuze discusses this notion in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2003, 86). Francois Dosse’s work
has shown that Deleuze first encountered this notion in his meeting with the French painter Gérard
Fromanger in 1971. Deleuze quotes Fromanger almost verbatim in What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994, 204). See Dosse (2010, 440–42).

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connect to other lines they always avoided or missed.5 It is this action—trans-

missibility—that allows becoming to unfold. This becoming ensnares the work
as much as the artist and the viewer/listener/reader.
Thus an act of erasing, simplifying, and involuting what one encounters moti-
vates becoming (expression and construction), which is a paradoxical move-
ment because as one involves—explicating and complicating the folds of a work
and oneself—one becomes more “populated.” But “populated” not with peo-
ple or more things, but with singularities and non-historical temporalities, that
is, the material and sensational precipitate of an event.6 Here is Deleuze once
more: “In becoming there is no past nor future—not even present, there is no
history. In becoming it is, rather, a matter of involuting; it’s neither regression
nor progression. To become is to become more and more restrained, more and
more simple, more and more deserted and for that very reason populated. This
is what’s difficult to explain: to what extent one should involute. . . . [because]
experimentation is involutive” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 29).
This mode of “creative involution” is a connective thread running from
Deleuze’s work on Bergson to his concept of the fold. Becoming is “a little
time in its pure state” (the Proustian formula) (Deleuze 1994, 122) or a section
of chaos captured by a formal net articulated by an artist: the fold or “and” of
the Joycean chaosmos, the ultimate aim of our “apprenticeship to art” (Deleuze
[1972] 2000, 65).7
All this leaves us with the ability to posit that an artwork is what it does: it
renders new passages, new modes of becoming, between past and future.
These passages are always untimely because they are inherent unhistorical lines
of time that flow within the present.8 Transmissibility is the power of an art-
work to deframe any cultural representation and to compose with other modes
of culture. Transmissibility is this double movement, which creates aesthetic
and historical encounters with singularities rather than subjects. Therefore,
what is transmitted is not a given past or even a represented state of things
or subject(s); instead, what is created is only an opening—a pure means—a

5 Deleuze and Guattari discuss the concept of “creative involution” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (1987, 238). “Becoming is involuntary, involution is creative,” they write.
6 As Deleuze (1990, 52) explains: “What is an ideal event? It is a singularity—or rather a set of singularities
or of singular points characterizing a mathematical curve, a physical state of affairs, a psychological
and moral person. Singularities are turning points and points of inflection; bottlenecks, knots, foyers,
and centers; points of fusion, condensation, and boiling; points of tears and joy, sickness and health,
hope and anxiety, ‘sensitive’ points. Such singularities, however, should not be confused either with the
personality of the one expressing herself in discourse, or with the individuality of a state of affairs. . . .
The singularity belongs to another dimension than that of denotation, manifestation, or signification.
It is essentially pre-individual, non-personal, and a-conceptual. It is quite indifferent to the individual
and the collective, the personal and the impersonal, the particular and the general—and to their op-
positions. Singularity is neutral. On the other hand, it is not ‘ordinary’: the singular point is opposed to
the ordinary.” But we should also note a key lesson Deleuze ([1972] 2000, 111) takes from Marcel Proust
that “to remember is to create”; that is, “to reach that point where the associative chain breaks, leaps over the
constituted individual, is transferred to the birth of an individuating world [i.e., a world of singularities].”
7 The significance of Deleuze’s Proustian formula traverses all his works, especially the books on cinema
(Deleuze 1986, 1989) and Proust and Signs (Deleuze [1972] 2000, 59–61).
8 The “untimely” is a concept Deleuze and Guattari developed from Nietzsche and Michel Foucault (see
Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 112–13). See also Deleuze (1988, 107–11, 119–23).

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new temporal relation of simultaneity and duration, a past-future (Aion) that

“inheres” within the present (Chronos), one comprising “incorporeal effects”
that make “pre-individual and nonpersonal singularities” sensible and intelli-
gible (Deleuze, 1990, 73). To think of transmissibility in this manner is to accept
Deleuze’s philosophy of time and materiality.
Deleuze’s philosophy of time, of course, includes his elaboration of Bergson’s
theory that time is not simply divisible into past, present, and future. There are
no clearly differentiated temporal states, but only levels and degrees of tem-
poral co-existence and transformation. Throughout his work, Deleuze relies
on Bergson’s concept of the “pure past”: that the entirety of all that has hap-
pened coexists with each present, that each present is the “contraction” of this
“pure past,” which itself is then reconfigured with every passing present (see
Deleuze 1991; note also Deleuze 2004). The past, therefore, is an immanent
terrain, a field, “not just a reified version of the present,” because it is “search-
able, explorable, problematizable, penetrable, and livable” (Lampert 2006, 51).
The force that surveys and animates the past is the future. Temporal movement
is “untimely” and open because the future is the desire to search the past and
make different presents liveable; it is the desire to actualise different configu-
rations and effects in lieu of the present.
For Deleuze, an event is nothing other than a movement of becoming that
traverses time immanently, repeating and thus differentiating anew the succes-
sion of past, present, and future. Within this movement, the future “defines an
event not in the time-frame that it is in, but in another time-frame” because it is
“the forced communication of the present, past, and future of the same event”
(Lampert 2006, 66). Of course, this “forced communication” has ontological,
ethical, and epistemic effects, if only because it reveals how and why varying
temporalities are enfolded within each supposed discrete tense. However, the
future is conceived as a disjunctive, aleatory force: an outside that paradoxically
exists at the most intimate interior of time as such because it “forces cracks in
the stable set of past events to exhibit not-yet determinate chance effects, and
conversely forces the future to have shown itself, at least darkly, in its precur-
sors” (ibid.). Moreover, this philosophy of time makes Deleuze’s assertion that
art is a “power of the future”—an eventual force, that embodies singularities
and temporalities that complicate the history of representation—even more
crucial for artistic re-search.9 Thus when he argues that “art comprehends the tex-
tures of matter” (Deleuze 1993, 35, my italics), it is because he redefines matter
so that the relation of matter and form in art is replaced by the relation forces
and forms, chaosmos.
For Deleuze, matter is what fills space and time. Matter is “unformed, unor-
ganized, nonstratified” and with “all its flows” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 43).
It is what he will call chaos or life as such. Matter comprises singularities and
relations, that is, relational capacities (to affect and to be affected). There is
always already, he asserts, a “continuous variation of matter” (Deleuze 1993,

9 Art is a Deleuzian “power of the future” and not a “thing of the past” as Hegel wagered (see Hegel 1975,
10).

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19) or “an entire energetic materiality in movement” (Deleuze and Guattari

1987, 408). Conceiving of matter in this way is only the first step in abandon-
ing a hylomorphic, matter-form relation in favour of “material-force” (Deleuze
1993, 35).10 Material-force replaces matter and form. This substitution gets us
to the heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s semiotic, in which material-force is a net
(an assemblage) of forms of expression and forms of content.11 Hence, “it is no
longer a question of imposing a form upon a matter [hylomorphic] but of elab-
orating an increasingly rich and consistent material, the better to tap increas-
ingly intense forces” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 329).
For Deleuze, then, it follows that there are no human subjects and inert
objects (matter), but only morphogenesis and traits/predicates. In working
with such a materiality we must accept that an “abstract and tactile sense
of matter must figure at the crux of any social practice” (Conley 1993, xiv).
Morphogenesis implies that any opposition of organic and inorganic, present
and past, form and content, becomes “tonal flow and flux” (ibid., xv). In other
words, dialectical relations are replaced with resonance, which means both the
ontological and temporal structure of difference and repetition as well as the
logic of sensation. The concept of material-force (Deleuze and Guattari’s opera-
tive definition of a work of art) takes as its starting point “a world pierced with
irregular passages” because “even the most refined matter is perfectly fluid”
(Deleuze 1993, 5). In short, there is always already the “fluidity of matter” (4), or
“temporal modulation” (19). There is “temporal modulation” because a “mat-
ter-fold is a matter-time” (7).
This is what Deleuze (2007, 263) terms the “fabric of immanence”: “compli-
cating the most diverse things and persons in the self-same tapestry, at the same
time that each thing, each person, explicates the whole.” Each thing explicates
the whole, the whole complicates each thing. This “fabric of immanence” is texture:
texturology.12 Texturology is precisely the importance of the fold in Deleuze’s
work. Materiality is an infinite folding wherein virtual and actual, sensible and
intelligible, expression and event, past and present coexist without any recourse
to a reductive hierarchy of one over the other. This is immanence. The actual
(molar forms) are presented as foldings: “a complication of surfaces that offsets
any temptation to step beyond the wholly immanent plane. . . . [a conception
of matter as] a universal texturology” that enfolds finite and infinite (Mullarkey

10 “Temporal modulation” is not a spatial conception of moulding matter and form (hylomorphic) in
which the object is withdrawn from the mould that forms it (see Deleuze 1993, 19). Hylomorphic
signifies hyle (matter), wherein a form is applied to a formless and homogenous matter (passive) from
without (pace Aristotle).
11 For Deleuze and Guattari, semiotics is material expressiveness, matter of expression—that is, a non-lin-
guistic (opposed to the semiology of structuralism with its abstract language system that operates
indifferently to matter) semiotics of direct sensation. So they oppose the linguistic reductionism in
structuralism and post-structuralism (postmodernism). In their semiotics, “both expressions and con-
tents . . . have both form and matter. Expressions do not merely represent contents epiphenomenally;
rather, expressions and events interpret each other at the level of form, and interact causally with one
another at the level of matter,” as Lampert (2006, 77) astutely argues.
12 “Then matter has not only structures and figures but also textures. . . . a texturology that attests to a
generalized organicism, or to a ubiquitous presence of organisms,” Deleuze (1993, 115) argues.

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 Jae Emerling

1999, 77).13 This is noteworthy when we recall that Deleuze and Guattari define
art as the finite that restores the infinite.
This operative function of art presents artists, cultural historians, and phil­
osophers with a challenge. A challenge to cross “thresholds of perception,” to
“peer into the crannies of matter and read into the folds of the [virtual],” as
Deleuze (1993, 3) posits.14 The aim is to encounter the texture of an event, that
is, a life (pure immanence) that traverses all matter. In other words, we need “a
sense of the affinity of matter with life” (ibid., 6), but life within and beyond
human life and experience (see also Pearson 1999; and Bennett 2010). We must
accept the challenge to contemplate how and why matter is always already a
“matter of expression” and why “what is expressed [an event] does not exist
outside its expressions” (Deleuze 1993, 35, 37). As Deleuze writes in The Fold,
“Art comprehends the textures of matter” (ibid.).
Lastly, although there is no given method of artistic re-search, there is the
ethic of a “long preparation,” with its infinitive verbs to deframe and to compose,
that is, to transmit. Artistic re-search is the very ethos of Deleuzian style, which
is a non-style, a “foreign language in the language we speak. Stretched to its
intern­al limit, toward this outside of language” (Deleuze 2007, 370). Stretching
the state of things and its representations (i.e., language, image-repertories,
musical modes) means to creatively involve, to fold it toward an outside—an
intimate exterior—that is the double movement of becoming. Transmissibility
as artistic re-search is a “sober style,” a texturology that senses and creates
temporal passages, involutions, and thus becomings. Transmissibility works to
“cross thresholds of perception” in order to partake of the work of immanence.
This is the noble yet aleatory aim of our “apprenticeship in art,” our artistic
re-search: to render time itself transmittable but never inheritable.

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14 Note that the Deleuzian virtual is thus “the Fold between the folds” and the smallest unit of matter is
the fold.

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———. 1991. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Dosse, François. 2010. Gilles Deleuze and Félix
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———. 1994. Difference and Repetition. de Mille, 260–71. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
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 Architecture
and Indifference
Ronny Hardliz
artist; Middlesex University, London; Goldsmiths, University of London

Figure 2.19.1.

This chapter takes two critical readings as its point of departure: first, it defines
Deleuze’s “difference” as unilaterally indistinguishable from “indifference”;
and, second, with the help of the first, it reclaims the validity of Benjamin’s
paradigmatic use of architecture’s tactile appropriation for art in times of neo-
liberal ideology: architecture’s tactile appropriation meets indifferent neo-
liberal architecture. If taken as a paradigm for the current art/anti-art dichot-
omy, which in many ways reflects the neo-liberal aesthetic as the aesthetic of
no aesthetic, tactile appropriation gives strategic insight into the grasping and
politicising of a neo-liberal aesthetic of indifference into a critical indifference
of aesthetic—that is, to humankind’s own ends, rather than humankind’s end.

446

Figure 2.19.1. Exit Strategy, Ronny Hardliz, 2016. The artist carving the logo of the Mu-
seums of Bat Yam (MOBY) into a pedestal in front of the museum for contemporary art
during the opening of the exhibition The Kids Want Communism.
 Architecture and Indifference

Theory understood not as knowledge but as touching allows architectural

practice to be determined as a means of understanding the world by such
politicised tactile appropriation, rather than as a tool for shaping it. Adapting
Kafka’s model of art as pure transmissibility to the Kafkaesque conditions of
current life, which is a life that in many ways detaches its means from its ends,
the politicising of today’s works of art by tactile appropriations takes place in
artists’ endlessly but critically lived labour and gestures. Any work of art is the-
oretical today by means of such a practice of touching. Discursive practice and
its seemingly paradoxical use in works of art should be read, therefore, as the
self-critical manifestation of a refusal to stop working as purposeless or useless
art. The hope of evicting the neo-liberal ideology of control and compliance
thereby resides in tactile appropriation as a means of theoretical understand-
ing, rather than as knowledge fabrication, which is critically lived in an archi-
tectural practice that attempts to understand itself as architecture.

Deleuze and indifference

“Indifference,” writes Gilles Deleuze (1994, 28, my emphasis) at the start of
Difference and Repetition, “has two aspects: the undifferenciated abyss, the black
nothingness, the indeterminate animal in which everything is dissolved,” on
the one hand, and, on the other, “the white nothingness, the once more calm
surface upon which float unconnected determinations like scattered members:
a head without a neck, an arm without a shoulder, eyes without brows.” Deleuze
thus differentiates indifference and asks, “Is difference intermediate between
these two extremes?” (ibid.).
On the black side, there is the “indeterminate,” the animalistic, which “is
completely indifferent” (Deleuze 1994, 28). In other words, it is completely ter-
minated, since it is not de-terminate. It is indifferently rooted in its originality
and nothing else.
On the white side there are “floating determinations,” scattered on the sur-
face, which “are no less indifferent to each other” (ibid.). In other words, these
“floating determinations” are indifferent to one another because they float,
because they are suspended and captured on the surface of a superficiality lack-
ing spatial depth. Here they seem to be no less completely terminated, though, not
as the originally indeterminate, but rather as something that has ceased to be
determined. Such a relapse evokes Giorgio Agamben’s conception of contin-
gency as “decreation,” as if it were a de-determined originality.
Isn’t the differentiation of indifference as such illogical, since it always has
the same effect: namely, to be indifferent? Indeed, Deleuze (1994, 28) contin-
ues asking whether difference is not “the only extreme, the only moment of
presence and precision,” rather than being “intermediate between these two
extremes” of indifference. In doing so he restores indifference to itself—there
is no more black and white—stating that “difference is the state in which one
can speak of determination as such” (ibid.).
If determination is the process that uproots a concept and potentially
leads it towards a new terminus, then neither indeterminate indifference nor

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de-determined indifference describes such a process. They are both, it seems,

always already terminated, albeit in different ways, as they provide either for a
groundless ground or an endless end. They are always either already over or yet
to come. Therefore, any indifference can only present itself as transcendent
differentiation, that is to say, as experience. Such difference pulls the “surface”
of “floating determinations” back to the indeterminate ground; or, rather, it
appears to raise the indeterminate ground to the height of the “surface” of
“floating determinations,” thus showing that difference, to exist, has to be
made, “or makes itself ” (Deleuze 1994, 28).
Such a difference is only the “extreme” state of “presence and precision,” of
“determination as such.” Indifference nevertheless exists in presence, but “dif-
ference is [the] state in which determination takes the form of unilateral dis-
tinction”; and yet, that from which it distinguishes itself does not distinguish
itself from it (ibid.).
Deleuze uses the example of lightning, which “distinguishes itself from the
black sky but must also trail it behind, as though it were distinguishing itself
from that which does not distinguish itself from it”; this evokes the strik-
ing contradiction, “It is as if the ground rose to the surface, without ceasing
to be ground” (ibid.). Deleuze’s difference operates on a differentiation of
indifference as a ground that rises and grounds the determinations of the
surface in itself. In other words, in Deleuze’s example, indifference does not
distinguish itself from difference, which nevertheless distinguishes itself
from it.
In the chiaroscuro images evoked by the example of lightning, in which “the
determined maintains its essential relation with the undetermined,” Deleuze
(1994, 29) insists on the cruelty and monstrosity of difference and determina-
tion. It is not his aim “to rescue difference from its maledictory state” (ibid.); on
the contrary, the shining “image of thought which presupposes itself ” must be
destroyed in order to give way to “the genesis of the act of thinking in thought
itself ” (ibid., 139). Although Deleuze does not say so explicitly, his strategy
appears to be the inverse of what we see. Rather than making a difference by
differentiating indifference, which, according to him, is a false move or “a poor
recipe for producing monsters” (1994, 28), he makes a difference by indifferen-
tiating difference: “It is better to raise up the ground and to dissolve the form”
(ibid., 28–29).

Benjamin and architecture

“Architecture,” writes Walter Benjamin ([1968] 2007c, 239) in the last chapter of
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, “has always represented the
prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collec-
tivity in a state of distraction,” as “buildings are appropriated in a twofold man-
ner: by use and by perception—or rather, by touch and by sight” (ibid., 240).
Deleuze’s inverse or invisible conception of indifference, which maintains its
essential relationship with his concept of difference at all times, can be applied
to architecture in Benjamin’s terms. More than to touristic attention, Benjamin

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(ibid.) assigns the visual appropriation of a building to “noticing the object in

incidental fashion,” that is, “optical reception” “determine[d] to a large extent”
by “habit,” which in fact is a means of “tactile appropriation.” The “state of dis-
traction” in which a “collectivity” “consummate[s]” architecture corresponds
to the raising of the ground of tactile indifference to the level of optical differ-
entiation, thus rendering “optical reception” tactile or, rather, establishing the
essential relationship between the two. Indeed, we can see architecture and we
can look at it; looking at it, however, always falls back on just seeing it—that is,
on touching it with our eyes, as if they were hands helping us find our way in a
state of distraction.
For Benjamin distraction is instructive in comprehending what he calls the
“exhibition value” of the work of art, which, according to him, is put to the
foreground in mechanically reproduced works of art such as photography and
film. Benjamin ([1968] 2007c, 224) opposes “exhibition value” and “cult value,”
by which he understands “the unique value of the ‘authentic’ work of art [that]
has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value.” Due to the mechan-
ical reproducibility of the artwork, Benjamin argues, “the instant the criterion
of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function
of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on
another practice—politics” (ibid.).
Whereas “with ceremonial objects destined to serve in a cult . . . what mat-
tered was their existence, not their being on view” or being exhibited, “with
the emancipation of the various art practices from ritual go increasing oppor-
tunities for the exhibition of their products” (Benjamin [1968] 2007c, 224–25).
What seems important, though, is that in the ritual work of art the cult value
was its use value and that, therefore, it “would seem to demand that the work
of art remain hidden” (225). On the other hand, the political work of art’s use
value, the political, is already hidden behind its exhibition value. Politics, for
Benjamin, is the location of the original use value of the exhibition value of
the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. The specific kind of
approach to such art is no more “free-floating contemplation” (226), or its cele­
bration as “magic” (225), but “that of testing” (229), of research and criticality.
By drawing on architecture Benjamin shows that “free-floating contempla-
tion” is not the same as “distracted consummation.” According to him, the
two approaches depend on the “nature” of the work of art. He argues that
“free-floating contemplation” is only a false move, the mirror image of a fake
cult, which in times of mechanical reproduction creates a fake spirit—in his
epoch, that of fascism; today, considering the omnipresence of corporations,
the fake spirit is that of neo-liberalism. There is, in the way the falseness of
this spirit is created, a structural identity between fascism and neo-liberalism.
“Distracted consummation,” inattentive criticality, or “absent-minded” exam-
ination, on the other hand, enable mastering “the tasks which face the human
apparatus of perception at the turning points of history. . . . gradually by habit,
under the guidance of tactile appropriation” (Benjamin [1968] 2007c, 240).
While the first “render[s] politics aesthetic,” and, thus, according to Benjamin,
cannot but “culminate in one thing: war” (241), the latter politicises art, dis-

449
 Ronny Hardliz

tracts from aesthetics, and thereby allows for a consummation of history:

“Communism” (242).
Benjamin’s criticism of humankind’s self-alienation is as true for neo-
liberalism as it was for fascism in his time: “[Mankind’s] self-alienation has
reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic
pleasure of the first order” (242), albeit today under the guise of an aesthetic of
no aesthetic. Benjamin’s response to fascism in the form of politicising art and,
hence, his defence of communism must be just as true today, however, taking
into account the transformed relationship between art and life in neo-liberal
conditions.

Political anti-art
Currently, art passes through a process of indifferentiation. It reduces itself to a
form indifferent from life, or rather it raises life to the form of art and thus dis-
solves art into life. The “blurring of art and life” by artists in the 1970s, in par-
ticular in the work of Allan Kaprow, was, however, not at all a blur or a confusion
(see Kaprow 2003). In fact the appearance of life as something recognisable as
art, for the public, was crucial to his working practice. Therefore, the extent
to which life changed because attention was being paid to it was perceived as
“strange.” Nevertheless, the states that the arts and the subjectivities of artists
find themselves in today work in the opposite way: not the appearance of life
as art, but the appearance of art as life. This is profoundly reflected in Maurice
Blanchot’s (1995, 1–2) readings of Kafka when he claims, “what is strange about
books like The Trial and The Castle is that they send us back endlessly to a truth
outside of literature, while we begin to betray that truth as soon as it draws us
away from literature, with which, however, it cannot be confused.”
In Franz Kafka’s work we find a model for what Stewart Martin (2007, 23) pro-
posed as art’s “self-critical dialectic with anti-art.” Martin shows that Theodor
W. Adorno was aware of this dialectic in as much as he “saw the crisis of modern
autonomous art as the result not simply of its internalization of commodifica-
tion, but of whether the critical proposition of art’s autonomy could be sus-
tained once this internalization became explicit” (ibid.).
To enforce this statement, Martin quotes Adorno claiming that “art cannot
advocate delusion by insisting that otherwise art would not exist” (Adorno
[1997] 2015, 310, as quoted in Martin 2007, 23). This means that to exist, accord-
ing to Adorno, art needs, at least to some degree, to maintain the illusion that it
is not a fetish commodity, but a “coherent,” “absolute” work of art. Notions such
as “advocate” and “insisting” are metaphors for what art does, independently
of whether it uses spoken or written language. However, “the aporia of fetish-
ism at stake here,” Martin deduces, “forces autonomous art into a self-critical
dialectic with anti-art, with art’s heteronomous determination, in order to
avoid asserting its autonomy in a conservative or mythical form” (ibid.).
Discursive practice, consequently, seems to be a logical form for an autono­
mous art that is able to “insist fetishistically on [its] coherence, as if [it] were
the absolute that [it is] unable to be” (Adorno [1997] 2015, 310), and, simultane-

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ously, include “art’s heteronomous determination” as articulated “self-critical

dialectic with anti-art,” or “post-art” (Martin 2007, 23). In other words, there is
something within the self-critical dialectic of discursive practice that makes it
insist on “the rationality of its irrationality” (Adorno [1997] 2015, 310–11). Just
as Baron Munchausen saved himself from drowning by pulling on his own hair,
“today art must extract itself from its heteronomous determination to a seem-
ingly unprecedented degree” (Martin 2007, 23).
The artist Liam Gillick’s discourse on discourse, for example, empathi-
cally fetishises delusion rather than advocating it, and in this way insists that
it would not exist otherwise. The problem is to realise (in a work of art) that
such art is “too close” to current working conditions and simultaneously “out
of reach” (Gillick 2009, 7). Today, when everyone is forced to act like Baron
Munchhausen—because the connections between social forces of production
and the relations of production have been eliminated by corporate manage-
ment—art seems to be faced with the task of insisting on its use-value not by
being useless but rather by being useful as anti-art, and turning that means into
a useless end.

Kafka in Kafkaesque times

Kafka’s work is set in the context of the early twentieth century—that is, in a
time when the capitalistic mode of production had seized society to the extent
that it was, according to Benjamin ([1968] 2007a, 116), perceived by thinkers
such as Max Brod and Kafka as “the decline of the human race.” Benjamin
claims that capitalism generated a “reality” that “can virtually no longer be
experienced by an individual,” and, he continues, “Kafka’s world . . . is the exact
complement of his era which is preparing to do away with the inhabitants of
this planet on a considerable scale” (Benjamin [1968] 2007b, 143). Writing on
Kafka in 1934 and 1938, Benjamin certainly had the looming war in mind; how-
ever, he also had been referring to the “prognostic value” of Karl Marx’s “cri-
tique of the capitalistic mode of production.” In the preface to “The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin wrote, “the result was
that one could expect it [capitalism] not only to exploit the proletariat with
increasing intensity, but ultimately to create conditions which would make it
possible to abolish capitalism itself ” ([1968] 2007c, 217).
It may be in this light that Benjamin speculates that “the experience which
corresponds to that of Kafka, the private individual, will probably not become
accessible to the masses until such time as they are being done away with”
([1968] 2007b, 143). In a world that is commonly defined by an emphasis on
individualism, Benjamin assigns individuality to “a complementary world”
in which Kafka lives. According to Benjamin “[Kafka] perceived what was to
come without perceiving what exists in the present,” adding “that he perceived
it essentially as an individual affected by it.” Life in fact is not individualistic,
because it is being parted and exploited by capitalist modes of production,
while the artist’s complementary world is individualised by the “marvelous
margin[s]” of “his gestures of terror” (ibid.).

451
 Ronny Hardliz

For Benjamin the lack of truth in Kafka’s work is a sign of his time, whereas
his response to it was entirely new. Linking truth to wisdom inherent in trad­
ition, Kafka, according to Benjamin ([1968] 2007b, 143–44), in contrast to his
contemporaries, rather than “clinging to truth or whatever they happened to
regard as truth and . . . forgoing its transmissibility. . . . sacrificed truth for the
sake of clinging to its transmissibility.”
If the quest for art’s “self-critical dialectic with anti-art” (Martin 2007, 23)
remains today, and if Kafka presents a valid model for such a dialectic, since
it does completely away with truth and thus is complementary to a present in
which the “consistency of truth . . . has been lost” (Benjamin [1968] 2007b, 143),
then Benjamin’s conclusion, according to which, “in regard to Kafka, we can no
longer speak of wisdom” (144), sheds an interesting light on artistic research.
Namely, to be consistent with the historical transitions of our time—that is,
from the spirit of enlightenment to modes of production and to the spirit of
corporate management—one would have to demand lived criticality rather
than original knowledge from any form of practice. Since in art “only the prod-
ucts of [wisdom’s] decay remain” (ibid.), with regard to artistic research this
would mean, to follow Benjamin’s thought, that such lived criticality would
have to consist of something like “rumor” and “folly.”

Touching theory
Giorgio Agamben’s text “Absolute Immanence” constitutes the foundation of
his philosophical project as a form of philosophical inheritance (from Michel
Foucault and Deleuze), which is based on the assumption that, “today, blessed
life lies on the same terrain as the biological body of the West” (Agamben 1999,
239). Agamben notes that for Deleuze “life as absolute immediacy is defined as
‘pure contemplation without knowledge’” (233). Agamben continues:

Deleuze’s two examples of this “contemplation without knowledge,” this force that
preserves without acting, are sensation (“sensation is pure contemplation”) and
habit (“even when one is a rat, it is through contemplation that one ‘contracts’ a
habit”). What is important is that this contemplation without knowledge, which
at times recalls the Greek conception of theory as not knowledge but touching
(thigein), here functions to define life. As absolute immanence, a life . . . is pure
contemplation beyond every subject and object of knowledge; it is pure potentiality
that preserves without acting. (Agamben 1999, 233–34, incorporating quotations
from Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 212–13)

What Agamben only suggests in a subclause, as if he felt the need to hesitate

before actually touching on it, is that what defines life is theory, if conceived
not as knowledge but as touching. Theory, as “absolute immanence,” is pure
contemplation beyond any subject or object of knowledge; it is the theoretical
as pure potentiality that preserves itself without acting, as the “eternal return”
of “the yet-to-come” (Deleuze 1994, 91).
Not only corporate architecture but also contemporary architectural pro-
duction as a whole—understood here as the totality of building produc-

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tion—are dominated by neo-liberal conditions; beyond star architecture this

even includes architectural and urban initiatives such as community building,
urban gardening, and local or ecological architecture. These initiatives cannot
escape the neo-liberal pull, as under capitalist conditions everything can be
made profitable. But, even more importantly, neo-liberal activity functions not
unlike urban gardening. Each of these urban activities functions as part of a
self-regulatory market economy. As contemporary architecture under such
conditions seems to be ruled by absolute immediacy and indifference, one
might feel tempted to claim that contemporary architecture and its production
is in fact absolutely theoretical, in terms of contemplation without knowledge.
If, following Agamben’s claims that beatitude and the biological body of the
West today lie on the same terrain, it seems that there is absolute indifference
between all forms of spatial production.
Nevertheless, considering indifference as more than a symptom of the
neo-liberal condition, and trying to understand it in relation to the architec-
tural by means of lived critical philosophical and artistic inquiry instead, it
is possible to make use of indifference through an appropriation of indiffer-
ence to humankind’s ends. Rather than resisting or countering neo-liberalism
as an ideology, this strategy bears witness to the work of thinkers who try to
understand the neo-liberal condition as it presents itself in reality, in order
to grasp and defer its political potentials to unexpected grounds (e.g., Mark
Fisher [2009]; Michel Feher [2009]). But it equally bears witness to the work
of thinkers who have a historical understanding of neo-liberalism not as an
extreme of capitalism but as an ideology (e.g., Philip Mirowski [2013]; Pierre
Dardot and Christian Laval [2013]). According to Mirowski (2013, 28) the per-
version of this ideology is that “neo-liberalism as a world view has sunk its roots
deep into everyday life, almost to the point of passing as the ‘ideology of no
ideology.’” The most thorough examination of “how contemporary architec-
ture became an instrument of control and compliance” to date can be found
in Douglas Spencer’s The Architecture of Neoliberalism (2016, subtitle). Spencer,
however, deliberately remains on the level of “unproductive negativity and its
hateful criticality” (163) without providing an alternative, neither in content
nor in style.
Although there is indeed a great potential to outwit neo-liberalism by means
of unproductivity, in his essay Out of Bologna Philip Ursprung, on the contrary,
offers a possibility of going beyond negativity and criticality by both choosing
a good example and praising it. Ursprung (2015) writes, “architecture does not
have to subscribe to the ideology of reduction, scarcity, and control, although
it has to be conscious of it, letting us see more than what the political deci-
sion-makers say. [The Nantes Architecture School] is therefore not only one
among many places where future architects are trained. It is also a place where
the autonomy of architecture is tested.”
When the aesthetics of the dominating ideology becomes anti-aesthetic then
things become complicated for politicised art. To keep faithful to its political
anti-aesthetic, art has to claim its lived criticality by saying more than what art
looks like (in its not looking like anything whatsoever). In other words, at first

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sight both “neo-liberal” and “artistic non-aesthetic” look the same. Looking
closely, however, the one says more than the other; but this is more haptic than
visible. Such a haptic dimension of theory in discursive practice, as the politi-
cised dimension of art, can only be felt in a state of collective distraction: or in
a life. . . .

Conclusion
Architecture tends towards tactile appropriation by the masses independently
of its (ideological) means of production. This tangibility beyond visibility is its
political potential and our hope. Architecture tends towards an indifferentia-
tion of itself within its environment, in which habit, as a contraction, as a life,
as an imagination, always tells more than what we see. Even though Georges
Bataille may be right that architecture “is only the ideal soul of society, that
which has the authority to command and prohibit” (Bataille 1971–88, 1:171,
as translated in Hollier 1992, 47), and thus represents the dominant ideology
itself, it is also true that architecture always tells us more than any ideology
would want us to see. The potential for the criticality of architecture—but also
the potential for its eroticism—therefore, resides not in its making but in its
tactile appropriation, in touch: not in architectural practice as a means of pro-
ducing architecture, but architectural practice as a means of understanding
itself as architecture, that is to say, architecture as a means of understanding
what architectural practice produces.
If we can conclude that the indifferentiation of art into life is already proper
to architecture and that this artistic process of indifferentiation can therefore
be called architectural, then we must conclude that the making of architecture,
in order to be architectural, indifferentiates itself into lived architectural prac-
tice by tactile appropriation. Only if the lived criticality of (architectural) mak-
ing coincides with the criticality of the made (architecture) is there hope for
evicting the neo-liberal ideology of control and compliance.

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am Main: Suhrkamp). Translation first Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of
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First published 1996 as “L’immanenza December). Book first published 1955

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as Illuminationen: Ausgewählte Schriften (Paris: Presses universitaires de France).

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Bound by the Absence of a Tie
Andrej Radman
Delft University of Technology (TU Delft)

Empathy and abstraction

This chapter unpacks Deleuze and Guattari’s “machinic” conception of con-
sistency, which is determined neither by the naive “organic” autonomy of the
vitalist whole nor by the crude reductionist expression of the whole in the sum
of its mechanical parts. Machinism entails the dark precursor’s zigzagging
between the immanent limits of empathy and abstraction, nature and culture,
the extensive and the intensive, signification and significance, as well as the
political and the libidinal. To talk of multiplicities is to avoid subsuming a num-
ber of particulars under the universal concept. Instead, each multiplicity is to
be related to the variables that determine its mutations (Deleuze 1995, 31). We
start from the hypothesis that the current digital turn in architecture effectively
reproduces the Cartesian duality of mind and body. It removes the mind from
the concerns of coping with the environment and treats the body as no more
than a kind of recording mechanism. The role of the body is relegated to con-
verting the stimuli that impinge upon it into data to be processed.
It is for this reason that I want to revamp the legacy of Deleuzian transcen-
dental empiricism in general and Gibsonian ecological perception in particu-
lar.1 American psychologist James Gibson vehemently rejected the reductionist
information-processing view because of its implied separation of the activity
of the mind in the body from the reactivity of the body in the world. Instead,
he argued that perception is part of the total system of relations constituted
by the ecology of the life form, or its mode of existence (Gibson [1979] 1986).
Let us make it, after Guattari (2000), ecologies in the plural: environmental,
social, and psychic. Life forms perceive the world directly, by moving about
and discovering what the “annexed milieu” affords, rather than by represent-
ing it in the mind (Deleuze and Guattari [1987] 2004, 51). Hence, meaning is
not the form that the mind contributes to the flux of raw sensory data by way
of its acquired schemata. Rather, it is continually becoming within relational
contexts of pragmatic engagement or speculative extrapolation. To put it suc-
cinctly, empathy and abstraction are mutually constitutive.

1 Pace Spencer (2016), contemporary architecture is not “Deleuzist” enough.

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Although everything starts from the sensible, one must quickly reach towards
that which makes sensibility possible.2 In other words, sensations mobilise the
differential forces that, in turn, make thinking possible. This is what Deleuze
(1994, 237) meant by referring to the “pedagogy of the senses.” One is at the
mercy of the more or less contingent encounters. The profound consequence
of the epigenetic turn did not pass unnoticed by media guru Friedrich Kittler
([1997] 2012, 144): A thing turning back on itself ought to be called “feedback”
rather than “reflection”. (Dis)cognition is extended and not interiorised or
centralised, embedded and not generalised or decontextualised, enacted and
not passive or merely receptive, embodied and not logocentric, affective and
not unprovoked.3 If architects ever stopped to consider how much of life is con-
strained by ego-logical intentionality and how much it is enabled by eco-logical
gratuitous encounters, they would certainly pay far more attention to relational
properties. If they paid attention to paying attention, they would concede that
there could be a bind despite the absence of an a priori tie.

Nature and culture

We commence with a problem statement. Is there a way to overcome tech-
no-determinism without regressing to relativism, and, conversely, how is one to
escape relativism without regressing to determinism? In contemporary archi-
tectural discourse, the crypto-modernist logic of dominating abstraction goes
by the name of “parametricism.”4 A parametricist’s fantasy is total formalisa-
tion/simulation, which rests on the assumption of commensurability between
digital data and the (analogue) world. On the other hand, the crypto-postmod-
ern relativism is associated with neo-phenomenologists such as Steven Holl
and Peter Zumthor, who privilege “the poetics of space,” “the subjective,” “the
haptic,” and similar emphatic submissions.5
The answer lies in the transversal approach of eco-logic as advanced by the
Ecologies of Architecture (æ). The æ is a neo-materialist architecture research
group at TU Delft.6 “New materialism” is the umbrella term for a series of
movements that distance themselves from anthropocentrism, rethink subjec-
tivity and ethics in terms of “inhuman” forces within the human, emphasise
heteropoiesis as the organising power of transversal processes, and explore the
political ramifications of these processes for cultural practices such as archi-
tecture. According to this view, architecture does not represent culture but is
a mechanism of culture. Better still, it is machinism, or what Guattari (2016)
named the “collective equipment.”

2 “Once we try to think the origin of all that is, the very ground of being, then we arrive properly not at
the origin of sensibility, but sensibility as origin” (Colebrook 2009, 29).
3 For more information on 4EA Cognition see John Protevi’s Blog (Protevi 2016). Cf., “I use this neolo-
gism [discognition] to designate something that disrupts cognition, exceeds the limits of cognition, but
also subtends cognition” (Shaviro 2016, 10–11).
4 For an account of parametricism, see Schumacher (2015); see also Schumacher (2010).
5 For an account of neo-phenomenology, see Holl, Pallasmaa, and Pérez-Gómez (1994); see also,
Otero-Pailos (2010).
6 See, http://www.tudelft-architecture.nl/chairs/architecture-theory/research.

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Let us return to the opposition between the all-too-abstract parametricism

and the not-abstract-enough neo-phenomenology (McKim 2014). Once again,
we are offered a false choice between the territory-as-map and the map-as-ter-
ritory; between “objective” reality or “subjective” illusion; between the red or
the blue pill from The Matrix (the Warchowskis 1999). We opt for a third pill,
as does Slavoj Žižek in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (Fiennes 2006). Yet, this is
as far as we are prepared to follow Žižek’s Hegelian/Lacanian trajectory that
insists on human exceptionalism. Instead, we turn to Spinozian ethics as a
mode of existence, for it is in ethology—as a theory of capacity—that the dis-
tinction between abstraction and empathy finally collapses (Deleuze 1988). As
we have already underlined, binaries such as subject and object are never to be
taken as general abstractions, but as divergent processual destinations.
The æ also follows the lead of process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead
([1929] 1978, 29) who rejected the solipsistic self—the liberal humanist sub-
ject—in favour of the developmentally constructed counterpart. Whitehead
famously launched his (in)famous plea for substituting super-ject for sub-
ject, or the ontogenetic effect for the substantialist cause (Brassier 2014).
Architecture theorist Sanford Kwinter recently reiterated Whitehead’s cri-
tique of the reversed ontology. Moreover, according to Kwinter (2014, 329), the
essential human engagement in the environment is geared toward extraction
of sensory stimulation, not food. This thesis reverses the orthodoxy of urban
metabolism with its presumed primacy of incorporation over sensation as the
vehicle of our experience of the world (Maas and Pasquinelli 2016). Guattari’s
(2013, 232) prodigious statement on “architectural enunciation” from his
Schizoanalytic Cartographies is worth quoting at length: “Reinventing architec-
ture can no longer signify the relaunching of a style, a school, a theory with
a hegemonic vocation [pace parametricism], but the recomposition of architec-
tural enunciation, and, in a sense, the trade of the architect, under today’s con-
ditions.” He continues: “Once it is no longer the goal of the architect to be
the artist of built forms [pace neo-phenomenology] but to offer his services in
revealing the virtual desires of spaces, places, trajectories and territories, he
will have to undertake the analysis of the relations of individual and collective
corporeality by constantly singularizing his approach. . . . In other words, he
will have to become an artist and an artisan of sensible and relational lived
experience” (ibid.).
Not only do humans realise “natural” ends, they do so by creating the means
to realise such ends, creatively transforming them into those of culture. The
transformation allows a deterritorialisation from the organic strata and its sub-
sequent non-organic reterritorialisation, fraught with the dangers of “ex-futur-
ism” and “neo-archaism,” respectively. Once again, it is eco-logic that will help
us navigate between the evident schizophrenia of the “revolutionary” paramet-
ricism and the equally evident paranoia of the “reactionary” neo-phenomen­
ology. Deleuze and Guattari ([1977] 2009, 260) anticipated the impasse in their
first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia:

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The social axiomatic of modern societies is caught between two poles and
is constantly oscillating from one pole to the other. Born of decoding and
deterritorialization, on the ruins of the despotic machine, these societies are
caught between the Urstaat that they would like to resuscitate as an overcoding and
reterritorializing unity [as in neo-phenomenology], and the unfettered flows [as in
parametricism] that carry them toward an absolute threshold. . . . They are torn in
two directions: archaism and futurism, neoarchaism and ex-futurism, paranoia and
schizophrenia. . . . They are continually behind or ahead of themselves.7

The extensive and the intensive

The term “ecology” is as political as it is scientific. Departing from the “logic
of discreteness” and its principle of non-contradiction, ecological thinking
endorses the “logic of continuity.” There is discreteness, to be sure, but the
finite always consists of an infinity under a certain relation (Deleuze 2016a).
The discrete and the continuous—digital and analogue—are not to be taken
as mutually exclusive, but rather as effectively co-determining, albeit asymmet-
rically.8 The content is always too big for the form, given that the reality is in
excess to the phenomenal.
The general lesson of the “logic of included middle” is that the quasi-stable
regularities we see in actuality—objects—do not have a specific cause that can
be demarcated and isolated, but may only be understood as a heteropathic cas-
cade of many processes operating over time.9 To quote Gregory Bateson (1979,
58): “we used to ask: Can a computer simulate all the processes of logic? The
answer was yes, but the question was surely wrong. We should have asked: Can
logic simulate all sequences of cause and effect? The answer would have been
no.” After all, if effects were reducible to their causes, novelty would be impos-
sible. The ethico-political lesson of the “logic of intensity” is that all things are
contingently obligatory and not logically necessary. Therein lies the possibility
of pursuing a project of defatalisation or anti-teleology (Radman 2014).
“Resetting ourselves in a metaphysical perspective,” as the speculative realist
Quentin Meillassoux (2010) suggests, permits us to reconstruct our existence
beyond faith alone “or the sole opportunism of interest.” Artistic researchers
beware: it is not just that all things could have been different, but what might
have happened virtually subsists in what actually exists. The time has come to
unyoke the architect from Newtonian physics and Cartesian metaphysics in
favour of the intensive and relational—ecological—approach. In the words
of Guattari (2009a, 160), “there is no longer a tripartite division between the
realm of reality, the realm of representation or representativity, and the realm
of subjectivity. You have a collective set-up which is, at once, subject, object,

7 See also, “Unlike the paranoid whose delirium consists of restoring codes and reinventing territories,
the schizophrenic never ceases to go one more step in a movement of self-decoding and self-deterrito-
rialization” (Deleuze 2006, 28).
8 The concept of “double bind” was coined by Bateson (1972, 199–204).
9 Unlike homopathic laws that have an additive character—producing highly predictable patterns of
causal interactions—heteropathic laws are somewhat idiosyncratic, linking quite different classes of
homopathic properties across levels (see Deacon 2012, 155; cf., Kwinter 2002).

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 Andrej Radman

and expression.” Yet, this is not to be taken as a call for the homeostatic con-
ception of ecology. In the words of Žižek (2016, 31), “after the death of the
God-Father, the masculine Reason, we should also endorse the death of the
Goddess-Nature” (cf., Wark 2015, 209).
The æ starts from the middle, par le milieu: “the assemblage extracts a territory
from the milieu; it is the assemblage that allows us to think the coevolution
of the human and nature in terms of milieu, the back-and-forth of modula-
tion” (Sauvagnargues 2016, 83). Pace cognitivism, we must avoid reducing the
world to our own conceptual schemes and instead be “primed for non-recog-
nition” (Massumi and McKim 2009). If we hold a hammer, we should not treat
everything as if it were a nail. Both Deleuzian “transcendental empiricism”
and Gibsonian “ecological perception” ward off the reductionist information-
processing view, with its implied mutual exclusivity of active abstraction and
reactive empathy. Instead, they advocate the metastable plasticity whereby the
condition is never greater than the conditioned.10
The lesson of assemblage theory is that capacities do depend on the proper-
ties of their components but cannot be reduced to them (DeLanda 2016). This is
how Gibson ([1979] 1986, 127) conceptualises the externality of relations: “The
affordances of the environment are what it offers the [human], what it provides
or furnishes, either for good or ill. . . . I mean by [affordance] something that
refers to both the environment and the [human] in a way that no existing term
does.” It would be difficult to imagine a more elegant shift of focus from the
extensive space of properties to the intensive non-local spatium of capacities,
or, in Deleuzian parlance, from the actual manifest reality to the real-yet-
incorporeal virtual. This is crucial because the actual experience of space bears
no resemblance to the (phase) space of experience. A mode of existence never
pre-exists an event (Manning and Massumi 2013, 84).

Signification and significance

In his review of Deleuze’s early works Difference and Repetition and The Logic of
Sense, Foucault (1970) praises Deleuze for challenging the three conditions that
make it impossible to think through the event, namely the world, the self, and
god (a sphere, a circle, and a centre) (cf., Deleuze 1994, 1990). First, Deleuze
introduces a metaphysics of the virtual, which is irreducible to the physics of
the world (the actual). Second, the logic of neutral meaning (affect/affordance)
replaces the phenomenology of signification based on the subject and her or
his sense-bestowing. Finally, the tethering of the conceptual future to a past
essence is rejected in favour of a thought of the present infinitive.
Consequently, the prerogative of the æ is to renounce any order of preference,
any goal-oriented organisation, any signification, any a priori tie (Deleuze 1997,
153). In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 210) characterise the
auto-unifying form (survol) in the following terms: “It is a primary, ‘true form’ as
Ruyer has defined it: neither a Gestalt nor a perceived form, but a form in itself

10 The concept of plasticity has been revamped by Malabou (2008).

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that does not refer to any external point of view, . . . it is an absolute consistent
form that surveys itself independently of any supplementary dimension, which
does not appeal therefore to any transcendence” (cf., Ruyer 2016; Hauptmann
and Radman 2013).
Semiology is only one of the many regimes of signs and certainly not the most
important for architecture. After all, “we cannot hope to understand natural
stimuli by analogy with socially coded stimuli, for that would be like putting
the cart before the horse” (Gibson 1960, 702). A sign, according to Spinoza, can
have several meanings, but it is always an effect. An effect is first of all the trace
of one body upon another, the state of a body insofar as it suffers the action of
another body (Deleuze 1988, 124). For the æ, singularities come before identi-
ties and participation precedes cognition. A body ought to be defined not by
its form, nor by its organs or functions, but by its capacity for affecting or being
affected, because “the limit of something is the limit of its action and not the
outline of its figure” (Deleuze 2016c). This is what it means to be bound in the
absence of a tie and, perhaps, by the very absence of a tie.
Things are powers, not forms, and there may be consistency despite incon-
gruence, or isomorphism without correspondence (Deleuze and Guattari
[1987] 2004, 51–52). Deleuze gives an example which seems counter intuitive at
first and proves just how much we are accustomed to Aristotelian categorisa-
tion (of genera and species): “There is a greater difference between a race horse
and a work horse than between a work horse and an ox” (Deleuze and Parnet
2007, 60). This is because the racehorse and the workhorse do not have the
same affects. Things are no longer defined by qualitative essence, as in “man as
a reasonable animal,” but by quantifiable power.

The political and the libidinal

For radical empiricism, thought cannot be richer than reality and non-con-
scious experience is not an oxymoron because much more is felt than is known.
The æ is interested in an encounter between thought and that which forces it
into action. While accepting multiple scales of reality, it opposes the alleged
primacy of the “physical” world. We cope with the environment more or less
skilfully.11 The emphasis is on the encounter, where experience is seen as an
emergence that returns the body to a process field of exteriority.
Sensibility introduces an aleatory moment into thought’s development.
It effectively turns contingency into the conditio sine qua non for thinking.
Contingency upsets logical identity and opposition, and places the limit of
thinking beyond any dialectical system. Thought cannot activate itself by
thinking. It has to be provoked. It must suffer violence. Architecture as “the
first art” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 187) may inflict such violence because
it bears the potential for breaking up the faculties’ common function by plac-

11 “In our most basic way of being—i.e., as skillful copers—we are not minds at all but one with the world. . . .
the inner–outer distinction becomes problematic. There’s no easily askable question about where the
absorbed coping is—in me or in the world” (Dreyfus 2014, 259).

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ing them before their own limits: “thought before the unthinkable . . . mem-
ory before the forgotten . . . sensibility before the imperceptible,” and so on
(Deleuze 1994, 227).
As already argued, the eco-logical “perspectivist” assault on ego-logical rep-
resentational thinking inevitably impinges upon the identity of the subject.
While Kant founded the representational unity of space and time upon the
formal unity of consciousness, difference fractures consciousness into mul-
tiple states not predicable of a single subject. According to Deleuze (2016b),
Leibniz’s great lesson is that, counter-intuitively, it is points of view that
engender a subject, rather than the other way around.12 In the words of Anne
Sauvagnargues (2016, 103), “subjectivity proceeds through framing.” Always
already, social “desiring machines” connect, disconnect, and reconnect with
one another without (private or personal) meaning or intention.13 There may
be “entention,” or intention without intentionality, desire without volition,
and a smile without a cat.14 Individuality is not characteristic of a self or an ego,
but a perpetually individualising differential, a dark precursor. As feminist phil­
osopher Claire Colebrook (2015, 229) put it recently, “I love you not because
of the predicates that personalize you, but rather for that absolutely singular
event of your existence that is irreducible to determination.” As we have seen
at the outset, this constitutes Deleuze’s (1994, 145) famous pedagogy of the
senses: “Each faculty, including thought, has only involuntary adventures,” and
“involuntary operation remains embedded in the empirical.”
To turn the theatre of re-presentation into the machine for desiring-produc-
tion is to recognise a (r)evolutionary potential in creating the “new,” that which
is not-as-yet captured or (over)codified as in clichés and opinions (ibid., 271; cf.,
Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 2009, 379). The emancipatory political potential
lies, quite literally, in the pure agency of transcendental causality, or the differ-
ence in itself that relates heterogeneities. The concept of quasi-causality—the
dark precursor—prevents regression into simple reductionism of the sensible
(empathy) to the intelligible (abstraction). To think differently one has to feel
differently. The first step towards the reversal of the reversed ontology is to “ask
not what’s inside your head, rather what your head’s inside of ” (Mace 1977).

12 “It’s the point of view that explains the subject and not the opposite” (Deleuze 2016b).
13 “For Gilles Deleuze and me desire is everything that exists before the opposition between subject and
object, before representation and production. It’s everything whereby the world and affects constitute
us outside of ourselves, in spite of ourselves. It’s everything that overflows from us. That’s why we define
it as flow” (Guattari 2009b, 142).
14 “I propose that we use the term ententional as a generic adjective to describe all phenomena that are
intrinsically incomplete in the sense of being in relationship to, constituted by, or organized to achieve
something non-intrinsic. By combining the prefix en- (for ‘in’ or ‘within’) with the adjectival form mean-
ing something like ‘inclined toward,’ I hope to signal this deep and typically ignored commonality that
exists in all the various phenomena that include within them a fundamental relationship to something
absent” (Deacon 2012, 27).

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 Part 3
Politics
 The Fear of Boredom
Ian Buchanan
University of Wollongong, Australia

Time was when anywhere in an airport was a good place to read, or just to go slack
and empty, to be nobody in particular and, by that token, more specifically yourself.
Now, there are TVs everywhere . . .
—John Burnside (2014)

No other public building excites as much fear and anxiety as an airport. No

other building exemplifies more acutely Sartre’s cruel judgement that “hell is
other people.” It is a leviathan space in which everyone fights tooth and claw
not to be held up and forced to wait. Now that the online universe of working,
shopping, banking, and living has created smooth spaces in which to conduct
our lives without ever having to encounter another actual human being, the
airport is one of the last places in the first world where crowds are still encoun-
tered and queuing is still a necessity (entertainment complexes such as art gal-
leries, cinemas, and theme parks are the only other places where one is likely
to queue). And it was of course the queue that denoted the disintegration of
society into seriality for Sartre. Experienced travellers know there is something
worse to fear than mere queuing, namely delayed or cancelled flights, but it is
essentially the same anxiety: the fear of waiting and more especially the corre-
sponding fear of boredom the waiting will entail.
But perhaps we should not be so fearful of boredom. As Fredric Jameson
(1991, 303) argues, “boredom is a very useful instrument with which to explore
the past, and to stage a meeting between it and the present.” It is, however, a
species of experience that is vanishing rapidly. Indeed in some quarters it has
already passed into extinction. Good riddance some would say. But we must ask,
what does it say about a culture if it loses the art of waiting? Does it mean we no
longer know how to amuse ourselves with only our inner selves for company?
Boredom, however, is not the only emotion we feel in response to queues.
There is also frustration because not everyone is equal before the law of the
queue—the cultural elite use their wealth or star status or both to exempt them-
selves from standing in line, from having to “be” in someone else’s moment,
and endure “bare” time unfolding. I use “bare” here in Agamben’s (1998, 8)
sense of “bare life” to mean time that can be wasted but not spent. The differ-
ence between these two conceptions of time can be seen quite clearly in the
different ways time is experienced by the rich and the poor. The wealthy don’t
wait their turn—their time must be spent not wasted. By contrast, the stark-
est index of poverty is the necessity to queue—whether it is for food, water, or
relief from illness, the poorer you are the more you are forced to wait, to have

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your time wasted. And in the case of the very poor, death often moves faster
than the queue ever does (Farmer 2015).
This is the stick conservative politicians use to beat down both the idea and
the reality of socialised medicine (wherever it still exists): if you can afford to
jump the queue, then you should be able to, is the argument, regardless of
any inequity that may entail. But not just any money will do—it has to be the
“right” money (foreigners and racial or religious others should not expect the
same consideration). Power manifests as the “right” of selection, the “right”
to say who the “right” kind of person is in other words. In the twenty-first cen-
tury, then, the ultimate status symbol (and proof positive of Walter Benjamin’s
([1968] 2007, 256) thesis that there is “no document of civilization which is not
at the same time a document of barbarism”) is the magical pass card that gives
you an express passage through power’s turnstiles. Check in, luggage drop-off,
security, health screen, customs, and so on are all just so many metaphors for
how life is today in the full spectre of late capitalism.
One might expect art galleries to be the exact opposite of airports, sooth-
ing rather than anxiety-inducing, contemplative rather than agitated and hur-
ried, but in fact the dissimilarities are melting away faster than the polar ice
caps. All the major galleries are now every bit as fortified as airports, with the
same security rigmarole exacted on all visitors. As for the actual space of the
gallery, it too has become airport-like, as one can readily see at the Louvre, as
one passes from I. M. Pei’s Pyramid to the older “classical” parts of the building.
The Pyramid is such a bland, featureless, it-could-be-anywhere space that one
struggles to discern the difference between the gallery entrance and the metro
exit it is connected to.
The final form of this reconfiguration of the gallery from ornate temple to
the arts (old Louvre) to versatile box (new Louvre) is the Frank Gehry designed
Guggenheim in Bilbao. The exterior of the building has triumphed over and
completely supplanted the interior. Visitors go there for the architecture, not
the art—its collection, drawn from Guggenheim’s magnificently vast holdings,
is not even advertised as a feature, or reason, for visiting. It could in fact be
utterly empty, a giant hangar-like space, and still draw a crowd because it is
enough to have been there and witnessed its crumpled foil shape. I am tempted
to say for many people the emptier the better, as it is the chore of actually look-
ing at paintings that puts them off visiting galleries in the first place. Gehry’s
inverted gallery, where it is the building not the content it houses that is the
real attraction, relieves potential visitors of this anxiety.
Airports and galleries are nodal points in the vast smooth space created to
serve the so-called transnational (cultural) elite. In Deleuze and Guattari’s
terms, they are reciprocally presupposed—airports need destinations to con-
nect to and a constant supply of new reasons to travel and galleries need a con-
stant stream of visitors that no local population base is large enough to sustain.
This is especially true of speculative edifices like Bilbao’s Guggenheim and
Abu Dhabi’s Louvre, both of which cost a fortune to build and establish, but
it is also true of major metropolitan galleries such as the original Guggenheim
and Louvre. It is perhaps logical, then, that airports should experiment with

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incorporating galleries into their own space, as Schiphol in Amsterdam did in

partnership with the venerable Rijksmuseum. For the most part, though, air-
ports tend to be content with the odd piece of “folk” art, meaning any artwork
whose function is to express the originality and authenticity of place, irrespec-
tive of its actual artistic or heritage value or provenance. This leaves more space
for retail, which points to another line of convergence: all public buildings are
becoming mall-like. The day will come when art galleries mothball their art and
give over their total floor space to coffee shops and souvenir stores, as airports
have done. If art is to be viewed at all, it will be done online or on giant screens.
And no one will notice, much less bemoan, the change because when not shop-
ping they’ll be glued to their mobile digital devices.
Malls have become their own kind of Mecca; they are consumerist sites of
pilgrimage, which is doubtless why airports have transformed themselves into
malls too. To journey from Terminal 5 at Heathrow to London Westfield, for
example, is to experience the shock of changing location without changing
place. Indeed, as Marc Augé (1995) might put it, it is to experience the very
absence of place, or what he called non-place (see also Buchanan 2005). A sim-
ilar experience can be had visiting almost any major city, literally anywhere in
the world. Admittedly it is more challenging in the megacities, like Delhi and
Mumbai, or Chongqing and Shanghai, shot through as they are with vast slums,
but even there, if one has sufficient means, one can travel in a protected bubble
from airport to hotel to mall to office park and never set foot in the “real” city,
never breathe in its dust and smells, never see its dark and dilapidated side.
The standardising influence of capitalism has been much remarked upon, but
the process is now so far advanced that we’re in danger of forgetting how cities
used to be. George Ritzer (2000) wittily coined the term “McDonaldization” to
describe the process whereby cities everywhere seem to be shedding their dis-
tinctive local characteristics in favour of mass-produced global characteristics.1
But perhaps Jameson (2003) was nearer to the mark with his caustic description
of the spread of corporate bland as being like an outbreak of “toxic moss” (see
also Buchanan 2006).
If anything can stop the “malling” of the world (to use Kowinski’s [2002]
phrase), it will be the smartphone—it is transforming how we use and experi­
ence space and at the same time shaping the kinds of spaces we need, which
ultimately may not be the kinds of spaces we want. The huge increase in online
shopping that has occurred over the past decade or so has placed enormous
pressure on bricks-and-mortar retail, of all kinds, in some cases driving even
big box stores like Borders out of business altogether. No one can predict
where this trend will end, but it is clear that there will be more casualties as
global shopping practices change. One effect of this transformation that is hav-
ing a noticeable impact on the urban environment, particularly in the subur-
ban fringe areas, is that warehouses are replacing malls. Online retailers like

1 As Ritzer (2000, 233n1) notes, conservative political pundits Thomas L. Friedman (The Lexus and the
Olive Tree) and Benjamin R. Barber (Jihad vs. McWorld) have expressed similar viewpoints to his. Interest-
ingly, Ritzer seems not to be concerned that both Friedman and Barber depict “McDonaldization” as
the welcome spread of social democracy and capitalist freedom.

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Amazon don’t need or want a shopfront, what they need is vast distribution
centres (Amazon calls them “fulfilment centres”) capable of processing thou-
sands of orders per day. They’re also making increased use of robot technology
to “fulfil” these orders, thus further reducing the “human” presence in these
dour places. If all or even most of our shopping moves online, the city will
lose its crowds, its hustle and bustle, and become instead a dreary collection
of buildings (visit any “business” district after hours for a glimpse of what this
looks like). Those who despair at the dreary uniformity of the strip mall will
find themselves nostalgic for their tasteless exteriors when they’re replaced by
the vacant grey walls of warehouses. The city remade as distribution centre will
be the final triumph of the image because it will mean that the image of the
thing has replaced the thing itself. We would only tolerate this if we weren’t
paying attention, if our gaze wasn’t directed elsewhere, and that is precisely
what is happening: smartphones’ small screens have enacted a vast capture of
attention.
Smartphones are not just reshaping space; they’re also transforming time,
most noticeably in our apparent loss of the ability to wait and growing fear of
boredom. The siren’s song of consumer capitalism, which disguises itself as
entertainment, grows louder in our unstopped ears with each passing day. Like
the great traveller Odysseus, we do not try to avoid the siren’s fateful music; but,
unlike him, we assume our freedom—our sense of our “self ” as an autonomous
agent—will protect us from its deadly melody (Adorno and Horkheimer [1972]
1998, 59). In contrast to benighted schizophrenics unable to stop the voices in
their heads, we invite the voices in, we let them crowd out our heads to such an
extent we forget our “self ” and we’re grateful for the loss, as though it was our
“self ” that is tedious and not the place we’re trapped in. That is the reality and
the tragedy of contemporary life. Nowhere is that “truth” felt more keenly than
in airport departure lounges where waiting is widely considered torture. But,
contrary to the popular view, I want to argue it isn’t torture because it is bor-
ing—it is torture because boredom is no longer possible. We embrace our electronic
thralldom and thank the gods that we’ve conquered boredom once and for all,
forgetting this means that we can now never be, as Siegfried Kracauer (1995,
332) once put it, “as thoroughly bored with the world as it ultimately deserves.”
By conquering boredom consumer capitalism has extinguished its most potent
critic. Boredom is our defence against the present.
Kracauer’s diagnosis was made in 1924 when newspapers and magazines were
the dominant media forms and cinema and radio were still in their infancy,
albeit maturing rapidly. TV had yet to be invented, and the Internet was more
than half a century away, but already the idea of an unbearable form of “bare”
or non-mediated time was being promulgated. Already there was “too much”
going on.2 Looking back we might think this early period in the history of mass
media was much less intense in its effects than our own media-saturated uni-
verse is today, but that fails to grasp just how radical the media form was to those

2 See Crary (1999) for an excellent account of how modernity has changed how we experience time.

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who encountered it then, many for the first time in history.3 Kracauer’s contem-
porary Walter Benjamin was especially clear-eyed in this regard. He argued that
the form of newspapers, particularly the way news stories render the flow of the
experience of events as a punctuated sequence of “things that happened,” that
is, as pure information, was such that it could not be assimilated as experience
by its readers. Today the “crawl” of seemingly random headlines that trace their
way across the bottom of the TV screen during a news bulletin is a powerful
reminder of the truth of Benjamin’s thesis. Watching the crawl cannot by itself
give rise to experience: its very structure is alienating. “The principles of jour-
nalistic information (freshness of news, brevity, comprehensibility, and, above
all, lack of connection between the individual news items) contribute as much
to this as does the make-up of the pages and the paper’s style” (Benjamin 1973,
112). The net effect was something he bluntly called “shock.”
Benjamin frames his discussion of “shock” in two ways, both of which are
relevant today as we try to think about the impact of digital media on our
daily lives, that is, not as a source of (mis-)information, or distraction, but as a
formative agent shaping our very subjectivity. To begin with, Benjamin frames
it historically, arguing that each new mode of communication competes with
the one that came before and in doing so increases the atrophy of experience
by moving further and further away from “original” story forms. Although
Benjamin doesn’t specify what kind of story form he has in mind here as the
putative original form (and to be clear he never refers to it in this way either),
his subsequent comments suggest that he is referring to myth, particularly oral
myth. He charts a shift from narration to information to sensation and suggests
that it is only narration—the story form—that can be assimilated as experi-
ence. This is because storytellers have already embedded what they want to say
in their own lives, thus rendering it as experience from the outset (Benjamin
1973, 113). The second frame is drawn from Freud, specifically Freud’s essay
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (though he’s careful to say his purpose in turning to
it is to test the fruitfulness of Freud’s concepts rather than confirm their cor-
rectness). He also draws heavily on Bergson and Proust, particularly the latter’s
concept of involuntary memory.
Freud helps explain an apparent anomaly in the history of media, as
Benjamin maps it, namely its increasing propensity to “shock” as each new
media form distances itself from storytelling. One may wonder why each
new media form should want to follow this trajectory since at first glance it
would seem as though this would be increasingly off-putting to its potential
audience. Benjamin doesn’t address this issue directly, strangely enough, but
one may suppose that it has to do with the needs of advertisers, who have an
obvious vested interest in producing “shock.” They want their products to be
memorable, which as I’ll explain shortly means they have to penetrate the veil
of the conscious, but more than that they want to insinuate the desire to buy at
a level below or somehow beyond the reach of the conscious mind. Their ulti-

3 Those of us “old” enough to remember the advent of email and the birth and growth of the Internet
have had a similar experience, perhaps without realising it at the time.

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 Ian Buchanan

mate goal, not to put too fine a point on it, is to programme the unconscious so
that buying something—in fact, one can just say shopping, which as Jameson
(2003) has argued has been divorced from buying so as to become a fantasy
activity in its own right—is regarded as a pleasurable end in and of itself. And in
this regard they have been spectacularly successful. Shopping is the dominant
cultural activity today.4 It also calls into question the current vogue (initiated
by the scarcely disinterested CEO of Google Eric Schmidt) of referring to our
engagement with digital technology as the “attention economy” because—if
we follow Benjamin—the goal of this particular mode of capitalism is in fact a
somewhat deeper layer of the mind.
What interests Benjamin is Freud’s hypothesis that what becomes conscious
cannot also become a memory trace. “In Freud’s view, consciousness as such
receives no memory traces whatever, but has another important function: pro-
tection against stimuli” (Benjamin 1973, 115). In Freud’s view, protection against
stimuli is just as vitally important as the reception of stimuli and his whole the-
ory of dreams turns on the hypothesis that their essential purpose is to manage
excess stimuli by repeating it and “working” it until it can be “experienced” and
mastery over it thus obtained. Similarly, in everyday life, as Freud’s discussion
of his grandson’s cotton reel game explains, we use rituals to gain control over
otherwise uncontrollable thoughts and feelings.
Repetition is a form of training, or what Benjamin called “shock defence,” that
enables us at the level of the unconscious to internalise the hitherto indigestible
stimulus and “make sense” of it without ever having to think about it. This, Freud
suggests, is what his grandson did—it was his way of dealing with his mother’s
uncontrolled presences and absences and behind that the loss of his father who
was “at the front.” At the extreme edge of this spectrum of behaviours is the
schizophrenic, who is bombarded by so many stimuli, both from within and
without (but particularly from within, which is why it is so distressing—there is
literally no escape from it), that he or she is eventually forced to abandon even
the attempt at mastery. In Deleuze and Guattari’s language, the schizophrenic
then retreats to his or her body without organs (a notion they borrow from the
French schizophrenic poet Antonin Artaud), sealing him- or herself off from the
world and effectively being made “shock proof ” (Buchanan 2014).
Boredom is something like this. It is simultaneously a walling off from
external stimuli and a negation of internal stimuli: it is in this sense that it is
a defence against the present. It is both a rejection of a situation and a pro-
tection against it. To be bored waiting for a plane (to update and simplify—a
great deal—Heidegger) means that time has reasserted itself in a paradoxical
way: on the one hand, it has lengthened—the moment seems never to pass, it
becomes bloated, expanding without end—but, on the other hand we do noth-
ing to shorten it; indeed, we refuse to pass the time and thus make time pass.
In such a state, we are, as Kracauer avers, impervious to the blandishments of

4 It is against this that one should read Fredric Jameson’s (1991, 49) polemical and frequently misunder-
stood proposition that late—by which he meant contemporary—capitalism is characterised by the
prodigious expansion of multinational capital and its penetration and colonisation of the “last” two
pre-capitalist enclaves, Nature and the Unconscious, because it plainly rings true.

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 The Fear of Boredom

capitalism. No commodity, however bedazzling, can entice us out of this funk

once we’ve sunk into it; and, no entertainment is sufficiently entertaining to
force us to relent and make time pass again.
As Heidegger’s (1995, 99–105) brief discussion of waiting at train stations
suggests, we fall into the funk of boredom because we feel time has been stolen
from us by a space that seems to have let us down. But what more could we expect
of the station? Heidegger’s answer is very much of his own time (1929/30). The
empty platform, as miserable as it is, is all one can expect because it does pre-
cisely what it is supposed to. Today, this line of thinking makes no sense to us
because we’ve been taught to expect that the last thing a train station or airport
(or even an art gallery) should be is purely functional, a place to do nothing
more than wait. We’ve learned to think the absence of our train or plane is a
welcome opportunity to relax, to shop, to eat, to be entertained.
And if all else fails, we have our smartphones to keep us company. How could
we be bored? In the screen age, boredom has been as thoroughly de-legitimated
as the welfare state. Any moment or place where boredom might creep in is sat-
uration-bombed by media-messaging—TVs, radio, canned music, billboards,
electronic message boards, not to mention our own personal devices, which
do the same thing under the guise of social media so we don’t even notice that
we’re being blitzed by marketers. Behaviour that passes for “normal” today is
in many cases indistinguishable from the key clinical symptoms of schizophre-
nia. We “listen” to the disembodied voices of advertisements all day long and
happily do as they instruct us—buy this, buy that, think this, think that—with-
out questioning how weird this really is. Our digital devices bombard us with
messages and stimuli and we think nothing of it, but the reality—as research is
beginning to show—is that it is transforming “us” individually, culturally, and
socially in ways that haven’t been fully mapped. Not only that, we put in head-
phones to block out the rest of the world and give our fullest attention to the
disembodied voices on our phones and other devices. Should someone try to
talk to us when we’re thus engaged it’s thought rude and inconsiderate that
one should have been interrupted, which is to say it is no longer rude or impo-
lite to actively ignore one’s fellow humans.
Boring art is another matter altogether. With typical prescience, Jameson
(1991, 72) noted this paradox twenty-five years ago. It is, he says, “a paradox one
can get used to: if a boring text can also be good (or interesting, as we now put
it), exciting texts, which incorporate diversion, distraction, temporal commod-
ification, can also perhaps sometimes be ‘bad’ (or ‘degraded,’ to use Frankfurt
School language).” Jameson could be talking about smartphones here. Art is
compelled to be boring in this context if it is to be interesting but not distract-
ing; if it is to catch and hold our attention and draw our conscious mind into
a conversation with it. Art that bedazzles will no longer be able to distinguish
itself from the ceaseless pulsations of stimulus issuing from the digital devices
we surround ourselves with. Even digital art must, in this regard, endeavour to
be boring or else find itself subsumed into the morass of social media. If galleries
have become stark places with bare walls and subdued lighting it is undoubtedly
in an attempt to calm the storm of distractions audiences today carry with them.

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Ours is a “schizo society” so distracted by media that we don’t even notice

that being connected is the new form of atomism, which is a step beyond
Sartre’s seriality. Paradoxically, though, it is our connectedness that discon-
nects us from the world. In the space of only a handful of years, less than an
evolutionary blink of the eye, the mobile digital device has gone from being
present-at-hand, in Heidegger’s sense, to fully ready-to-hand, meaning it has
passed from being something that is merely of interest, as perhaps an idea or
concept might be, to being something that is a practical tool we use intuitively,
without conscious thought. This trajectory is of course the one mapped out for
us by the designers and manufacturers of digital technology. The great techno-
logical revolution of the early 1970s, when Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were just
geek university dropouts, not billionaire gurus, came about because innovators
like Gates and Jobs could see that computers had the potential to be machines
that people used in their homes and in their everyday lives. The prevailing view
until then had been that computers were both too complicated and too expen-
sive for anything but commercial, military, or enthusiast (i.e., geek) applica-
tions. And even then they had no idea of just how pervasive digital technology
could and would become once they let the genie out of the bottle.
The digital revolution unleashed a veritable tidal wave of technological
innovation that led to the development of the World Wide Web—the Internet
existed for two decades before the web, but it wasn’t useable. Once home com-
puters and then their mobile spawn became Internet-enabled, a cultural revo-
lution followed. Although the dot.com boom that was supposed to follow this
union didn’t live up to expectations in the first instance, the cultural changes
it wrought are still unfolding. The web giants, Amazon, Facebook, and Google,
belong to this era and we’ve only scratched the surface in our understanding of
how these corporations have transformed the contemporary world.
Not only do we use the mobile digital device without thought, now, as
Heidegger said of hammers, it has in many ways supplanted thought, thus ren-
dering large parts of our minds redundant. So long as we have Google Maps we
don’t need to remember the way home or know how to read a map in order to
get somewhere—our device can tell us. Nor do we need to remember to pick
up groceries, our device can remind us to do that, or else enable us to order
them home-delivered. Our device can also translate all languages into English
or any other language we choose. Similarly we can programme our TVs no mat-
ter where we are and we can connect with friends via social media no matter
where they are. And since practically everyone has a mobile digital device—
and not just in the first world, either—these days we don’t even need to con-
cern ourselves with such old-fashioned questions as to whether so-and-so has a
phone. Of course they do!
Digital technology is, to say the least, a profound new kind of distraction,
one that amplifies all the previously existing distractions “consumer society”
could throw at them—cinema, magazines, radio, TV, and commodities them-
selves—and effectively forecloses on the possibility of escaping its clutches.
There is literally nowhere one can go these days that isn’t somehow in the thrall
of commodity capitalism. This connectedness, which in its present intensity

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was impossible even a decade ago, comes at a price, albeit one that few of us
are complaining about. It is creating a new kind of people, one that as par-
ents whose childhoods were much less connected can and should seem utterly
alien, even schizophrenic. I will go so far as to say: schizophrenic is what we
really mean when we say connected. One can only imagine what the people to
come will be like.
Phone companies and dot.com boosters tell us that our “devices” are our
means of reaching the world. The reality is of course the other way round. It is
“their” means of reaching “us.” Our screens are their billboards. But unlike the
old-fashioned static billboards blighting the streets and highways, our smart-
phones aren’t random—they don’t just flash random images at us. They’re pro-
grammed to deliver advertisements and “suggestions” that reflect our carefully
data-tracked habits. The voices we hear are literally reflections of some version
of our selves. If we use our phones or laptops to look at real estate or new cars,
for example, then every time we open Facebook or visit a news aggregator site
like Huffington Post we’ll be shown more advertisements for houses and cars.
Not only that, the next time we search for something else our search engine
will prompt us to look at real estate and cars first. If we check in at a café our
phone will tell us what else is around and suggest shops we might like to visit
on the basis of our past searches or activities. It is all presented as though it is
a free service, an added convenience, and not simply a lure for our attention.
Concerns about personal privacy and the tracking and trafficking of our data
is waved away by us as much as it is by the data-miners themselves as so much
paranoia.
There has been no device in the history of technology more efficient than
the smartphone when it comes to capturing “our” attention. So much so that
it has made time itself seem unbearable in its absence. One can hardly imagine
waiting for a bus or a plane or a coffee without the distraction of one’s phone.
It’s as if seconds and minutes stretch into hours and days when not contained
by a digital device of some kind. Adults and children, young and old, men and
women, are all equally afflicted. No one sits and contemplates the world any-
more. Our eyes are glued to our screens, checking email, checking-in with our
social media, or watching a video. It no longer seems rude or impolite to check
one’s phone while talking with someone else. Unmediated time, or what I have
called “pure time” because it is time experienced without the mediation of a
digital device (in any of its manifestations), has all but vanished from our lives.
And let’s not kid ourselves, this has been the goal of every new piece of infor-
mation technology since the invention of writing. As Fredric Jameson argued
more than two decades ago, the final frontier of capitalism was always con-
sciousness itself and that moment has arrived.
In his book on postmodernism, Jameson (1991, 409) proposed that art could
provide a homeopathic remedy (his test case example was Hans Haacke). But as
the galleries empty out and art migrates to the small screen one can no longer
have much confidence in this utopian idea. Instead one must have confidence
in the utopian imagination itself that all artists embody.

479
 Ian Buchanan

References
Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Bent Meier Sørensen, 135–50. Edinburgh:
(1972) 1998. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Edinburgh University Press.
Translated by John Cumming. New York: ———. 2014. “Schizoanalytic Modernism:
Continuum. First published 1944 as The Case of Antonin Artaud.” In
Philosophische Fragmente (New York: Social Understanding Deleuze, Understanding
Studies Association), revised as Dialektik Modernism, edited by Paul Ardoin, S. E.
der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente Gontarski, and Laci Mattison, 196–206.
(Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1947). This London: Bloomsbury.
translation first published 1972 (New Burnside, John. 2014. “Diary: Death and
York: Herder and Herder). Photography.” London Review of Books 36
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: (24): 38–39. Accessed 29 May 2017. http://
Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n24/john-burnside/
by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: diary.
Stanford University Press. First published Crary, Jonathan. 1999. Suspensions of
1995 as Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern
nuda vita (Torino: Einaudi). Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-places: Introduction Farmer, Paul. 2015. “Who Lives and Who
to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Dies: Paul Farmer on the Iniquities of
Translated by John Howe. London: Verso. Healthcare Funding.” London Review of
Benjamin, Walter. (1968) 2007. “Theses Books 37 (3): 17–20.
on the Philosophy of History.” In Heidegger, Martin. 1995. The Fundamental
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude,
by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Solitude. Translated by William McNeill
Zohn, 253–64. New York: Schocken and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington:
Books. Chapter first published 1950 Indiana University Press. Delivered as
as “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” lectures (1929–30); first published 1983
(Neue Rundschau 61 [3]: 560–70). Book as Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt—
first published 1955 as Illuminationen: Endlichkeit—Einsamkeit (Frankfurt am
Ausgewählte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Main: Klostermann).
Suhrkamp). Translation first published Jameson, Frederic. 1991. Postmodernism,
1968 (New York: Harcourt Brace or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,
Jovanovich). London: Verso.
———. 1973. “On Some Motifs in ———. 2003. “Future City.” New Left Review
Baudelaire.” In Charles Baudelaire: A 21 (May–June): 65–79.
Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, Kowinski, William. 2002. The Malling of
translated by Harry Zohn, 107–54. America: Travels in the United States of
London: Verso. Chapter first published Shopping. New York: Xlibris.
1940 as “Über einige Motive bei Kracauer, Siegfried. 1995. “Boredom.”
Baudelaire” (Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung In The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays,
8 [1–2]). Book first published 1969 as translated and edited by Thomas Y.
Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter Levin, 331–36. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard
des Hochkapitalisms (Frankfurt am Main: University Press. First published 1924
Suhrkamp). as “Langeweile” (Frankfurter Zeitung,
Buchanan, Ian. 2005. “Space in the Age of 16 November, Feuilleton 1). Book first
Non-place.” In Deleuze and Space, edited by published 1963 as Das Ornament der Masse:
Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert, 16–35. Essays (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp).
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ritzer, George. 2000. The McDonaldization of
———. 2006. “Practical Deleuzism and Society. New century ed. Thousand Oaks,
Postmodern Space.” In Deleuze and the CA: Pine Forge Press.
Social, edited by Martin Fuglsang and

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 Art, Knowledge,
and the In-between
Rahma Khazam
Art historian, researcher, and critic, Paris

In Artistic Research: Theories, Methods and Practices (2005), Mika Hannula, Juha
Suoranta, and Tere Vadén emphasised the need for a non-dualistic and non-
binary dialogue between the fields of art and research, despite the fundamen-
tally different modes of thinking on which each of them is based (ibid., 25).
Twelve years on, that dialogue is underway: characterised more often than not
by in-betweenness and indeterminacy (ibid., 167), artistic research has proved
itself capable of merging art and research more or less seamlessly and in a variety
of ways. In this chapter, I shall explore the complex relations between these two
activities, drawing on terms and concepts theorised by Deleuze and Guattari.
The two philosophers regard indeterminacy as productive in that it provokes
thought (MacKenzie and Porter 2011, 41) and associate the in-between with
creation and intensity (Bidima 2016). They have furthermore coined concepts
such as metamodelling or striated space that shed light on or have been the
subject of artistic research—as I will show in the three case studies that follow.
The first case study is Esther Shalev-Gerz’s Trust and the Unfolding Dialogue, a
research project carried out between 2010 and 2013 in which the artist reflected
on the ongoing movement between trust and forms of dialogue generated by
her practice (Shalev-Gerz 2013, 7). The terms “trust” and “dialogue” are well
to the fore in her video installation Does Your Image Reflect Me? (2002), where
Shalev-Gerz invited two elderly interviewees to share their life stories: one was
a German woman, who lived forty kilometres from the Bergen-Belsen concen-
tration camp during World War II; the other was a Polish Jewish woman who
had spent time in it. Shalev-Gerz filmed each woman as she recounted her
experiences in the years before, during, and after the war and also filmed each
of them listening to the other’s story. Projected on four screens installed in the
Sprengel Museum, Hanover, the work consisted of the two videos of the women
telling their stories placed side by side, opposite the videos of them listening.
As Annika Wik (2013, 192) has pointed out:

Esther Shalev-Gerz’s art is full of speech acts. . . . Letting the other speak freely
without interruption is an important parameter in her work. . . . This is made
possible because of the ways she provides subjects with a mobility based on a
sense of trust, so that there are openings and possibilities to move freely to an
in-between of different spatial positions and personal pronouns. . . . By inviting
participation, trust becomes the core of the work—in the sense of building trust,
fostering someone else’s or one’s own narrative, listening and speaking, filming and

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its communication, and giving it space and time. By using this method in an artistic
project, within a clear framework and a specific context, dialogues can unfold.

Shalev-Gerz (2013, 7) herself has noted that trust is present not just in the
artwork but also in the art world: the museum trusts the artist inasmuch as it
exhibits her work, while the spectator trusts the artwork in the sense of believ-
ing in its capacity to speak about itself and the world around us. A space of
trust thus opens up between the spectator, the institution, and the artwork that
allows a dialogue to unfold.
Yet it is Deleuze’s thought that provides the most comprehensive framework
within which to conceptualise Shalev-Gerz’s approach. Stefanie Baumann
(2013, 163) has observed that Shalev-Gerz’s project “demarcates a sort of map
in a Deleuzian and Guattarian sense.” In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and
Guattari (1987, 21) evoke a map that “must be produced, constructed, a map
that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple
entryways and exits.” Such a map would be capable of exploring indeterminate
spaces, such as that between the notions of dialogue and trust. Baumann (2013,
163) further stresses that the space outlined by the juxtaposition of the two
terms is far from stable and embodies a particular Deleuzian state of becom-
ing—because it is situated between heterogeneous terms and eschews any par-
ticular goal.
Shalev-Gerz’s research is furthermore horizontal, open-ended, and bot-
tom-up, as opposed to arborescent (i.e., hierarchical, linear, and segmented).
And precisely because it is evolving and indeterminate, it cannot be subjected
to top-down criticism, which would mean reintroducing a hierarchical ele-
ment. Finally, Shalev-Gerz’s foregrounding, probing, and testing of the con-
cepts of trust and dialogue are comparable to Deleuze’s method of dramati-
sation, whereby concepts are brought to life as a means of determining their
potential and force.
The vocabulary Shalev-Gerz uses in the online text describing her neon instal-
lation Potential Trust (2014) is likewise reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari: “A
careful and generous listening to the concept should guide the artwork to the
format that it demands, without imposing on a nascent idea further outside thoughts
and decisions regarding its realization. The potentiality of trust given to this form of
creative understanding will allow a multiplicity of perceptions, constructions, connec-
tions, hierarchies, dialogues and could generate a similar reception of the artwork
to be passed on to the world, where the artist is one of the viewers” (Shalev-
Gerz 2014, my italics).
For Shalev-Gerz, this research project was an opportunity to conceptualise
and clarify the ideas she has been developing in her work over the years. Her
work can be thought of in terms of pure research, which is exploratory, con-
ducted without any practical use in mind, and “simply aims to advance knowl-
edge and to identify/explain relationships between variables” (University of
Southampton 2017). Shalev-Gerz likewise seeks to identify the spaces of in-
betweenness connecting dialogue and trust

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 Art, Knowledge, and the In-between

Other works of artistic research bear more of a resemblance to applied

research, which “is not carried out for its own sake but in order to solve spe-
cific, practical questions or problems” and has a specific goal (ibid.). This is
the case of my second example, Japanese artist Yutaka Makino, whose work
seeks to materialise Deleuze and Guattari’s abstract concepts, addressing con-
crete questions concerning their viability. His sound installation/performance
Atmosphere (2012), for instance, is designed to give concrete form to notions of
difference and heterogeneity. In this work, continuously modulating sounds
delineate different sound environments in the gallery space. Exhibiting con-
tinual differentiation with respect to one another, these sound environments
eschew all reference to an underlying system or score. They depict the idea of
real difference as opposed to adherence to a norm (Khazam 2015, 72).
Makino’s ongoing research into sound and space takes a similarly practical
approach to Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between smooth and striated
space, the first being heterogenous, tactile, and immersive and the second,
homogeneous. Makino’s installations Temporal Object #1 and #2 (2011) trans-
pose these ideas onto real materials: during the first phase of the work, the
sounds highlight the acoustic features of the space, which are homogeneous
and unchanging; in the second phase, the sounds are immersive and quasi-tan-
gible and listeners have to construct their own understanding of them, without
reference to the features of the space (Khazam 2015, 72).
Finally, in his performance Conflux (2010), Makino explores a third set of
Deleuzian concepts through the use of intensive materials. The term is a refer-
ence to Deleuze’s notions of extensive and intensive—the first of which relates
to measurable properties, such as length, and the second to indivisible phe-
nomena such as temperature, which are harder to control. In his performance,
Makino uses only materials relating to the second category, namely sound,
light, and fog, investigating their properties and monitoring their constantly
changing behaviour (Khazam 2015, 73). Makino’s interest in Deleuze is thus
manifested in his artworks, which offer a sensory account of how the philoso-
pher’s abstract concepts operate in the real world.
Yet even though there is a strong research component in the work of Shalev-
Gerz and Makino, their pieces were conceived as artworks and can only second-
arily be viewed as research. This distinction, however, is not as clear-cut in the
case of my third example, Bethan Huws, who produces works that challenge
the primacy of art by assigning the research aspect an equally important role.
As Michael Schwab (2008) points out, the fact that artists rarely challenge the
artwork’s primacy “is perhaps the reason why no coherent history connects
Conceptual art with artistic research.” Huws takes up this challenge: a number
of her works and even, on occasion, entire sections of her exhibitions consist
of the detailed research notes she has produced on Marcel Duchamp’s works
and writings.

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 Rahma Khazam

Figure 2.22.1. Figure 2.22.2.

484
Figure 2.22.1. Bethan Huws, Research Notes, photocopy, Post-it notes, pen and pencil
on paper, 297 × 210 mm, 2007–14. Reproduced from Research Notes, Bethan Huws,
edited by Dieter Asssociation, Paris, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, 2014,
p. 441. Courtesy of the artist. Image incorporates Luca Giordano, Hercules on the Pyre,
1697–1700. El Escorial, Casta del Principe, Madrid. From Luca Impelluso, Dieux et héros
de l’Antiquité (Paria: Éditions Hazan, 2003), 78. Copyrights 2017 Bethan Huws and VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
Figure 2.22.2. Bethan Huws, Research Notes, Post-it notes and pencil on paper, 297 ×
210 mm, 2007–14. Courtesy of the artist. Reproduced from Research Notes, Bethan Huws,
edited by Dieter Asssociation, Paris, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, 2014,
p. 442. Copyrights 2017 Bethan Huws and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
 Art, Knowledge, and the In-between

Figure 2.22.3. Figure 2.22.4.

485

Figure 2.22.3. Bethan Huws, Research Notes, pencil on paper, 297 × 10 mm, 2007–14.
Courtesy of the artist. Reproduced from Research Notes, Bethan Huws, edited by Dieter
Asssociation, Paris, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, 2014, p. 488. Copy-
rights 2017 Bethan Huws and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
Figure 2.22.4. Bethan Huws, Research Notes, pencil on paper, 297 × 210 mm, 2007–14.
Courtesy of the artist. Reproduced from Research Notes, Bethan Huws, edited by Dieter
Asssociation, Paris, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, 2014, p. 490. Copy-
rights 2017 Bethan Huws and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
 Rahma Khazam

By exploring the dense network of references and cross-references generated

by Duchamp’s use of idioms, homonyms, and puns, she offers an insight into
the French artist’s thought processes as well as into her own. Bearing witness
to much of these investigations is Research Notes (2014), a 623-page artist’s book
each page of which is a collage of images, sketches, short printed texts, or Post-it
notes bearing hand-written comments. These might include a letter written by
Duchamp, dictionary entries for words such as “fontaine” or “rose,” a list of
expressions containing the word “art,” or pencil sketches of items pertaining
to Duchamp’s works. By grouping a number of these entries on the same page,
Huws creates unexpected connections between them: for example, an image
of Duchamp’s work Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy? (1921) with its fake sugar cubes
is juxtaposed with the words “in the form of a sugar cube,” which happens to
be the subtitle of a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire—this being only one of the
many links that Huws identifies as attesting to the influence of Apollinaire on
Duchamp.

Huws’s investigations differ from standard academic research in that they are
essentially non-hierarchical and open-ended: not only do they range widely,
referencing fields as diverse as theology, mythology, or philology, but they lack
an overarching structure, in that each item of information carries the same
weight as any other. Another difference is that Huws leaves it up to the reader
whether to connect the different items, thereby eschewing the possibility of a
fixed interpretation or meaning. On the one hand, her work resembles art in
terms of its structure and materials, constituting to all intents and purposes
a work of art in itself. On the other hand, her exhaustive investigations and
meticulous cross-referencing are undoubtedly research, in that they constitute
a systematic activity that produces new knowledge (Klein 2010). Inherently
indeterminate and openly flaunting their in-betweenness, Huw’s works can be
viewed either as research or as art: they highlight the common ground between
the two terms, while questioning both and privileging neither.
In this respect, her work puts into practice the concept of metamodelling,
which Guattari develops in Schizoanalytic Cartographies (2012) as a means of
associating different models without favouring any one of them. Erin Manning
(2015, 67) defines the term thus in Non-Representational Methodologies: “A meta­
model, for Guattari, was a proposition that would upset existing formations
of power and knowledge.” Manning also quotes Genosko and Murphie (2008),
who challenge the tendency of models to “operate largely by exclusion and
reduction, tightly circumscribing their applications and contact with heter-
ogeneity.” Bethan Huws’s research/art likewise challenges existing forms of
research-based knowledge and their tendency to reduction and exclusion.
Finally, metamodelling, as Guattari (1996, 122) points out, appropriates exist-
ing models to construct new cartographies and reference points of its own.
Bethan Huws’s project also borrows from existing models, in her case art and
research, to construct its own cartography.
To conclude, the works of Shalev-Gerz and Makino lean more towards art
than research, whereas Huws’s works sit squarely in the middle: like the rabbit-
duck illusion, they may be viewed as one or the other or as one then the other,

486
 Art, Knowledge, and the In-between

or even as both at the same time.1 Even more radically than the works by the
other two artists, Huws’s pieces question the methods and limits not only of
research but also of art itself.

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1 On the question of perceiving both figures at the same time, see McGaughey (2011).

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In the Act
The Shape of Precarity*
Erin Manning
Concordia University

In a text on Guattari, Deleuze speaks of two Guattaris, a Pierre and a Félix (he was
called Pierre-Félix). According to Deleuze, one was “like a catatonic head, a blind
and hardened body perfused by death, when he takes off his glasses,” the other “a
dazzling spark, full of multiple lives as soon as he acts, laughs, thinks, attacks.” These
are the two schizophrenic powers of an anti-I: the petrification and the spark.

—Peter Pál Pelbart (1994, 9, my translation)

Shortly after Félix Guattari’s death, Peter Pál Pelbart—schizoanalyst, philoso-

pher—wrote a text that he ended with an anecdote about Guattari’s inherent
doubleness, wanting to get at the complex overlapping, in Guattari, of what
Deleuze calls “petrification and spark.” The anecdote recalls a trip taken to La
Borde, the clinic where Guattari worked and lived. Pelbart writes:

In 1990, passing through France, I went to visit the La Borde clinic with Guattari.
We left Paris by car. He asked me to drive, and, while I was driving, he slept, like
that, without his glasses, petrified, as Deleuze describes it. It is well known that
sleep can confer on the sleeper the guise of a rock, but the next morning, awake,
Guattari hadn’t changed. . . . I had never seen him this way, even during his many
trips to Brazil. To escape from a situation that made me a bit uneasy, I decided to
go out and walk with my partner. Guattari wanted to accompany us. We walked in
silence. It was late afternoon. We listened to the noise of our steps and far-away
sounds. Evening was coming. A neighbour greeted us. Everything was bucolic. And
then we found ourselves in front of a pigsty, in silence. So I tried to converse with
the pigs, using my limited knowledge of oinking. Slowly, the dialogue became more
animated, and Guattari began to participate in the conversation. He laughed a lot,
and he oinked a lot. I think that in this day and a half spent at La Borde, this was the
only conversation we had—oinked. In front of the pigsty. With a collective of pigs,
in a veritable becoming-animal. I left the next morning, troubled. I told myself that
a thinker has the right to remain catatonic, to become dead, to oink from time to
time, if it please him or her. To tell the truth, since that day, I never stopped envying
this catatonic state. Sometimes, of my own accord, I find myself this way, to the
distress of those around me . . .

* This chapter was first published in Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2016). Reproduced with minor emendations with kind permission of the author and publishers.

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[Later, in] re-reading some of his texts, I understood that his silence at La Borde was
not only a petrification, but also an immersion in a kind of chaosmosis, the mix of
chaos and complexity, of dissolution, where what is to come must be engendered.
(Pelbart 1994, 9–10, my translation)

Depression
In his work on the alignment of depression and capital in neo-liberal times,
Bifo (Franco Berardi) uses the figure of Guattari—with whom he collaborated
when he was also a committed activist—to explore the relationship between
depression and the act. Focusing on Guattari’s “winter years,” Bifo wonders
how depression affected Guattari’s work as a philosopher and activist. Bifo sug-
gests that Guattari’s depression not only left him paralysed in the face of life,
but put him in a situation where he gave himself to causes that he didn’t really
believe in. Depression, it seems, not only affected Guattari’s capacity to be in
the act, it transformed his ability to direct his energies in ways that would best
move his practice forward. This inability to demonstrate volition with respect
to what was most important to him—activism—Bifo argues, is in part tied to
Guattari’s own reluctance to discuss the relationship between activism and
depression. Bifo explains:

I sensed and was convinced that in the final decade of his life, Guattari had at several
points undertaken a political commitment in which he did not deeply believe, that
is, seeming to him to be his duty to “hold on,” that he needed to get past this rather
difficult, regressive period, etc. And I perceived a kind of exhaustion in his will to
maintain a position. So in this phase of the Guattarian itinerary, what seemed to me
to be missing . . . is a reflection about depression. While one would need to enter
more fully into this concept, depression basically is a disinvestment of libidinal
energies in facing the future, in facing the world. Naturally it’s a question of a
pathology, but not only that. Or rather, in short, the pathology is not something to
be undervalued. (Berardi 2008, 158)

Bifo, in a move that troubles me, then turns to Guattari’s writings to explore
the omission of depression. In what seems to me a classic psycho-analytic ges-
ture, Bifo analyses Guattari’s work to see how or why depression was excluded.
Turning to Deleuze and Guattari’s writing on desire in Anti-Oedipus, he writes:

Félix did not pay attention to depression, neither as a philosopher, nor as a

psychoanalyst. And we can easily understand why. The methodology [démarche] of the
Anti-Oedipus is not easy to reconcile with the possibility of delving into depression.
Depression is not just a condition among others, in which a machinic unconscious
is assembled, made of existential and chaosmotic fragments proceeding from
anywhere to everywhere else. The Anti-Oedipus does not know depression; it
continuously overcomes, leaping with psychedelic energy over any slowing down
and any darkness. (Berardi 2008, 11)

Personalising Guattari, and making the dangerous assumption that writing is

an act that should somehow mirror the writer, Bifo continues his analysis:

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Félix knew this, I am sure, but he never said as much, not even to himself, and this
is why he went to all these meetings with people who didn’t appeal to him, talking
about things that distracted him and making lists of deadlines and appointments.
And then he would run off, adjusting his glasses to consult his overflowing daily
planner. And here again is the root of depression, in this impotence of political will
that we haven’t had the courage to admit. (Berardi 2008, 13, translation modified)

Using his friendship with Guattari as a guarantor (basing his account of

Guattari’s mental state on what went on between them as friends), Bifo under-
takes a specious project, specious because based on a proposition that uses
the personal as the central figure instead of acknowledging, at the very out-
set, Guattari’s lifelong investment in the prepersonal and the group subject. In
so doing, Bifo backgrounds the operational nature of Guattari’s writing, both
alone and with Deleuze. When Bifo suggests, for instance, that their writing
on the machinic unconscious is only about “a continuous overcoming,” that
their writing refuses “any slowing down and any darkness,” he misinterprets,
it seems to me, the machinations of desire as outlined in Anti-Oedipus. Anti-
Oedipus is not an account of light over darkness, but one of the in-act. The in-act
is not positive or negative: it is productive.
This is Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of the desiring machine. Depression
is not missing from Anti-Oedipus—the complexity of neurodiversity is every-
where present in the account of what schizoanalysis can do. What’s absent is a
separating out of depression from neurodiversity as a whole. Anti-Oedipus fore-
grounds transversal operations that propose techniques for creating desiring
machines that are capable of cutting through existing systems to create new
modes of existence. Psychoanalysis is one of the systems Anti-Oedipus’s desir-
ing machines cuts through. Anti-Oedipus works against any account that would
restratify a neurotypical identity politics or any normative identity structure.
For theirs is an exploration, avant la lettre, of what neurodiversity can do, not
of its failings. To suggest otherwise would be to discredit the force of schizo-
analysis so central to Guattari’s practice.
Guattari would resist, it seems to me, any normative account of depression
that would situate it in the agency-volition-intentionality triad. When Bifo
speaks of Guattari’s inability to use his time well, he provides exactly this kind
of normative account of depression: he proposes that Guattari demonstrates a
lack of volition, suggesting that in the best-case scenario, Guattari would have
the kind of will, the kind of agency, that would better direct his decision to
align himself to projects “that matter.” Guattari would also be suspicious of an
account of depression that kept it within the bounds of the subject. He would
be more likely to align himself, it seems to me, to the following account of
depression, which, unlike Bifo’s analysis, refuses to situate depression solely
in the individual, making it a collective problem for which a group-subject
must be invented. This is a story narrated by Andrew Solomon, who has written
widely about his struggle with depression. In this story, Solomon (2008) recalls
a trip to Senegal where he experienced a ritual for depression called ndeup.
The ndeup is a ritual practice that involves the careful crafting of techniques
to create a group-subject. As with all rituals, certain precise procedures have to
be followed. Solomon explains: “The first thing we had was a shopping list. We

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had to buy seven yards of African fabric. We had to get a calabash, which was a
large bowl fashioned from a gourd. We had to get three kilos of millet. We had
to get sugar and kola beans. And then we had to get two live cockerels, two
roosters, and a ram.” These effects were purchased at the market, except the
ram, which was bought by the side of the road. Then Solomon headed to what
would become a full-day ritual. By early afternoon, the ritual really got going.

And the sound of drumming began—the drumming I had been hoping for. And so
there was all of this drumming, and it was very exciting. And we went to the central
square of the village, where there was a small makeshift wedding bed that I had
to get into with the ram. I had been told it would be very, very bad luck if the ram
escaped, and that I had to hold on to him, and that the reason we had to be in this
wedding bed was that all my depression and all my problems were caused by the
fact that I had spirits. In Senegal you have spirits all over you, the way here you have
microbes. Some are good for you. Some are bad for you. Some are neutral. My bad
spirits were extremely jealous of my real-life sexual partners, and we had to mollify
the anger of the spirits. . . .

The entire village had taken the day off from their work in the fields, and they were
dancing around us in concentric circles. And as they danced, they were throwing
blankets and sheets of cloth over us, and so we were gradually being buried. It was
unbelievably hot, and it was completely stifling. And there was the sound of these
stamping feet as everyone danced around us, and then these drums, which were
getting louder and louder and more and more ecstatic. And I was just about at
the point at which I thought I was going to faint or pass out. At that key moment
suddenly all of the cloths were pulled off. I was yanked to my feet. The loincloth
that was all I was wearing was pulled from me. The poor old ram’s throat was slit, as
were the throats of the two cockerels. And I was covered in the blood of the freshly
slaughtered ram and cockerels.

After a short break, the ritual continued. Solomon was told to place his hands
by his side and to stand very straight and erect. They proceeded to tie him up
with the intestines of the ram.

In the meanwhile [the ram’s] body was hanging from a nearby tree, and someone was
doing some butchering of it, and they took various little bits of it out. And then I had
to kind of shuffle over . . . and take these little pieces of the ram and dig holes, and
put the pieces of the ram in the holes.

And I had to say something. And what I had to say was actually incredibly, strangely
touching in the middle of this weird experience. I had to say, “Spirits, leave me alone
to complete the business of my life and know that I will never forget you.” And I
thought, What a kind thing to say to the evil spirits you’re exorcising: “I’ll never forget you.”
And I haven’t.

Solomon continued to speak this mantra. He was then given a package of the
millet with which his body had earlier been rubbed and told that he should
sleep with it under his pillow that night. He was also instructed to bring it to
a beggar “who had good hearing and no deformities” the following morning.
Once the millet had exchanged hands, he was told “that would be the end of
my troubles.”

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And then the women all filled their mouths with water and began spitting water
all over me—it was a surround-shower effect—rinsing the blood away from me. It
gradually came off, and when I was clean, they gave me back my jeans. And everyone
danced, and they barbecued the ram, and we had this dinner. And I felt so up. I felt
so up!

Solomon’s participation in the ritual places us in a completely different relation

to depression’s working than does Bifo’s account. A Rwandan who encounters
Solomon several years later articulates this difference succinctly. After hearing
of Solomon’s experience in Senegal, this man says:

You know, we had a lot of trouble with Western mental health workers who came
here immediately after the genocide, and we had to ask some of them to leave. [The
problem was that] their practice did not involve being outside in the sun, like you’re
describing, which is, after all, where you begin to feel better. There was no music or
drumming to get your blood flowing again when you’re depressed, and you’re low,
and you need to have your blood flowing. There was no sense that everyone had
taken the day off so that the entire community could come together to try to lift you
up and bring you back to joy. There was no acknowledgment that the depression is
something invasive and external that could actually be cast out of you again. Instead,
they would take people one at a time into these dingy little rooms and have them sit
around for an hour or so and talk about bad things that had happened to them. We
had to get them to leave the country. (Solomon 2008)1

This is the key detail Bifo’s analysis of Guattari’s winter years misses: that all
of Guattari’s theory and practice emerges from the necessity to bring out the
collective resonance of the event, to see illness not as a personal problem to be
analysed outside the field of relation, but as an event, an ecology, that necessi-
tates the kind of minor gestures that populate the ritual described above, minor
gestures that tune the event to its more-than. As outlined so comprehensively
in Anti-Oedipus, the force of schizoanalysis is that it creates the conditions for
opening the event to its productive schism rather than reducing it, as psycho-
analysis would do, to a regressive account of a preconstituted past. Time, in
schizoanalysis, is of the event, in the group-subject of its co-composition. Any
technique created in the name of schizoanalysis needs to be able to craft event-
time, to move the event to an operative more-than that persuasively cleaves it
with the instauration Étienne Souriau argues is at the heart of the creation of
new modes of existence.
In his years of practice at La Borde, Guattari was everywhere involved in the
creation of such techniques that activate the ecological core of experience’s
more-than. In his writing, where chaosmosis, as Pelbart suggests, is probably the
strongest description of the force of petrification and spark, Guattari aligned
himself again and again not with pathologising accounts of neurodiversity, but
with the kinds of rituals described above, rituals that involve bringing out the
community, rituals that activate the minor gesture, rituals that transform the
very ground of experience.

1 See also Solomon (2014).

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Neo-liberal depression
Bifo’s argument, over the last decade, is that neo-liberalism has left the body
disempowered, our collective nervous system besieged by the forces of a capit­
alist takeover. We can, and indeed, we must no longer act. As outlined by Gary
Genosko and Nicholas Thoburn (2011, 7) in their introduction to Bifo’s After
the Future, Bifo argues that “activism . . . is the narcissistic response of the sub-
ject to the infinite and invasive power of capital, a response that can only leave
the activist frustrated, humiliated, and depressed.” Activism, Bifo suggests, is a
desperate attempt to ward off depression. “But it’s doomed to fail and, worse,
to convert political innovation and sociality into its opposite, to ‘replace desire
with duty’” (ibid., 7).
Bifo sees the current landscape of depression as “a product of the ‘panic’
induced by the sensory overload of digital capitalism, a condition of with-
drawal, a disinvestment of energy from the competitive and narcissistic struc-
tures of the enterprise. And it’s also a result of the loss of political composition
and antagonism” (Genosko and Thoburn 2011, 8). Depression is the collective
effect of a social tendency, as “born out of the dispersion of the community’s
immediacy. . . . When the proliferating power is lost, the social becomes the
place of depression” (Berardi 2008, 13). In the past, autonomous and desiring
politics were actively co-composing, whereas now, in neo-liberal times, such
proliferating power is lost, and the act—activism—is incapable of resurrect-
ing it. It’s difficult not to see Nietzsche’s last men rearing their heads in this
dark account that has so completely lost the elan of the in-act. “The earth has
become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small. His
species is ineradicable as the flea; the Last Man lives longest” (Nietzsche 1954,
5). This is certainly not Bifo’s hope, nor is it what moves his writing, but I won-
der whether the account of depression he proposes doesn’t end up cement-
ing a reactive nihilism, a cynicism that tends, despite its position “against,” to
strengthen the status quo. Being out of act, out of service—isn’t that the very
posture of ressentiment?2
Despite my respect for Bifo as an activist and thinker, I hope to challenge
his account of depression, particularly his account of the relationship between
depression and activism. I will do so by paying close attention to the story told
by Pelbart of the chaosmosis at the heart of the “not-me” which is inhabited at
once by petrification and spark. Taking the act not simply as that which is in the
service of the neo-liberal economy, but more broadly as the force of the event
through which minor gestures course, and taking depression out of the context
of an individual sadness, I want to explore the operative passage between pet-
rification and spark.
In doing so, I do not want to discredit the fact that there is extensive turmoil
in the face of neo-liberalism’s excessive takeover of what a body can do. There is
no question that these are troubled times. Nor do I want to suggest that depres-
sion isn’t terrible. It is. What I want to do, always with the ndeup ritual in mind—

2 [The question of ressentiment and its relationship to affirmation (and critique) is discussed more thor-
oughly in Erin Manning’s Postscript to the book The Minor Gesture (2016), in the “Affirmation without
Credit” section.—Ed.]

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with its belief that depression carries a more-than that needs to be attended to
in its differential force; with its acknowledgment that it is only collectively that
new modes of existence can be invented—is propose that depression operates
in event-time, not outside the event in a passive relationship to the what was. If
we start here, the inquiry leads somewhere profoundly different than the path
Bifo outlines. Against Bifo’s account of the neo-liberal takeover of the act, this
different path leads us toward a rethinking of the in-act, as I’ve attempted to do
throughout, a rethinking that leads to a neurodiverse exploration of the what
else at the heart of experience.
In my own struggle with depression, it has become clear to me that what
we call depression is nothing if not plural: it expresses itself in an infinity of
ways from sadness to hunger, from loss to anguish and anxiety, from a freneti-
cally quiet inner panic to a full-edged panic attack, from the stillness of a body
incapable of moving to an agitated body. For some, all these tendencies are
present, which leads depression to be less about a state that could properly be
described than a terrible decalibration that makes it impossible to compose
with the world: everything feels out of sync. This is the case for me: the experi-
ence is one of not being able to connect to the movements that surround me,
not being able to match their rhythms. The best description of this is a sense
of misalignment with time. The world moves too quickly or too slowly in ways
that are difficult to connect to. It is as though there were multiple speeds and
slownesses in continuous unalignable disjunction. Medicated, and with many
years of various kinds of treatments, the sense I have is that it has become easier
to align and that the field of relation now stabilises enough to allow a co-com-
position across worldings. I can participate. But the one who participates is not
a personalised “I.” It is a schizo-I, like Deleuze’s account of “Pierre” and “Félix,”
a schizo anti-I in the sense that there is no absolute integration, but instead an
emergent potential for co-composition across experiential time both quick and
slow. Living with depression, and acknowledging the necessity for facilitation
in its many relational guises, is an art of participation, and what has emerged
through this art of participation is a belief in the world as a mobile site to which
alignments are possible.
These alignments are not given. They must be crafted. Opening the way for
a co-composition that potentially aligns itself to times in the making requires,
I believe, a rethinking of the act of alignment itself. It requires what Guattari
would call a group-subjectivity, an account of a collective that exceeds the per-
sonal. To connect with this collectivity in the making requires techniques for
inventing modes of encounter not simply with the human but in the wider
ecology of worlds in their unfolding. For the collective as a mode of existence
in its own right is not the multiplication of individuals. It is the way the force of
a becoming attunes to a transindividuation that is more-than. To become-col-
lective is to align to a chaosmosis in a way that prolongs the capacity of one
body to act.
This is not to underestimate the pain, difficulty, even horror of depression,
nor to underplay how complex misalignments make us feel our silence on the
one hand, or our anxiety on the other as signs of our decalibration with the
world. Nor is it to argue that drugs against depression in its widest definition

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should be handed out as liberally as they are. It is simply to inquire, across my

own experience, and through the moving reading of Peter Pál Pelbart’s account
of Guattari’s petrification, how else we can facilitate emergent collectivities
without turning to the neurotypical habit of pathologising difference, or, in the
case of depression, of too quickly aligning the nonvolitional to passivity.

Neurodiversity

Neurodiversity is about accepting that there is no normal human brain, that

being different is okay, and [about working] together to discover how we all can
participate to the best of our abilities in our lives. We are optimistic that with the
proper supports and accommodations, positive attitudes, acceptance, inclusion, and
encouragement, that every (autistic) person is able to communicate, interact, and
contribute to society while meeting individual needs and respecting one’s sense of
self and personal rights. (No Stereotypes Here 2015)

It is very common for autistics to suffer from the disabling anxiety that is on
the spectrum of what is treated as depression. It is also very often asserted by
autistics that they have a strange sense of time: “Time perception in autism
spectrum disorder is a part of the complexity of the condition. Many people
with autism experience fragmented or delayed time perception, which can
present challenges to social interaction and learning” (Warber 2014). What I
want to do by aligning the autistic’s perception of time to the perception of
time in the wide array of depressive disorders is not to suggest that we are all
autistic, or that all autistics are depressed, but to return to neurodiversity to
think about the complexity of experience. In doing so, I want to turn once more
to the concept of autistic perception to explore how depression—as the expe-
rience of time’s differential—is itself on the continuum of autistic perception.
This, I hope, will open the way for an alignment between autistic perception
and schizoanalysis.
Autistic perception, as I have described throughout, is a direct experience of
relation, a worlding that makes felt the edging into itself of experience. This
makes it difficult for autistics to have a strong sense, at any given moment, of a
time separated out from the event-time of their perception. Metric time, time
counted, is often difficult to get a sense of. Of course autistic perception of time
varies as much as autistics themselves do, but there are some salient charac-
teristics. For instance, those on the spectrum “experience a delay in how they
process certain stimuli, including time. It can sometimes be hard for them to
comprehend that hours have passed. For example, a person with autism who
has echolalia may hear a phrase in the morning and repeat the phrase hours later
out of context” (Warber 2014). “Anecdotal reports suggest that individuals with
autism have trouble gauging how much time has passed, and parsing the order of
events” (Mascarelli 2010). Speaking of her autistic son with ADHD (and wonder-
ing where the two conditions meet), Emily Willingham (2014) similarly empha-
sises a strange sense of time: “One area of overlap is their sense (or lack thereof)
of time and timing. They both show delays in responding to spoken questions or
requests. When their peers learned to tell time in elementary school, they were

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completely at sea, unable to instinctively comprehend the passage of time. Even

now, in their adolescence, the question ‘What day is it?’ is frequent, as is ‘What
are we having for lunch?’ within an hour of having had lunch.”
Within depression, a similar sense of the untimely is at work. Steve Connor
(2013) writes: “People with severe depression have a disrupted ‘biological clock’
that makes it seem as if they are living in a different time zone to the rest of the
healthy population living alongside them, a study has found.” Personal accounts
support this research: “When I am depressed I feel like time goes slowly, yet at
the same time I feel like I—or anyone else—has hardly any time to live at all. It
feels as if time is running out” (Ratcliffe 2015, 175). “Yes, days go past slower and
more boring feeling like everything’s going to drag on. On the other hand I can
feel like life going too fast and the years are flying by and start getting depressed
thinking not long to live now etc.” (Ibid.). “You cannot remember a time when
you felt better, at least not clearly; and you certainly cannot imagine a future
time when you will feel better. Being upset, even profoundly upset, is a temporal
experience, while depression is atemporal” (Solomon [2001] 2014, 55).
If autistic perception is the direct perception of experience in-forming, it is
also, as I suggested above, a direct perception of time, but not metric or meas-
ured time. It is the direct experience of the time of the event. Event-time is
experiential time, time felt rather than abstracted. It is the time of the oinking
in Pelbart’s story. It is the moment in its alignment to itself, to its enfolding. It
is not time in the sense of a pastness that can be recorded on the present. It is
the now felt in its entirety, in its untimely infinity. And so it passes too slowly, or
it moves too fast, oscillating in a time always of its own uneasy making.

Language
When experience resists external organisation according to a metrics of time,
the linearity of language’s enunciation is invariably affected. The experience
is that of words blurring, of the impossibility of composing a thought that will
survive articulation. For the autistic, especially one on the classical end of the
spectrum, where motricity is affected such that vocal cords cannot be properly
located to permit speech, or where impulse control makes it difficult to direct
speech toward what the autistic wants to say, language comes slowly, finger by
finger, on the keyboard. But it also comes slowly experientially, moving around
images that are closer to metaphors (metamorphoses) than direct statements.
As autistic Larry Bissonnette writes: “Typing is like letting your finger hit keys
with accuracy. Leniency on that is not tolerated. Am easily language impaired.
Artmaking is like alliance people develop with their muscles after deep mas-
sage. You can move freely without effort” (in Savarese 2012, 184).
Shifting in and out of autistic perception, language comes in fits and starts,
in a time all its own. Watching Chammi communicating in the film Wretches
and Jabberers (Wurzburg 2010), a film that follows two autistics, Tracy Thresher
and Larry Bissonnette, in their travels to meet autistics in India, Japan, and
Finland, we see a familiar scene: Chammi types, one letter at a time, while his
mother facilitates not only by touching him but also, as is often necessary with
facilitated communication, by vocally encouraging him to continue when he

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becomes anxious. One sentence is typed. And then Chammi pushes the chair
away, runs into the next room, waves his fingers in front of his face, vocalises.
For someone unfamiliar with autism, it would seem he has completely lost
interest in the conversation. But soon he returns to his chair, where, out of the
frenzy of the movement, another sentence is typed. When asked about why he
needs to move around like this, Chammi types: “Killingly hard to figure out, the
pattern of movement I need to type my thoughts.”
Movement makes time, makes time felt. It activates the field in its emer-
gence, making felt how space–time composes with the time of the body, in the
bodying, and, in this case, with the time of language. But let us not forget that
the time of the body is doubled, petrification and spark, on a spectrum that is
precarious at both ends. As I did elsewhere, I’d like to think of the time of the
body in the moving as the shape of enthusiasm (see Manning 2013). Think of
the shape of enthusiasm not as a personalised body that is enthusiastic, but as
the experience of bodying that shapes the event and is shaped by it.
The shape of enthusiasm is itself a spectrum that swings in an oscillation
that moves from the potential energy or the energy-in-waiting of petrification,
to the expressive, potentialised energy of the spark. The shape of enthusiasm
gestures toward the more-than in the event at both ends of the spectrum, fore-
grounding how the in-act is operational both in its initial activation and in its
coming-to-be as this or that. This is an enthusiasm, a chaosmosis, not with life
already engendered, but in the very act of engendering. At the petrified limit,
an enthusiasm held in abeyance, absolute movement, energised potential. At
the exuberant limit, an enthusiasm fully expressive, in the moving.
Chammi’s frenetic movement between sentences foregrounds a bodying that
takes the shape of enthusiasm, a bodying here attuned to and in excess of the
articulation of words. This is shaping that defies description, at once anguished
and exuberant, frenzied and ineffable. Movement here is itself expressibility,
not a deviation from language, but its extension, in co-composition.
Amelia Baggs writes of this experience of the movement of thought in terms
of patterns. Through a focus on body language, she proposes that we rethink
the neurotypical stance of placing linguistic articulation as primary in the act of
communication. For her, the shape of enthusiasm is always before and between
language.

There are entire groups of autistic people out there who communicate with
each other using our own unique forms of body language that are different from
nonautistic body language, different from other autistic people’s body language,
specific to ourselves, specific to each other. Who communicate best reading each
other’s writing, looking for the patterns that exist between the words, rather than
inside the words themselves. Who communicate best by exchanging objects, by
arranging objects and other things around ourselves in ways that each other can read
easier than we can read any form of words. Who share the most intimate forms of
communication, outside of words, outside of anything that can be described easily,
in between everything, seeing each other to the core of our awareness. Who see
layers upon layers of meaning outside of any form of words.3 (Baggs 2013)

3
Baggs’s Ballastexistenz website has gone offline, though its archive remains. Her new blog can be found at
http://witha smoothroundstone.tumblr.com.

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Baggs also speaks of feeling patterns: “But I can see the patterns of movement
in other people, including cats, whether or not I see them well in the usual
forms of visual perception. And those patterns of movement tell me more than
any word ever could” (ibid.). These feeling patterns are felt expressions of a
language in the making that has not yet expressed itself in words, a language
closer to Bissonnette’s statement above regarding painting: “Artmaking is like
alliance people develop with their muscles after deep massage. You can move
freely without effort.” This is nonverbal communication, but it is also more
than that. It is a shape of enthusiasm in the sense that it creates a bodying, a
feeling of experience in the moving that invents its own time and takes that
time, operating mostly at the non-conscious level. Baggs (2013) emphasises this
when she says that “forms of nonverbal communication I understand best are
unintentional, in fact. That’s one reason tests using actors don’t work on me. I
know an autistic woman who failed a test of nonverbal communication because
it used actors and she kept describing their real feelings instead of their acted
ones.”
Patterns emerge, and in their emergence they create new kinds of expression
in the making, new shapes of enthusiasm in the bodying. As Chammi’s coming-
to-words through movement makes clear, language is in the moving. Language
moves in the shape of an enthusiasm that lingers precariously at once on the
side of anxiety, where there is always worry that communication will prove
impossible, and on the side of a kind of overpowering Spinozist joy that undoes
language of any pretence of linear representation, redefining what communi-
cation can be. In a post titled “the Obsessive Joy of Autism” Julia Bascom writes:

One of the things about autism is that a lot of things can make you terribly unhappy
while barely affecting others. A lot of things are harder. But some things? Some
things are so much easier. Sometimes being autistic means that you get to be incredibly
happy. And then you get to flap. You get to perseverate. You get to have just about the
coolest obsessions. . . .

It’s that the experience is so rich. It’s textured, vibrant, and layered. It exudes
joy. It is a hug machine for my brain. It makes my heart pump faster and my mouth
twitch back into a smile every few minutes. I feel like I’m sparkling. Every inch of me
is totally engaged in and powered up by the obsession. Things are clear.

It is beautiful. It is perfect.
. . . Being autistic, to me, means a lot of different things, but one of the best things
is that I can be so happy, so enraptured about things no one else understands and so
wrapped up in my own joy that, not only does it not matter that no one else shares it,
but it can become contagious.

This is the part about autism I can never explain. This is the part I never want to
lose. Without this part autism is not worth having. (Bascom 2011)

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The words just can’t do it on their own: the feeling, the carrying feeling, is so
excessive, the quality of its shaping too exuberant to be formulated. Hence
the rhythm of autie-type, its force of the metaphorical, a mobility that dances
before it signifies.
Depression in its alignment to anxiety petrified is not without vitality affect.
Nor is it without movement. It is as uncontainable as the spark of its oppo-
site. But its quality is different, and with this difference come different effects.
For its shape is always closing in on itself. Direct perception of movement-
moving is hampered. It’s like walking in molasses. If the shape of enthusiasm is
the tremulous field of expression itself, its exuberance, depression is the field’s
calcification at the limit where expressibility is closest to foundering, especially
when called on to order itself into a linguistic articulation. There is simply
nothing to say. But there is something to oink. Within the register of uneasy
communication, the opportunity to body, to sound, to express in a collective
voicing is nonetheless available, and it is this that Pelbart hears that after-
noon at La Borde, and it is also this, I believe, that we often hear in the words
that align to autistic perception. For the spectrum that precariously balances
between petrification and spark is extraordinarily mobile in its tending to one
or the other extreme, and perhaps especially so in autistic conversations where
each word, each letter typed, is a reactivation that must relocate the otherwise
dislocated, multiplying body.
Citing Anne Donnellan, Ralph Savarese writes about the challenge autistics
experience in “staging the customary relation of the senses and body parts,
which must subtly cooperate to produce the seamless integrity of neurotypical
functioning. The tricks that autistics employ to compensate—touching some-
thing to make sight useable, for example—reveal the necessary relation: there
are no discrete faculties. As the drive to pattern links distinct entities through
a process of visual, auditory or olfactory comparison, the equivalent shows up
in language through the practice of touch-based typing. Touch literally co­-
ordinates thought, and not just any kind of thought: rather, sensuous, rela-
tional thought” (Savarese 2012, 188). Language comes relationally and remains
relational: the process of facilitated communication only emphasises what is
everywhere the case: to act is never to act alone. Facilitation takes many guises.
For those whose body refuses to organise itself, it acts as an organising force, it
“coordinates thought, and not just any kind of thought: rather, sensuous, rela-
tional thought” (ibid.). For there is nothing more frustrating, I’m certain, than
when “ladle of doing language meaningfully is lost in the soup of disabled map
of autism.” Facilitation opens this “disabled map of autism,” thanks to a “pot-
holder of touch” (Bissonnette quoted in Savarese 2012, 189). And in the mix of
the thinking-feeling-become-writing, the poetic voice of autie-type emerges,
caught, always, between petrification and the spark.

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Schizoanalysis
The schism between expression and enunciation, the intense passage between
petrification and spark, the shape of enthusiasm that bodies, these are schizo-
analytic tendencies. Or, to put it differently, the schizoanalytic, the “non-I” of
the double that expresses itself as the schizo-flux in Anti-Oedipus, can be felt in
the bodying-forth that composes at the edges of language where the movement
of thought is most active. Schizoanalysis composes with autistic perception.
Autistic perception, as I have suggested before, emphasises a modality of
perception shared by all, but felt directly by so-called neurotypicals only under
certain conditions. Depression is one of those conditions. Exuberance is
another. In these conditions, what is felt is the precarious edge of existence
where experience is under transformation, where the field of expression still
resonates with its own becoming. Falling in love is an example of an event
where the shape of enthusiasm overtakes what is thought of as the bounded-
ness of the subject to foreground the opening the field of relation provokes.
The deep silence of depression, where the world seems to be infolding, or the
inner anguish of anxiety, where speeds and slownesses seem to be out of sync
with the world at large: these are also events where the relational field vibrates
and the sense of a preconstituted self falls away.
This state of vibratory composition, where self and other are not yet, and
where the categorical does not take precedence, is very much what Deleuze
and Guattari describe as the eventful field of potential. This field of potential
is not embodied by the personalised schizophrenic. As Deleuze and Guattari
([1977] 1983, 380) repeat throughout Anti-Oedipus, their interest is not in this or
that schizophrenic—“someone asked us if we had ever seen a schizophrenic—
no, no, we have never seen one”—but of a schizoid pole in the social field.
Over and over, they emphasise that schizoanalysis is not about the production
of a schizophrenic, but about the schizophrenic process. Of course, Guattari
worked daily with schizophrenics, but not with “the” schizophrenic, not with
schizophrenia as a general idea. Indeed, all the therapeutic techniques at La
Borde emphasised the singularity of a given therapeutic event: there was no
generalised therapeutic matrix. This is what Deleuze and Guattari emphasise
throughout Anti-Oedipus: schizoanalysis reinvents itself through each of its
desiring operations. It cannot be contained or described: it is always in the act.
This attention to the difference between the schizoid pole and the produc-
tion of the schizophrenic as an individual is similar to the distinction I make
between autism as a medical category and autistic perception. I am not making
a value judgement on autism when I describe autistic perception, nor am I sug-
gesting that all of autism can be subsumed under its mantle. Rather, I am draw-
ing attention to a perceptual tendency that seems to be extremely pronounced
within the autistic community, and also present in each of us who figure else-
where on the spectrum of neurodiversity. This perceptual tendency reminds us
that there is no preconstituted body that stands outside the act of perception,
and that objects and subjects are eventful emergences of a relational field in
emergence.

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Schizoanalysis, as Guattari (1996, 136) emphasises in an interview after the

publication of Anti-Oedipus, “introduces into analytic research a dimension of
finitude, of singularity, of existential delimitation, of precariousness in rela-
tion to time and values.” Unlike psychoanalysis, it does not seek to “discover”
the unconscious, but asks it instead to “produce its own lines of singularity,
its own cartography, in fact, its own existence” (ibid., 137). And it does so not
through the individual, but through the prepersonal force of the group sub-
ject, a collectivity through which experience becomes multiple. To bring to
it the language of autistic perception is to emphasise how the schizoanalytic
process foregrounds the becoming-multiple, in an emergent ecology, of the
shape of enthusiasm. Not this body, this experience, this identity, but a collec-
tive field-effect of relationscapes that map themselves out according to emer-
gent cartographies that exceed this or that subject or object. Experience makes
itself felt as multiple, and it is out of this multiplicity that an account of its
effects can be expressed. Like the conversation with the pigs, where the force
of the oinking exceeds one person’s voice, or even one person’s idea of what
constitutes a conversation, the becoming-multiple of experience through the
group subject allows a fractured, complex, and expressive field of enunciation
to emerge. This field resists interpretation: it cannot be explained away. In
Guattari’s (1996, 196) words: “the term ‘collective’ should be understood here
in the sense of a multiplicity that develops beyond the individual, on the side of
the socius, as well as on this side (so to speak) of the person, that is, on the side
of pre-verbal intensities that arise more from a logic of the affects than from a
well-circumscribed, comprehensive logic.”
Schizoanalysis is a practice that reorients itself continuously around the intu-
ition of a problem, in the Bergsonian sense. Its mantra is “What can a body do?”
“We cannot, we must not attempt to describe the schizophrenic object without
relating it to the process of production” (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 6).
Always linked to desire (also in the mode of production), schizoanalysis taps
into the force of a bodying that shapes experience into its exuberant potential,
exuberant not in its attachment to a subject, but exuberant in its chaosmosis,
in the force of its expression across the precarious chasm of petrification and
spark. A productive, material intervention emerges that takes the site of expres-
sion as exemplary of what it does, not what it fantasises. The goal is not to locate
the symptom. What happens, as Whitehead might say, happens, and it is how its
effects resonate that makes the difference. Speculative pragmatism. Not what
you think you see, but how the seeing materialises, and what it does. So you
don’t perceive chairs? Sit on the ground instead. The face doesn’t form? Follow
the light effects. Writing refuses to come linearly? Mobilise the words in the
moving. Stand! Run! Jump! Wave your arms! Huddle, vocalise: whatever it takes.
Because this is where the thinking happens, this is where language resides, a
language that does not need to come out in words, a language in the bodying.
A language in the bodying takes the shape of enthusiasm: it shapes desire in
the moving. “A truly materialist psychiatry can be defined . . . by a double opera-
tion: introducing desire into the mechanism, and introducing production into
desire” (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 22, translation modified).

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Desire
This is where Bifo gets it wrong, it seems to me, positing as he does desire as a
counterpoint to depression or panic. He writes:

The process of subjectivation is based on conditions that have dramatically changed

in the forty years since the publication of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Reading that book was a defining moment in my
intellectual and political experience, in the first years of the 1970s, when students
and workers were fighting and organizing spaces of autonomy and separation from
capitalist exploitation. Forty years after the publication of that book the landscape
has changed so deeply that the very concept of desire has to be rethought, as it is
marking the field of subjectivation in a very different way. (Berardi 2012)

According to Bifo, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of desire “is in itself a force
of liberation, and thus we did not see the pathogenic effects of the accelera-
tion and intensification of the info-stimuli, that are linked to the formation of
the electronic infosphere and to precarization of work” (Berardi 2012). And yet
Deleuze and Guattari are at pains throughout Anti-Oedipus to emphasise that
desire is not reducible to a force of liberation. As Guattari explains (1996, 128):
“Our conception of desire was completely contrary to some ode to spontaneity
or a eulogy to some unruly liberation. It was precisely in order to underline the
artificial, ‘constructivist’ nature of desire that we defined it as ‘machinic,’ which
is to say, articulated with the most actual, the most ‘urgent’ machinic types. . . .
Desire appears to me as a process of singularization, as a point of proliferation and
of possible creation at the heart of a constituted system.” No mode of existence
is outside the workings of desire, Deleuze and Guattari argue ([1977] 1983, 29):
“In truth, social production is desiring production itself under determinate
conditions. We maintain that the social field is immediately traversed by desire,
that it is the historically determined product of desire, and that libido has no
need of any mediation or sublimation, any psychic operation, any transforma-
tion in order to invest the productive forces and the relations of production.
There is only desire and the social and nothing else” (translation modified). To
think the shape of enthusiasm in its precarity is to emphasise the materiality of
Deleuze and Guattari’s argument in Anti-Oedipus: “Desire produces the real, or
stated another way, desiring production is nothing else than social production”
(ibid., 30, translation modified).
Desire produces not the social preformed, but sociality, “sociality for two.”
Always more-than, desire is what passes between, what reorients. Activated by
the minor gesture, desire is machinic: it co-composes with experience in the
making to tune it to what it can do. Nothing mechanistic here: only agencements.
Autistic perception sees-feels the workings of desire, its machining, its facil-
itating. It feels the workings of desire in the patterns Baggs writes about, in the
mobility in Bissonnette’s metaphors, in the “killingly difficult” of Chammi’s
description of coming to language. What is perceived at this desiring interstice
is the field itself in all its complexity, where, to quote Deleuze and Guattari
([1977] 1983, 42) again, “everything functions at the same time but amid hia-
tuses and ruptures, breakdowns and failures, stalling and short-circuits, dis-

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tances and fragmentations, a sum that never succeeds in bringing its various
parts together to form a whole” (translation modified). Productive disjunction,
or, in Deleuze and Guattari’s vocabulary, inclusive disjunction; a panoply of
indecipherable effects, directly felt, actively desiring in the rhythm of a collec-
tive oinking.
Undoing experience of its reordering through the figure of the stable “I,”
schizoanalysis is concerned first and foremost with opening experience to its
prepersonal singularities. This enables it to compose well with autistic percep-
tion and to design techniques that honour its precarity. For schizoanalysis is
allergic to all neurotypical commands.

The task of schizoanalysis is to tirelessly undo egos and their presuppositions; to

liberate the prepersonal singularities they enclose and repress; to mobilize the
flows they would be capable of transmitting, receiving or intercepting; to establish
always further and more sharply the schizzes and the breaks well below conditions
of identity; to mount the desiring machines that cut across each and group it
with others. For each is a groupuscule and must live as such. . . . Schizoanalysis is
so named because throughout its entire process of treatment it schizophrenizes,
instead of neuroticizing, like psychoanalysis. (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 362,
translation modified)

To push experience to its schizoid pole is to take seriously the way in which
modes of existence are multiple, uncountable in their potential expressivity.
Where the shape of enthusiasm is most palpable, this multiplicity is often
decried as “too much,” “too noisy,” “too uncontained,” as though a return to
the solitary individual will provide solace. Certainly, it helps to have access
to motor skills that can dependably find the right letter on the keyboard, but
surely this is not enough to convince us that multiplicity is a travesty. And yet
this is what we say every time we bemoan the fate of autistics, or when we speak
disparagingly about the complexity of neurologies that evade the comfortable
centre where existence tends to be most valued.
Anti-Oedipus remains a revolutionary book, and a current one. Taking the
force of desire as its mantra, it speaks not of pathologies that are disabling, but
to the very potential of moving away from what Guattari calls “normopathy.”
It’s amazing what a group of depressives can do! Just watch the news: demon-
strations are happening everywhere, and with each of them we see a reorienting
of modes of existence that challenge the neo-liberal politics which frames our
existence. Mobilisations in Turkey (Gezi Park, 2013) may begin to save a park,
but very soon they are about political reform, about neo-liberal dominance,
about new forms of life-living. And this is not an isolated case. In the 2012
Montreal student strike we saw a similar emphasis not on discrete demands
but on a wider rethinking of what it means to learn, to live, and to live well.
This, it seems to me, discredits Bifo’s suggestion that “the global movement
against capitalist globalization reached an impressive range and pervasiveness,
but it was never able to change the daily life of society. It remained an ethi-
cal movement, not a social transformer. It could not create a process of social
recomposition, it could not produce an effect of social subjectivation” (Berardi

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2011, 12). For Bifo, if demonstrations do not produce something recognised as

a different social system, they have made no difference. What about the what
else of the in-act? What about the unwieldy effects of their continuing activ-
ity? Doesn’t this separation—between the ethical and what Bifo calls “a social
transformer”—miss the point of the desiring machine that cuts to recompose?
Sure, the effects have not been felt in every corner of daily life. But they are felt:
a change can be felt in the post-strike classroom in Montreal, in the students’
commitment to study and to the undercommons.4 A change can be felt since
the wave of Occupy movements.5 A change can be felt across America in the
wake of Ferguson.6

As we waited, Cleveland cops took the life of Tanisha Anderson, a 37-year-old Black
woman suffering from bipolar disorder. Police arrived at her home after family
members called 911 to help her through a difficult crisis, but rather than treat her
empathetically they did what they were trained to do when confronted with Black
bodies in Black neighborhoods they treated her like an enemy combatant. When
she became agitated, one officer wrestled her to the ground and cuffed her while
a second officer pinned her “face down on the ground with his knee pressed down
heavily into the back for 6 to 7 minutes, until her body went completely limp.” She
stopped breathing. They made no effort to administer CPR, telling the family and
witnesses that she was sleeping. When the ambulance finally arrived twenty minutes
later, she was dead.

As we waited, police in Ann Arbor, Michigan, killed a 40-year-old Black woman

named Aura Rain Rosser. She was reportedly brandishing a kitchen knife when the
cops showed up on a domestic violence call, although her boyfriend who made the
initial report insisted that she was no threat to the officers. No matter; they opened
fire anyway.

As we waited, a Chicago police officer fatally shot 19-year-old Roshad McIntosh.

Despite the officer’s claims, several eyewitnesses reported that McIntosh was
unarmed, on his knees with his hands up, begging the officer to hold his fire.
As we waited, police in Saratoga Springs, Utah, pumped six bullets into Darrien
Hunt, a 22-year-old Black man dressed kind of like a ninja and carrying a replica
Samurai sword. And police in Victorville, California, killed Dante Parker, a 36-year-
old Black man and father of five. He had been stopped while riding his bike on
suspicion of burglary. When he became “uncooperative,” the officers repeatedly used
Tasers to try to subdue him. He died from his injuries.

4 Two years after the student strikes in Montreal (the Maple Spring), demonstrations are starting up
again, this time clearly focused on the effects of neo-liberalism (Lau 2014). For more on the Maple
Spring, see Theory and Event’s supplement on the Quebec strikes (Massumi, Barney, and Sorochan 2012).
5 See, for instance, Occupy London’s recent organising around austerity measures, detailed at http://
occupylondon.org.uk.
6 The death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black man, on 9 August 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, created
deep political unrest. The issues sparked by the shooting have only become more pressing in the wake
of the grand jury’s decision not to indict the police officer who shot him (24 November 2014). This has
mobilised social justice groups across the United States and brought a renewed visibility to the use of
unwarranted violence against black and brown people across America. While waiting for the verdict
in Ferguson, in a strong post called “Why We Won’t Wait,” Robin D. G. Kelley (2014) writes about how
Ferguson represents the continuation of a long history of ignoring violence in black and brown com-
munities (a long excerpt from this post follows). For more on Ferguson, see Kenneth Bailey’s Twitter
account (https://twitter.com/ds4si); Bailey and Lobenstine (2014); McFadden (2014).

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As we waited, a twenty-eight-year-old Black man named Akai Gurley met a similar

fate as he descended a stairwell in the Louis H. Pink Houses in East New York,
Brooklyn. The police were on a typical reconnaissance mission through the housing
project. Officer Peter Liang negotiated the darkened stairwell, gun drawn in one
hand, flashlight in the other, prepared to take down any threat he encountered.
According to liberal mayor Bill DeBlasio and police chief Bill Bratton, Mr. Gurley
was collateral damage. Apologies abound. He left a two-year-old daughter.

As we waited, LAPD officers stopped 25-year-old Ezell Ford, a mentally challenged

Black man, in his own South Los Angeles neighborhood and shot him to death. The
LAPD stopped Omar Abrego, a 37-year-old father from Los Angeles, and beat him
to death.

And as we waited and waited and waited, Darren Wilson got married, continued to
earn a paycheck while on leave, and received over $400,000 worth of donations for
his “defense.”
You see, we’ve been waiting for dozens, hundreds, thousands of indictments and
convictions. Every death hurts. Every exonerated cop, security guard, or vigilante
enrages. The grand jury’s decision doesn’t surprise most Black people because we are
not waiting for an indictment. We are waiting for justice or more precisely, struggling
for justice. We all know the names and how they died. Eric Garner, Kajieme Powell,
Vonderi D. Meyers, Jr., John Crawford III, Cary Ball Jr., Mike Brown, ad infinitum.
They were unarmed and shot down by police under circumstances for which lethal
force was unnecessary. We hold their names like recurring nightmares, accumulating
the dead like ghoulish baseball cards. Except that there is no trading. No forgetting.
Just a stack of dead bodies that rises every time we blink. For the last three
trayvonsgenerations, Eleanor Bumpurs, Michael Stewart, Eula Love, Amadu Diallo,
Oscar Grant, Patrick Dorismond, Malice Green, Tyisha Miller, Sean Bell, Aiyana
StanleyJones, Margaret LaVerne Mitchell, to name a few, have become symbols of
racist police violence. And I’m only speaking of the dead not the harassed, the beaten,
the humiliated, the stoppedandfrisked, the raped. (Kelley 2014)

Are things rough? Yes, absolutely. Neo-liberalism strangles potential every day.
But new techniques for life-living are also being invented every day, activated
by minor gestures that continuously transform what it means to act.

Activism
In a bid to do away with activism, Bifo writes:

The term “activism” became largely influential as a result of the antiglobalization

movement, which used it to describe its political communication and the
connection between art and communicative action. However, this definition is a
mark of its attachment to the past and its inability to free itself from the conceptual
frame of reference it inherited from the twentieth century. Should we not free
ourselves from the thirst for activism that led the twentieth century to the point of
catastrophe and war? Shouldn’t we set ourselves free from the repeated and failed
attempt to act for the liberation of human energies from the rule of capital? Isn’t the
path toward the autonomy of the social from economic and military mobilization
only possible through a withdrawal into inactivity, silence, and passive sabotage?
(Berardi 2011, 36–37)

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I would like to address Bifo’s remarks through a return to Wretches and Jabberers
(Wurzburg 2010), turning to a few scenes where conversations about activism
take place. Shortly after having arrived in India, in dialogue with Chammi, Larry
types: “I think we are big time movers making a difference in peoples’ lives who
can’t talk.” The words don’t come easily, and Larry has to fight a meltdown to
get them out, but still he finds a way to turn the conversation to what is most
important: the activist movement for neurodiversity. A similar encounter hap-
pens in Japan. Naoki, a prolific autistic writer and artist who lives in Tokyo, runs
up and down the stairs and seems to jump off the walls before he can sit down to
write. But then the words come, without pleasantries, immediately addressing
the urgent questions at hand. From Larry to Naoki: “Mobilize letters like pat-
terns of thought like proud autistics we are.” No time for small talk: every word
an effort. Writing, thinking, is in the act. And necessarily so, for the stakes are
clear. Tracy, who travels around the world with Larry for the making of the film,
does not at the time of the filming have a home: living conditions for autistic
adults are extremely precarious. Even though he serves on two state-level advo-
cacy committees, he depends on people who are paid to take care of him, and
wonders every day whether he will be able to continue to afford to pay them.
And yet his commitment to neurodiversity is unwavering. Depression, anxiety,
the agony of difference—these all remain. But they are not decisive in the way
Bifo suggests they are. Rather, they are productive, expressive of the multiplicity
of experience out of which the movement for neurodiversity composes. “Let’s
begin the world’s intelligence magnified organization,” Tracy types in conver-
sation with Naoki and Larry. In Finland, a similar encounter occurs. In their
first conversation, again without preamble, Antti, who spends his days in a care
centre folding towels and doing other kinds of busywork, types: “I’m interested
in talking about our current experience, how we have changed as people. . . . I
think now is a good time to bind the strings of friendship between us strong
people who will pass the message.” Later Tracy adds: “We are a perfect example
of intelligence working itself out in a much different way.”
In the act—the force of activism, of activist philosophy—is not about the
individual. At its best, it is about how the collective operates as a group subject.
This is what resonates in Wretches and Jabberers, not despite their anxiety, their
unwieldy over-sensing movements, their depression, but with this difference,
in the shape of its enthusiasm, because of it, in the urgency of expression that is
spoken in images that pull us into the movement of thought. Larry, Chammi,
Tracy, Naoki, Antti, and also DJ, Tito, Emma, Ido, and so many others feel they
have work to do, and they are doing it. This, again, not despite the exuberant,
frustrating, excessive, deactivating, joyful interruptions to the flow of words,
but with, in the act. Desire is revolutionary not when it is individualised (or
turned against itself, as in Bifo’s account of depression), but when it creates
differential effects. “And if we put forward desire as a revolutionary agency, it
is because we believe that capitalist society can endure many manifestations
of interest, but no manifestation of desire, which would be enough to make
its fundamental structures explode” (Deleuze and Guattari [1977] 1983, 379,

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translation modified). What is revolutionary is not the act in itself, but the
opening of the act to its ineffability, to its more-than.
When the more-than is explored in its effects, a schizoanalytic process has
begun. This process, as Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate, is not a method,
nor is it a therapy in any conventional sense. It is an emergent attunement
to the precarious range of petrification and spark, a tuning toward both the
frenzied vocalisations of the autistic and the rock-like silence of the depressive
(who may inhabit one and the same bodying). There is no hierarchy here—just
a set of productive effects from the disarray of a field in motion. The purpose is
not to organise or select, but to make the way for something else to emerge—a
collective oinking, an engaged discussion, a mobile patterning. From here, new
modes of existence begin to take form.
Neurodiverse modes of existence must be created, and they must compose
across difference in ways that remain mobile, in the act. Pathology is not the
answer. Co-composition across the spectrum is necessary, as much between
the precarity of the shape of enthusiasm at its two poles as on the spectrum
of our collective difference, autistic or not. For we all have access to autistic
perception, and we are all susceptible to falling into depression. For those of
us for whom autistic perception comes less quickly, less easily, perhaps, as I’ve
suggested before, it’s time to learn to chunk less, to refrain from quick categori-
sation. This will likely not end neo-liberalism, but it will continue the engaging
process of inventing what life can do when it composes across collective reso-
nances that listen to dissonance.
Bifo writes: “We have today a new cultural task: to live the inevitable with a
relaxed soul. To call forth a big wave of withdrawal, of massive dissociation, of
desertion from the scene of the economy, of nonparticipation in the fake show
of politics” (Berardi 2011, 148). Wouldn’t such a task be the very recipe for the
kind of depression Bifo forecasts? To act must not be overlaid with capitalism’s
call to do, to make. In the act is something different altogether: precarious, but
creative. Not creative of capitalism’s “newest new,” but creative of new forms of
value, new ways of valuing modes of existence in their emergence and dissolu-
tion, new alignments to the time of the event. The challenge: to maintain the
schism between the in-act and the act. Systems are quickly formed, as are our
habits of existence. And if these systems, these habits, reorient toward the indi-
vidual in the mode of the preconstituted subject, we can be sure that there will
be a deadening of the operations of the movement for neurodiversity. But this
isn’t where I think we’re headed. I prefer to listen to the autistics named above,
most of them young adults. For they reassure me: the in-act is where the joy is,
where the minor gestures tune experience to its more-than, where activity is
not yet dedicated to a cause, or to an effect, but open for the desiring.

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 Erin Manning

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?u=0ede54f6027b2abf3b7f48607&id= Pain.” Translated by Lang Baker. In The
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5 April. Accessed 24 May 2017. Guattari” in Jean Oury, Félix Guattari,
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autism/. Matrice), 45–83.
Berardi, Franco (Bifo). 2008. Felix Guattari: Kelley, Robin D. G. 2014. “Why We Won’t
Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Wait.” Portside, 25 November. Accessed
Cartography. Translated and edited 24 May 2017. http://portside.org/2014-11-
by Giuseppina Mecchia and Charles 27/why-we-wont-wait.
J. Stivale. London: Palgrave. In part, Lau, Rachel. 2014. “Tens of Thousands
first published 2001 as Félix: Narrazione Gather in Montreal, Quebec City for
dell’incontro con il pensiero di Guattari, Anti-austerity Protest.” Global News, 29
cartografia visionaria del tempo che viene November. Accessed 24 May 2017. http://
(Rome: Luca Sossella). globalnews.ca/news/1699395/anti-
———. 2011. After the Future. Edited by austerity-demonstrators-gather-at-place-
Gary Genosko and Nicholas Thoburn. du-canada/.
Translated by Arianna Bove, Melinda McFadden, Syreeta. 2014. “Ferguson,
Cooper, Erik Empson, Enrico, Goddamn: No Indictment for Darren
Giuseppina Mecchia, and Tiziana Wilson Is No Surprise. This Is Why
Terranova. Edinburgh: AK Press. We Protest.” Guardian, 24 November.
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Anti-Oedipus.” Through Europe, 12 nov/24/ferguson-no-indictment-darren-
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reassessing-recomposition-40-years- Enthusiasm.” In Always More Than One:
after-publication-anti-oedipus (page Individuation’s Dance, 184–203. Durham,
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Demon: An Atlas of Depression. New York:

509
 On the Concept of Creal
The Politico-Ethical Horizon
of a Creative Absolute
Luis de Miranda
University of Edinburgh

Process philosophies tend to emphasise the value of continuous creation as the

core of their discourse. For Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze, and others the real is
ultimately a creative becoming. Critics have argued that there is an irreducible
element of (almost religious) belief in this re-evaluation of immanent creation.
While I don’t think belief is necessarily a sign of philosophical and existential
weakness, in this paper I will examine the possibility for the concept of uni-
versal creation to be a political and ethical axiom, the result of a global social
contract rather than of a new spirituality. I argue here that a coherent way to
fight against potentially totalitarian absolutes is to replace them with a virtual
absolute that cannot territorialise without deterritorialising at the same time:
the Creal principle.

Back to the (anti-)absolute

How can communities of passion avoid the internal or external menace of
totalitarianism? By signing a global social contract in the name of pure and
absolute creation.
Such a contract would be the manifestation of an ethico-political agreement,
the consensual idea that an absolutised supra-axiom, carefully chosen, should
supersede values pertaining to specific and agonistic groups of power. I pro-
pose, with the help of Deleuze, Guattari, and Lacan, that such a contractual
universal should be a concept of immanent creation (“the Creal”), perhaps
the only absolute that, logically, would constantly self-destroy and re-emerge
again. This epistemic and existential Creal-strategy is expected to efficiently
prevent the over-territorialisation of hegemonic positions, thus providing
a stronger bulwark than the laissez-faire of capitalistic pseudo-relativism. A
non-anthropocentric creational axiom might also nurture a constitutional desire
for the kind of radical novelty that is a source of political and existential exper-
imentation and openness.
“Concept[s] must be created” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 5): I have taken
to calling this universal value Creal. I propose to call the horizon of its social
implementation Krealpolitik. This absolutist strategy can be understood as the
positing of an open common ground compatible with epistemic, social, and

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existential pluralism, now that the general devaluation of integrity and the
schizoid-paranoid form of individualism produced by capital-humanism have
failed to counter the totalitarianism of globalisation in which the formula
“laissez-faire” mostly liberates markets.

Enter Creal
The French novel Paridaiza (de Miranda 2008a) describes a totalitarian digital
duplication of our planet. A small group of rebels slowly subverts the hedon-
istic-fascist system in which millions of players were more or less willingly
imprisoned. The liberators implant a virus within the codes of the immersive
world in the form of a disruptive signifier. Five combined letters function as the
grain of sand in the gears: “Créel,” a French portmanteau neologism for créé-réel,
“created-real”—hence “Creal” in English.
In an essay on Deleuze (de Miranda 2008b), now republished in English (de
Miranda 2013), the concept of “Creal” qualified a non-anthropocentric multi-
universal of the kind proposed by modern process ontologies: “Creal” is
analog­ous to what Deleuze (1994, 117, 120) called “disparateness” or “second-
degree difference,” what Deleuze and Guattari (1994, 208) called “chaosmos” or
“plane of immanence,” what Bergson ([1911] 2007) called “duration,” “creative
evolution,” or “life,” and what Whitehead ([1929] 1976, 21) called “creativity
process,” adding that “creativity is the universal of universals characterizing the
ultimate matter of fact.” The Creal—that is, the Real as a “chaosmic” creative
stream—is not necessarily teleological: it is likely to exuberate in all real and
virtual directions, without a spiritually predefined goal.
The Creal might be the implicit dark matter of artists and poets. To artists,
pure creation is certainly a valid absolute, even if we were trained in the last
century to be suspicious of absolutes. Some artists would add that the less we
tried to control reality, the more creal we would become, as proposed for exam-
ple by the surrealists, chief among them Breton, who thought surreality was
“a sort of absolute reality” (Alquié 1965, 149). This reactivates one of the old-
est philosophical questions: destiny or agency? It is sometimes forgotten that
Deleuze and Guattari themselves, supposedly the champions of anti-volunta-
rism, did not advocate laissez-faire nor submission to chaos: “We require a little
order to protect us from chaos . . . We only ask that our ideas are linked together
according to a minimum of constant rules” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 202).
Accordingly, a Krealpolitik should act as a minimal “umbrella” against the rain
of chaos, such that it would remain chaos-friendly, as Gene Kelly in Singin’ In
the Rain, the man “deprived of consciousness” but pointing to the opposite
extreme: infinite consciousness (Deleuze 1989, 61).

Totemic “chaosmos”
Most process philosophers are cosmologists. Every cosmology possesses its
dark precursor, a prime entity, a universal—or multiversal—principle. “We call
this dark precursor, this difference in itself or difference in the second degree

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 Luis de Miranda

which relates heterogeneous systems and even completely disparate things,

the disparate” (Deleuze 1994, 120). If it were the central axiom of a post-post-
modern cosmology, the Creal would be such a disparation, an exuberation of
impressions, compositions, and decompositions, a constant suggestion of
“multiplicities of n dimensions” (Deleuze and Guatarri 1987, 212). Difference
is not only a movement; it is a feeling, proceeding from a glide of vibrations,
our metamorphic state of desire. Pure immanence is a pluriversal, not heading
anywhere in particular: it is “disparating.” The verb disparatar, in Portuguese,
means playing nonsense, going in all directions like a facetious child, machin-
ing manifestations of play: “We call this state of infinitely doubled difference
which resonates to infinity disparity. Disparity—in other words, difference or
intensity (difference of intensity)—is the sufficient reason of all phenomena,
the condition of that which appears” (Deleuze 1994, 222).
However, such non-mathematical cosmologies, easily disparaged in our sci-
entific times, can themselves be seen at best as acts of playful faith or artis-
tic ritournelles. To be a cosmologist might not be enough to participate in
cosmopolitics. Moreover, positing a source of all things could be interpreted as
a fetishisation of the past: do we need sources and ontological origins? Thus,
what I propose here as Krealpolitik aims to keep cosmology in the background
for a moment, in order to define the Creal as an axiomatic universal, rather
than insist on affirming its ontological truth. Not unlike Kant’s regulative prin-
ciple (Critique of Pure Reason A673/B701, Kant 1998, 607) politically and ethically,
what matters, what makes (a) difference (Deleuze 1994) is to consider the Creal,
pure creation, as if it were a true absolute, and keep such a virtuality in view.
Lacan ([1986] 1997) has shown how any discourse, any web of belief, revolves
around a more or less invisible absolute signifier, the effect of which is produced
by the structure of discourse itself, as a ghost in the machine (this is analysed
in detail in de Miranda 2007). To be sustainable, a structure, an order, a dis-
course, a tribe, need to rely on a totemic value or web of values sometimes vir-
tualised by the chain of signifiers, sometimes expressed in god-like—or spirit-
like—concepts. The universal or set of universals around which such-and-such
social reality is constructed maintains the cohesion of the ensemble by playing
the role of a slippery axis mundi, a master signifier (Lacan 1991, 56). It can func-
tion as an “essentially contested concept” (Gallie 1956), but it serves neverthe-
less the process of sense-making and world-making. Human discourses tend
to crystallise around an explicit or implicit web of belief to catch a maximum
of flies. Such “essential concepts,” when supported by a signifier, are often
paired with a pseudo-opposite signifier that entertains an illusion of openness
or debate: God (atheism), Capital (communism), Competition (solidarity),
Beauty (decadence), Science (faith), or more recently the “master algorithm”
(Domingos 2015) and its pseudo-opposite, the mysterious human factor. For
example, the absolute psychological value of neo-liberalism is, following Lacan,
jouissance (de Miranda 2007), and social control would be its pseudo-opposite
value.
If the revolutionary and poietic “people to come” (Deleuze and Guattari
1994, 218) do not nurture a meta-absolute, then conservative ensembles might

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 On the Concept of Creal

extend the dominion of their own absolute by overcoding unprotected pseudo-

relativist territories. Absolutised values are partly combat concepts, partly the
spirit of social bodies, and each group spirit, each “esprit de corps,” is both
a love and a “war machine,” even if war is not its main purpose (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987, 366).
Here the reader could ask, what would then be the pseudo-opposite of the
Creal? Answer: the One. Elsewhere I have shown in detail how for Deleuze the
line of multiplicity (of flight) and the molar line of unity are two asymptotical
horizons from which reality proceeds as a third line, a crack-up, a zigzag (de
Miranda 2013). A crealectician (an interpreter of the cosmic semiosis) is never
totally creal, and never totally one. Crealectics is a zigzag in between the actual
and the virtual, on the crest line. Reality is the offspring of the mutual and com-
plex admiration between the Creal and the One (a cosmological relationship
I have tried to describe in more detail in de Miranda 2012). Homothetically,
Krealpolitik shall propose the healthy psychological practice of admiration to
replace capitalist envy.

Krealpolitik
If we agree that plural and choral forms of intelligence and world-forming are
desirable, we might wonder how to harness “esprit de corps” in order to “sow
the seeds of, or even engender, the people to come” (Deleuze and Guattari
1987, 345).
Chantal Mouffe said: “While we desire an end to conflict, if we want people
to be free we must always allow for the possibility that conflict may appear and
to provide an arena where differences can be confronted” (Mouffe in Mouffe,
Laclau, and Castle 1998). Agonistic pluralism (Mouffe 2013) is the idea that a
constant war of absolutes can be politically and democratically virtuous and
fecund provided we let no absolute prevail, by institutionalising confronta-
tional argumentation, pluralism, and collective dissent. Yet this interesting
theory still presupposes that a global community of communities possesses a
meta-universal: in this case, even if it remains more or less implicit in her the-
ory, Mouffe’s ontological absolute is the very concept of conflict or struggle. It
remains a negative absolute.
In a similar fashion, most process cosmologies tend to defend an agonal or
agonistic conception of creation, at the risk of inoculating an essentialised
notion of eternal struggle in their ontology. Henri Bergson (1920, 31) spoke of
cosmic creation as an emotive machine that produced worlds and gods via a
constant combat of spirit against matter; for him, the equivalent of the Creal
was an “immense inflorescence of unforeseeable novelty,” and the real was the
solidified and somewhat zombified side of life. Deleuze and Guattari (1987)
spoke in various places of “esprit de corps” as the spirit of seditious collective
bodies, a ghost in a “war machine” intended to dissolve official forms of imperi­
alism and this also supposes a somewhat military vision of social life as war.
What if we replaced the still reactive and anthropocentric absolute of agony
and combat with a more affirmative and posthuman Krealpolitik?

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 Luis de Miranda

Let’s assume that each organised group will tend to conquer as much sym-
bolic and social territory as possible, by the virtue of corporate conatus and
esprit de corps. We could even assume for the sake of prudence that each com-
munity, even the most “innocent” one, tends to be a micro-fascist monopoly.
The institutionalisation of agonism that is proposed by Mouffe et al. to pre-
vent totalitarianism raises the question of the superstructural institution itself.
To avoid the naturalisation of war, I propose that all communities agree on a
positive absolute, a pure and constant creation of the real and of the unreal: the
Creal as an affirmative and generous politico-ethical principle that constantly
self-destroys and constantly re-emerges again, as does any desire-without-
object (de Miranda 2007).
To become a Creal-citizen, a chaosmopolite, is to be able to co-create a
plurality of worlds. It is not enough to say that the Creal is the concept of if,
the imaginary of possibility, the desire for alternatives, or the idea of infinite
probability. It needs to be the core axiom of a global social contract. Will this
global contract become a new form of secular religion? Perhaps, but in this case
religion would derive from politics and ethics, rather than the contrary.
If we are to equate pluralism and monism (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 20),
we ought to institute—by global social contract—a new form of postnational
citizenship based on an agreement concerning the superabundance of pure
creation as being our affirmative and consensual absolute value, a sort of polit-
ical and rational—but non-reductionist—religion. If we train ourselves to
believe that the world is not lack and void, ontological misery, but deep pros-
perity, this would be one step out of the discourse of crisis and austerity that is
used to undermine and eradicate the creative, poetic, and intellectual classes
in favour of a depressed guilty global precariat. The poietic classes are the global
refugees we forget to care about because capitalism trains the public opinion
against them out of ressentiment and envy. Capitalism tends to generate self-
hatred, renunciation, or culpability among the creative, poetic, and intellec-
tual classes because the latter tend to confuse, morally, the luxury and richness
of their perception of life with a socially privileged existence. A Krealpolitik
proposes instead a triumphant reappropriation of the promises of spiritual
fecundity and non-materialistic luxury.

Crealism and anthrobotics

Humans are “rope[s] over an abyss” (Nietzsche 1961, 43), bridges between Creal
and One. Our equivocal position in the middle of a chaotic universal, on one
side, and a unifying horizon, on the other, is our ethical chance: by identifying
neither with the multiplicity of the Creal nor with any unified world, we could
perhaps avoid falling into the anthropocentric ontology of war. Nothing is the
Creal because, by logical necessity, the Creal flows everywhere. All tends to become
at the same time one and many, and the biosemiotic reality thus produced is a
development of realities and discourses, following a crealectical materialism.
The paradox of realism is that these lines or webs of in-betweenness appear
solid, as for example in blood veins, institutions, or networks. But what if such

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 On the Concept of Creal

structures are scriptural intensities, or differences of interpretative intensities?

Protocols and institutions are a social manifestation of the attraction of One.
Art, philosophy, and poetry are a social manifestation of the strange attraction
of the multiple. Or vice versa. We can play the world-forming game healthily
as long as we don’t identify with our protocols. It is not only that humans are
particularly gifted in developing new tools and techniques: we might in fact
have always been social hybrids, on the one hand working unceasingly towards
social automation, functionalism, the organisation and codification of the
real, on the other hand engaging in more unstructured, aimless dispersions,
recreation, and developing chaosmic and emotional aspirations (Deleuze and
Guattari [1977] 1983; de Miranda 2010). We code and decode our protocols
under the dual influence of the Creal and the clamour of unity. We are semi-
automatic agents in collective hybrid systems made of desire and algorithms,
with a fluctuating zone of embodiment. The Creal-citizen knows that he or
she is an “anthrobot” (de Miranda, Ramamoorthy, and Rovatsos 2016), a mem-
ber of a poietic social machine. Human societies are organic, poetic, and arti-
ficial, and at every moment, we are products and producers, partly creators
and partly created, partly automata and partly agents capable of adaptability,
self-actuation, and sense-making (Di Paolo 2009). This is not only about auto­
poiesis: humans and non-humans tend to form webs of hieropoiesis, in which
what is produced is a certain idea and sensation of what is sacred.
If a collective is an axiomatic, intrinsically normative system, we can infer that
a Krealpolitik would satisfy the requisites of a healthy system when the choral
intelligence generated by the global social contract favours respectful and
harmonious collaborations between and within socio-technical assemblages,
human and non-human. Harmony however should not become an obsession
(the pseudo-opposite of War): machinic breakdowns are perhaps necessary to
allow for renewal.

Conclusion: a prolegomenon
This chapter was a short prolegomenon to the concept of Creal, with many
aspects left to unfold. It can be summed up as follows: humans tend to act
according to absolutised imperatives, whether they are conscious of them or
not. War, conflict, or struggle seem to be the dominant imperative of modernity.
To end this global regime of agony, I have proposed that we globally agree on a
common ultimate principle, the Creal.

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Columbia University Press. First Domingos, Pedro. 2015. The Master Algorithm.
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(Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Machine Will Remake Our World. New York:
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1977) Basic Books.
1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Gallie, W. B. 1956. “Essentially Contested
Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Concepts.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian
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Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason.
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(New York: Viking Press). Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Riga: Verlegts J.
———. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism F. Hertknoch).
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Mille plateaux (Paris: Minuit). Alain Miller. Translated by Dennis Porter.
———. 1994. What Is Philosophy? Translated New York: Norton. First published 1986
by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham as Le séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre VII:
Burchell. New York: Columbia University L’éthique de la psychanalyse, 1959–1960
Press. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que (Paris: Seuil). This translation first
la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit). published 1992 (New York: Norton).
De Miranda, Luis. 2007. Peut-on jouir du ———. 1991. L’Envers de la psychanalyse. Le
Capitalisme? Lacan avec Heidegger et Marx. Séminaire Livre XVII. Paris: Seuil.
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———. 2008a. Paridaiza. Paris: Plon. World Politically. London: Verso.
———. 2008b. Une vie nouvelle est-elle possible? Mouffe, Chantal, Ernesto Laclau, and Dave
Deleuze et les lignes. Paris: Nous. Translated Castle. 1998. “Hearts, Minds and Radical
by Marie-Céline Courilleault, revised by Democracy.” Red Pepper, 1 June. Accessed 1
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as de Miranda 2013. hearts-minds-and-radical-democracy/.
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De Miranda, Luis, Subramanian Whitehead, Alfred North. (1929) 1978. Process
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 Affects of Indeterminacy
and Silence as
Aleatory Intervals between
Art and Philosophy
A Deleuzian Reading
Janae Sholtz
Alvernia University

Gilles Deleuze is well known for contemplating the emergence of thought as

an aleatory moment, an event whereby sense is wrested from a mute, imma-
nent field of sensibility: “that blind, acephalic, aphasic and aleatory original
point which designates ‘the impossibility of thinking that is thought,’ that
point where ‘powerlessness’ is transmuted into power” (Deleuze 1994, 199).
This event is provoked rather than internally generated, and it is provoked by
a dark precursor, which Deleuze associates with the sentiendum, the contempla-
tion of which has led to proliferating discussions on the nature of affect and
how art might intervene upon philosophy, opening a space for thought to
become otherwise. Unarguably, Deleuze ascribes a radical and unique power
to affects that concepts, and therefore philosophy, lack in and of themselves:
whereas concepts “lack the claws of absolute necessity . . . of an original vio-
lence inflicted upon thought,” affects epitomise “the claws of a strangeness or
an enmity which alone would awaken thought from its natural stupor or eter-
nal possibility ” (ibid., 139). It seems that between art and philosophy a special
becoming-thought is or can be engendered; yet, I argue that this provocation of
thought requires a precursory activity, to develop a sensitivity to immanence by
and through the intensification of the interval of the affect itself.
I am interested in what kinds of activities, affects, and encounters can open a
space whereby this sensitivity arises, in order that the very processes and mobil-
ity of thinking can get off the ground. Preliminarily, we can say that these will
be affects that have a potential to disrupt and change the flows and cadences
of present configurations, to open a space whereby we can sensitively engage
and immerse ourselves in our immanent milieu. To elucidate this, I will focus
on the performative practices of John Cage, in particular his explorations of
silence, and the Fluxus exploration of indeterminacy, particularly in Philip
Corner’s Piano Activities (1962) and Dick Higgins’s The Thousand Symphonies
(1968). As paradigmatic examples of producing new affects through experi-

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mental art and performance, they open a space for an experience of affect from
the side of immanence. Yet, we must also ask what these affects can do for us
now. Therefore, the more nuanced response is to ask, what affects do we need
today? and conduct something of a critical historical analysis. In the following
three sections, “Affect today,” “The power of the artwork,” and “Intersection
with art practices,” I explore the potential of affect as a form of resistance to our
contemporary present and present the creation of these affective encounters as
an ethical imperative.

Affect today 1
Drawing upon the work of leading figures in affect theory, Colebrook (2011,
45) provides a diagnosis of modern culture as “suffering from hyper-hypo-
affective disorder” exacerbated by the appropriation of affect through and by
capitalism, wherein we experience affect in terms of a diminishing intensity, all
the while addicted to the consumption of more and more affects. The capac-
ity to circulate affect becomes a matter of capitalist production, where bodily
affect is mined for value and the media is in the business of circulating and
continuously modulating and intensifying affect. Food, sex, and sociality are all
marketed affectively, leading to affect fatigue whereby the wider the extension
of affective influx, the greater the diminishment of intensity. Thus Colebrook
(ibid.) observes that we are in the grips of two catastrophic tendencies: “a loss
of cognitive or analytic apparatuses in the face of a culture of affective imme-
diacy, and yet a certain deadening of the human organism” and its migration
towards the generic.
What becomes clear is that affects, in and of themselves, cannot save us from
an over-intellectualised, over-rationalised world, nor will they necessarily be
agents of change in our perceptions or behaviours. The reason for this is that
affect has already become the mode of exchange in our current economy. In
other words, they are the mediums through which we rationalise, intellectual-
ise, and process information. Even neurologically, we have become predisposed
to affective consumption, oriented toward “the flashing stimuli of detached
intensities” (Colebrook 2011, 48), and the immediacy of affective stimulus.
Colebrook is careful to warn against a reductive account of this phenome-
non—it is not cause to merely lament the demise of cognitive capacities or to
condemn a socius fallen into superficiality. Rather, her point is that we are wit-
nessing a shift in the relations that we understand between stimulus and con-
cepts, which must be accounted for rather than either lamented or, conversely,
celebrated. Affect must be considered as part of our cognitive processes, a com-
plexification of the reactions and relations of the socius to its environs.

1 I utilise an extended version of this analysis to examine the power of the affect in light of current politi-
cal and ecological dilemmas in my article “Deleuzian Intervals of Resistance: Being True to the Earth in
the Light of the Anthropocene” (Sholtz, forthcoming).

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 Affects of Indeterminacy and Silence as Aleatory Intervals

To think through these issues, Colebrook calls upon the work of Deleuze and
Guattari, as thinkers who focus on the relation between brain, body, intellect,
and affect. Yet, while she is sympathetic to their work to uncover the power or
force of affect and its centrality in human experience, she is also critical of the
way that Deleuze’s emphasis on affect has been reintegrated into discussions
of affectivity—that is, of the assumption that the force of affect can be referred
back to the affectivity of an organised living body. To see beyond this dilemma,
we have to separate affect from affectivity in a more robust way. We need a con-
cept of affect that would open a space for thinking beyond the immediacy of
the “ready and easy responses craved by our habituated bodies” (Colebrook
2011, 50). We have to think the autonomy of the affect, a project that I have
taken up idiosyncratically by advocating the creative invention of singular
spatio-temporal intervals.

Thinking the autonomy of affect as the space of affect

This understanding of affect is certainly one that has it roots in the kind of
autonomy that Deleuze ascribes to affect: “Affects . . . go beyond the strength
of those who undergo them” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 164)—and it is most
certainly his account upon which my own work relies. Yet, within the field
of affect studies, the idea of autonomy is most notably associated with Brian
Massumi’s “The Autonomy of Affect” (1995). There, his main conclusion is that
the affective is marked by a gap between effect and content, where the content
is fixed by socio-linguistic qualification and signification. In other words, affec-
tive responses do not necessarily match the “meaning” presented in images.
The primacy of the affect is what Massumi wishes to elaborate, and the auton-
omy of the affect is related to its status as prior to signifying, linguistic, even
cognitive applications. He develops the idea of the immediate and direct effect
of affect or intensity on the brain, an interpretation that is certainly motivated
by Deleuze’s statement that the affect works directly upon the nervous system.
His particular interpretation of the impersonal nature of affect is radical, in
that he is claiming that because of this immediate directness, we cannot even
say that we have experienced affect; and he implies that affect is something that
works on us, through us, and over which there is absolutely no control.
Yet, returning to Colebrook’s demand for an account of affect that does not
become reintegrated into the lived body and affectivity as such, I want to argue
that we need to develop an even more radical account of affect’s autonomy.
Namely, that affect exists independently of living bodies altogether; affects
are materially separate, active entities that act upon our bodies, a view that I
believe is latent within Deleuze’s account, but, because of our tendency to rely
upon phenomenological description and anthropological association of affect
with various types of feelings, is immediately lost.
In other words, affect must be perceived as not incumbent upon the affectiv-
ity of the subject but rather as an autonomous monument, comprising circuits
of force, which stand alone, outside the body. To really underscore the auton-
omy of the affect, it is important to remember Spinoza’s influence on Deleuze’s
understanding of affect (see Deleuze 2016). Deleuze notes that in the Ethics

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one finds two words dealing with affection, affectio and affectus. The inherent
duplicity of affect is that it is both an effect that a given object or practice has
on its beholder and a self-sufficient, autonomous element in the world that is
not dependent upon a subject. What we have come to commonly understand as
affect, that point of contact or the effects of the rising and falling of our own reg-
isters, are encompassed within this phenomenon but do not make up its whole
story. Affect implies an utterly indispensable externality, itself a body or force
impinging upon and separate from our own. Affect, understood thus, opens
us to a different temporality than the affections that we feel through the lived
body. This temporal disconnect can destroy the sense of phenomenal immedi-
acy and open the intensive potential of affects (Colebrook 2011, 50), and thus
would destroy the efficiency of an economy that systematically and seamlessly
incorporates and neutralises affect by creating a system of hyper-consumption
that paradoxically anesthetises the social body from the force of affect itself.

The power of the artwork

It is at this point that we must invoke the power of the artwork; art presents an
occasion to understand the nature of the affect as that which exists independ-
ent of our affective registers yet has a unique potential to disrupt and recali-
brate our affectations. Deleuze emphasises the particular double potentiality
of artworks in The Logic of Sensation (2003) and returns to this particular relation
of affect and art in What is Philosophy?, where he says explicitly: “It should be
said of all art that, in relation to the percepts or visions they give us, artists are
presenters of affects, the inventors and creators of affects. They not only cre-
ate them in their work, they give them to us and make us become with them”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 175).
According to Colebrook (2004, 18), “The power of art [is] not just to present
this or that affect, but to bring us to an experience of any affect whatever or
‘affectuality’—or that there is affect,” buttressing my claim that before the provo­
cation of thought through the sentiendum, we must consider what it means to
engender a sensitivity to that realm in the first place. For Colebrook (2011, 51),
experiencing the artwork’s capacity to “create circuits of force beyond the view-
er’s own organic networks” opens up a space of delay, frustrating immediate
gratification. Posing this possibility of delay or interval becomes the occasion
for thinking forces detached from the lived. Affect, rather than a response (the
biological and internal model) must be considered from the perspective of
that by which we are confronted and as having an entirely “other” and exter-
nal nature. I interpret this to mean that, in this gap between our lived bodies
and the affect as a stand-alone entity, a space opens up for us to experience the
inhuman, the forces of immanent being out of which we are generated.
Thus in my work, to Colebrook’s demand for thinking the temporality of
affect as an interval that breaks up the immediacy of our subjective experience,
I have begun to develop an account of how this also allows us to imagine affect
in spatial terms, as a place in which inhuman forces can arise, or be illumi-
nated. Rather than an empty space, or gap between spaces, an interval has to

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be thought of as a temporal-spatial dimension that is already full, a crystallisa-

tion and slowing down of the space that is already present, with its myriad rela-
tions, dynamisms, and forces. We must therefore consider the kind of affects
that must be generated in order to allow us to engage with this new concept of
affect. Of course, affects are generated in a myriad of ways, but there is a special
relation between affect and art, as it is here that new affects are created. The
artwork makes the affect visible in ways that our fleeting interactions with them
on a daily basis do not.

Intersection with artistic practice

The claim then is that not only does art possess the potential to open spatio-
temporal intervals, but it is uniquely poised to do so in a way that calls upon
the artist in the mode of obligation. Where and how can one escape from the
singular economy of production if not in the intervals and spaces that artists
uniquely open up. Of course, this is a potential of art, not its essence, a poten-
tial that becomes an imperative if one desires a different future—an impera-
tive, I am arguing, to produce affects that are themselves embodiments of delay
or interval.
The feat of the artist is to straddle the line between chaos and order, to pro-
vide just enough consistency within the artwork for the myriad forces that
are being captured to hold together, while allowing them the most freedom
possible. These artworks would be frames around chaos—studies of intensity
that could make visible or amplify the forces themselves, forming what could
be considered a pulsating space by purposely flirting with and precariously
maintaining the tension between these two tendencies. Thus, these spaces of
affect would constitute an opening of immanence, an interval, within which
we could tarry, to produce a sensitivity to this intensive and immanent realm
that normally eludes us, or through which we clumsily pass unaware. I would
like to point to several art practices that help us understand this possibility, art
practices that create or provoke particular kinds of affect, as intervals in which
forces of immanence overwhelm us.

Silence and indeterminacy as affect/intervals

It may seem strange to speak of affects of silence and indeterminacy, rather
than concepts of silence and indeterminacy, but this is exactly the precipice
that must be traversed to shift towards an understanding of the visceral rather
than merely intellectual, that is, the autonomous power of affect. These affects,
in particular, resist easy incorporation and they are unlike other affects that can
be immediately connected to our own affective registers (as our tendency is to
understand the products of art as reflecting our own anthropocentric registers
and language of affectivity). I want to claim that these particular affects pro-
voke an experience of interval or delay required for shattering the subjective
paradigm and thus initiating us into a realm of inhuman force and immanence,
which we have called an imperative for thought.

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Here, I would like to consider John Cage’s explorations of silence and inde-
terminacy as affects that have the aforementioned power. Cage is perhaps most
well known for developing chance operations, which are meant to eliminate the
subjective intention involved in creating and highlight the aleatory as the main
operator of the work. In his composition Music of Changes, Cage casts the runes
of the I Ching as a way of determining the structure of the composition through
the invocation of contingency. Yet, what is interesting is that Cage situates the
aleatory in a larger framework beyond the orchestration of chance operations.
What he suggests is that his method of chance operations was a stage along
the way to exploring something more profound, the indeterminate, which is
accessed by abandoning structure—chance or otherwise—altogether. For this
reason, Cage emphasises the importance of the indeterminate with regard
to performance. The purpose of indeterminacy is to bring about an unfore-
seen situation (Cage 1961, 35–37), and though chance operations succeed in
rendering the structure of a composition unknown from the beginning, the
performance itself is foreseeable as it follows the edicts that the chance opera-
tions have determined. Cage maintains that, “more essential than composing
by means of chance operations, it seems to me now, is composing in such a
way that what one does is indeterminate of its performance” (ibid., 69)—a nec-
essary progression from the intentional incorporation of the aleatory (chance
operations) to a process that is itself aleatory (indeterminate).
Simultaneously with these experimental operations, Cage develops a theory
of silence, of which one only becomes aware once the structure and process of
composition is disrupted. Silence, traditionally, is seen to be the counterpart
to sound, a mode of duration. Silence, then, is thought of in terms of struc-
ture—the division of time-lengths—the partitioning of sound and silence.
Cage’s first attempts through the I Ching to make structure aleatory lead him
to understand that structure is not necessary at all. In relation to a subsequent
work, Music for Piano, Cage (1961, 22) says that structure is no longer part of
the composition. There is a purposelessness to it, an activity characterised by
process alone. It is in this context that he asks, what happens to silence, or the
mind’s perception of it?
Rather than a time-lapse between sounds, where there is a predetermined
structure or an organically developing one, “silence becomes something else—
not silence at all, but sounds, the ambient sounds. The nature of these is unpre-
dictable and changing. These sounds . . . may be depended upon to exist. The
world teems with them, and is, in fact, at no point free of them” (Cage 1961,
22–23). Cage insists that new music is nothing but sounds (7), those that are
notated and those that are not. The non-notated sounds are “silences, opening
the doors of the music to the sounds that happen to be in the environment”
(8). Silence is not void, empty space; it is an affect that holds open a space for
the unintentional, ambient sounds that pre-exist us, that compose us, that
exceed our activities: “inherent silence is equivalent to denial of the will” (53).
Therefore, silence is a filled space, a space of plenitude, that eradicates the pri-
ority of our cognitive and affective circuits, and which opens an interval for that
which arises independently therein—that is, concatenations of myriad forces

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of the external and yet immanent environment in which we are immersed.

The composition becomes what arises in these spaces of silence, an interval in
which immanent materiality and forces arise.
Next, I turn to the somewhat nebulous early 1960s neo-avant-garde art col-
lective Fluxus; many key members associated with Fluxus attended Cage’s
renowned and influential lectures at the New School for Social Research, which
may be why Fluxus’s overarching paradigm bears the mark of indeterminacy.2
The question we wish to develop is, what do Fluxus affects do? Preliminarily, I
propose that Fluxus performances are paradigmatic of resistance and mobil-
ity. Both these features are integral to developing what I am calling the “affect
of indeterminacy,” which could serve as a visceral experience of what Deleuze
truly would like us to understand—the power of the affect as a transformative
moment.
The first example of this is Philip Corner’s Piano Activities, performed at the
1962 International Festival of the Newest Music in Wiesbaden as Fluxus’s first
public event. This piece is an extension of Cage’s marriage of chance and com-
positional direction, known as an event score. The event score is a feature of
Fluxus that highlights the desire to create artworks as unforeseeable events,
artworks that evince a certain irrevocable indeterminacy. Corner’s “score”
provides no explicit directives, and only a minimum of notation and instruc-
tions, so that its method of performance would be entirely determined by the
performers (Smith 2005, 75). The performers radically interpreted the score
to include the methodical yet random destruction of the piano itself while it
was being played by Nam Jun Paik. It was described as a liberation of sound
from musical form, the release of a new kind of sensible being. The impact of
this performance was profound; it was met with shock from the community,
outrage, and even riots. Corner’s piece is iconic, and the extremities of the
reaction of the audience suggest an inability to properly assimilate the perfor-
mance. No one knew how to react because the affect that was introduced was
the indeterminate itself; as such, it opened up an interval between the phe-
nomenal experience and the immanent space of its appearance.
This emphasis on immanence and indeterminacy translates into a political
provocation as well. Fluxus events were a response to the violence of war and
the cultural cannibalism and assimilation of their day. These performances,
with their emphasis on the contingent and indeterminate, were meant to jolt
the audience and break open the established structures of reception. In other
words, Fluxus lines of flight were not just means of escape, nor were they reac-
tive to the present, they were meant to create new modes of being and perceiv-
ing. Indeterminacy was a form of resistance for Fluxus—resistance to a prevail-
ing arts culture based on commodification, resistance to prevailing art forms,
resistance to social normalisation, resistance to perceptual habitualisation, in
essence, resistance to its present.

2 An extended version of this discussion of Fluxus and these examples can be found in my book, The
Invention of a People: Heidegger and Deleuze on Art and the Political (Sholtz 2015).

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An artwork that captures the spirit of Fluxus, its commitment to open-

endedness and indeterminacy, is Dick Higgins’s The Thousand Symphonies. This
score was realised by Higgins enlisting a New Jersey Police officer to fire a 9
mm MP40 “Schmeisser” submachine gun at sheets of orchestral music paper.
The event has been retrospectively described by the Graham Foundation as
“an act of simultaneous destruction and creation, the gesture emphasized the
use of guns for a purpose other than killing Viet Cong and scattering protes-
tors” (Graham Foundation 2012). It is also an act of resistance constituted by
creating an interval that confounds expectations and leads to the reconfig­
uration of immanent relations through its very indeterminacy and multiplic-
ity. In the performance of the event, orchestral sheets were placed in a metal
wastebasket, which was fired upon by the police officer. Bullets ripped through
the pages, producing random holes and marring them with heat scars, which
were later stencilled onto upshot paper using paints and inks, and formed the
basis for several symphonies. From a Deleuzian perspective, this is an event of
becoming, whose outcome (the actual score) is absolutely unforeseeable. The
performance reveals that there are a thousand scores implicit in the pages. No
possibility has been eliminated by selection, by consideration of form, musical
methodology, or harmony; and like Cage’s silence, it highlights the immanent
plenitude from which any singular event is created. The affective potentials are
thus liberated from their immanent context.
The assiduous incorporation of chance and indeterminacy into performance,
culminating in our final example, evidences the commitment of Fluxus to a
contingent, unknowable future, and gives us hope that the future is possible,
but only if we are able to find a way to resist or disrupt the present. Perhaps in
revisiting this movement, with special attention to the affects that it was able to
release, we can engage a new potential—a space in which humanity can come to
understand itself from a new conception of immanence and affect, to become
a people sensitive to an open, dynamic system of intensities, forces, and multi­
plicities. This is not to become inhuman, but to think about the human, or
being human, differently, as an open possibility constantly bombarded by and
in tandem with myriad forces and affective relations to other beings, human
and otherwise. It is to inhere, to dwell even, in the same space—the interval.
Yet, it is to be differently attuned to this immanent space. Finally, this gives us
a vision of resistance: it happens in the cracks and intervals of time and space.
It is not loud, but rather the silence of increasing intensity, the eventual release
of an amplified force that tears through spaces, speaks to a new sensibility, and
opens vulnerability to the aleatory power of the outside­—for which art pre-
pares the way.

References
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Cage, John. 1961. Silence: Lectures and Writings. First published 1991 as Qu’est-ce que la
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University philosophie? (Paris: Minuit).
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———. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Massumi, Brian. 1995. “The Autonomy of
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———. 2016. “Cours Vincennes: Spinoza; ———. Forthcoming. “Deleuzian Intervals
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Murphy. Les cours de Gille Deleuze. Accessed in the Light of the Anthropocene.” In
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 Something Along
the Lines of . . .
Mick Wilson
University of Gothenburg

FLIGHT/ESCAPE. Both words translate fuite, which has a different range of

meanings than either of the English terms. Fuite covers not only the act of fleeing or
eluding but also flowing, leaking, and disappearing into the distance (the vanishing
point in a painting is a point de fuite). It has no relation to flying.

—Brian Massumi (1987, xvi)

Introduction
This text is conceived as a response to the mobilisation of a figure—“lines of
flight”—derived from the work of Deleuze and Guattari and variously deployed
within the rhetorical framing of artistic research. In addition to the Deleuze
and Guattari quotations, several other textual sources are substantially drawn
upon, two in particular are centrally important: the poetry of Edward Kamau
Brathwaite, specifically the section “Atumpan” from his Masks of 1968;1 and
the media reporting of the sinking of a boat and the drowning of hundreds of
refugees and migrants off the Sicilian island of Lampedusa on 3 October 2013.2
Through the interaction of these quotations there is an attempt to problematise
the currency of the “lines of flight,” drawing upon explicitly “rhetorical” strata­
gems in both the construction of the text and in the unfolding performance
of the text. The performance of the text employs a strategy of double-voicing,
whereby a single reader-speaker switches between alternate modes of voicing
the text: the first voice manifesting a manner of modestly inflected and partly
ironising utterance (familiar in the context of an academic conference), and
the second voice adopting a more declamatory mode, shifting between incan-
tatory and demagogic registers.3

1 Part III of Sequence 1 “Libation” from Masks (Brathwaite [1968] 1973).

2 The boat was transporting mostly Eritrean, Somalian, and Ghanaian people from Africa to Europe,
hundreds—the official number is 368—of whom drowned in one of an ongoing series of disasters at sea
that continue as of writing in January 2017 (see Fortune 2015; BBC News 2013).
3 This text is a partially revised version of one that was performed at The Dark Precursor conference at
the Orpheus Institute, Ghent, in November 2015. The two “voices” identified in the text were realised
with a somewhat pronounced sense of contrivance and artifice; over the course of reading the text, the
distinction in the performance of the two voices began to collapse. There is an attempt to maintain
this partly unsettled construction of the text (i.e., unsettled in terms of range of citation, genre, mode
of address, and tonality) in the printed version, because these formal tactics are seen to be integral to
the work that the text seeks to perform. It is proposed that the text be read aloud so that the reader may
decide upon the suasive ambition of this unsettled construction.

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 Something Along the Lines of . . .

First voice: It seems clear by now, if there ever was any doubt, that there is no
hegemonic dispensation as to what constitutes the propriety of research activ-
ity for the arts. From the anglophone “practice-based research” and “practice-
led research” to the more mainland European construction of “artistic
research”; from “sensuous knowledge”4 to “non-knowledge” (Maharaj 2009);
and from “art/science” to “nameless science”;5 from “embodied knowledge”6
to “dissident” knowledge;7 from the “amethodos hyle”8 of artistic process to the
radical opacity and singularity of the “artists’ method”; from “wild knowledge”
to “evental” knowing . . . many competing accounts of the specificity, saliency,
and viability of the arts as apparatuses of enquiry or as hotbeds of dissenting
knowledge work, are still in play, and are still in contest.
However, this contest over the nature of artistic research is marked not
only by a confident multiplication of nomenclature but also by recurrent
pronouncements on the institutions of expertise and knowledge in general,
on the encumberments of the university, and on the vale of tears that is the
Bologna process.9 Within this field of discursive production there is a marked
tendency to problematise the university and the modern system of disciplines
but to naturalise the artist and the modern system of the arts (and their pos-
ited commonality, variously construed in terms of “the aesthetic,” “affect,” and
“embodiment”). Furthermore it is often proposed, implicitly or explicitly, that
the naturalised category of “Art” has an intrinsically critical potentiality that
manifests various resistances to what are seen as pervasive systems of domina-
tion and control.
I do not wish to align with this tendency, and this motivates a challenge to the
currency of the “line of flight” as a motif within the naturalisation of “A”rt—and
by extension artistic research—as the bearer of an intrinsic capacity for critical

4 The Sensuous Knowledge conferences started in Norway in 2004 as an international venue for present-
ing and discussing artistic research projects: “to contribute to the creation and refining of a discourse
for critical reflection on artistic research” (Sandborg 2013).
5 The term is taken from the exhibition and seminar organised by Henk Slager at apexart in New York in
2008 (see http://www.mahku.nl/news/733.html). The term was earlier employed by Giorgio Agamben
(1999) in his essay on Aby Warburg’s move beyond the dispensations of traditional art history as estab-
lished in the late nineteenth century.
6 See for example “Reasoning through Art: The Articulation of Embodied Knowledge,” a seminar led by
Henk Borgdorff at Plymouth University in February 2016 (see https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/whats-on/
reasoning-through-art-the-articulation-of-embodied-knowledge).
7 The “Trans-decorative” research group at Nottingham Trent University announces its research focus in
terms that invoke the “dissident” as part of the specific affordance of research through a craft practice:
“The Trans-decorative—researching transgressive methods for interrogating the decorative and orna-
mental. Researchers in this area explore the intersection and collision of transgressive and decorative
practices; the meeting point between seemingly contradictory tendencies or approaches. Transgressive
here indicates that which is deviant, degenerate, dissident and unorthodox, while decorative describes
the ornamental, ornate, over-elaborate, opulent and pretty” (Nottingham Trent University 2017).
8 The term “amethodos hyle” is taken from Droysen’s reflections during his critique of Buckle on the
attempt to impose the terms of the natural sciences onto the practice of history within the debates in
nineteenth-century German universities (see Droysen 1893). The term points to “unordered matter”
or the resistance of historical experience to the taxonomising ordering (“method-ising”) of nine-
teenth-century natural sciences. It is a term that has been cited recently within the debates on artistic
research, both by way of proposing a historical comparison with other historical knowledge conflicts
in the university system, and by way of invoking commonalities across conventionally “artistic” and
“non-artistic” practices of enquiry in terms of their methodological quandaries.
9 For a discussion of these points and an outline of the wider debates see Wilson and van Ruiten (2013).

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micropolitical resistance or escape from a systematically controlling and irre-

deemably compromised institutional order. It is proposed that the currency
of this figure is especially problematic when it is accompanied by the refusal
of ideological analysis, which draws its legitimation from an argument-from-
authority mode of reasoning that cites the well-known disdain for ideology
critique rehearsed by Deleuze and Guattari. It may well be that an analytic
of ideology is precisely what will best help us understand why the currency
of this figure accompanies a renewal of artistic exceptionalism and an asser-
tion of the arts as privileged practices of adeterminacy (the arts as a “wildness”
emanating from beyond disciplinarity, from beyond control, from the beyond
that is posited as immanent to artistic agency). This problematisation of the
appropriation of the figure—“lines of flight”—is not proposed as an act of
delegitimation with respect to a given “reading” of Deleuze and Guattari, but
rather as an intervention into the field of operations across art, philosophy, and
enquiry.
This problematisation of “lines of flight” is produced through two alternat-
ing texts comprising multiple and disparate citation. It may help explicate this
strategy a little. This doubling is not presented as a strategy to achieve the mul-
tiple. It is a relatively simple doublespeaking, and as such it is probably a move-
ment precisely—as we have been warned by Deleuze and Guattari—away from
the multiple in the Deleuzian usage of that term: “In truth, it is not enough to
say, ‘Long live the multiple,’ difficult as it is to raise that cry. No typographical,
lexical, or even syntactical cleverness is enough to make it heard. The multiple
must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the sim-
plest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already
has available—always n – 1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always
subtracted)” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 6).
It will help clarify at this point that I do not typically operate, or concern
myself with, a Deleuzian lexicon. “Rhizomes,” “bodies without organs,” “planes
of immanence,” and “becoming woman” are not the rhetorical-conceptual
instruments in my quotidian toolbox (nor indeed, for that matter, is ideological
analysis as such my preferred equipment.) Rather, my tools (like this metaphor
of equipage) are even more old-fashioned than ideological critique may seem to
some. They are drawn from the sometime(s) discredited traditions of rhetoric.
So when I write-speak, I typically write-speak of “rhetors” not “rhizomes”; of
“bathos” not “bodies without organisms”; of “prolepsis” not “plane of imma-
nence”; of “digression” not “becoming”; of “tropes” and “topos” not of “ter-
ritorialisations.” I speak of and through, the clumsy transports of metaphors.
And in this instance I speak-write with a “white man’s forked tongue,” oper-
ating in parallel with another voice in the same text, presenting a seemingly
dialogical text that proposes a scepticism about dialogues. A second voice that
goes something along the lines of . . .

Second voice: Our brothers and sisters are drowning, having crowded the
boats, the metaphors, that shuttle across Mare Nostrum—“our sea.” Boats in
repeating waves, in daily errands of desperation. Now drowned, some of our

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brothers and sisters are granted European citizenship posthumously. They

become our dead fellow citizens. So they may be buried on this side of “our
sea,” without the costs of ferrying the sea-wet corpses back to an African or a
Levantine shore.
In the news they speak of the “search and rescue” mission of our border
police. It is only in such a monologue that our immigration policy “fortress
Europe” and its exclusion-unto-death can masquerade as a humanitarian bid
to save lives. Our mass media may appear (multiple) many-voiced, but it is all
the more a monologue, where many hands and many voices repeat the same,
the same, the same.
For some, dialogue appears to offer a way beyond this interminable rep-
etition of the same old story. This is not dialogue proposed as a transaction
between territories and identities, but rather dialogue proposed as the con-
dition of being put all at sea. This is dialogue as a difficult state of emergence
wherein identities are suspended, as we temporarily belong together, pulsing
or tossed about in the ebb and flow of conversational encounter, as we become
bodies floating unfixed in the water of their own speaking.
But between which speakers can such dialogue emerge? Who will listen and
who will talk, in turn? Will it be our brothers and sisters, who were not asked
whether we might call them such? Will it be “you” and “I,” who were not asked
whether we might be called “we”? Who will we become within these yet-to-
happen dialogues of the far-sea-crossing? Who can speak over the noise of this
traffic between places three hours away by budget jet and package tour?

First voice: In this presentation, I point at the currency of the rhizomatic con-
struction “lines of flight”—that has been multiplied in the discursive field of
artistic research and cited in the contestation of what the actualities of the uni-
versity and the academy might be . . . There are many sources that one could
draw upon here to demonstrate this, and the following choice of examples is
somewhat arbitrary: I will start by drawing upon the work of my friend and col-
league Henk Slager (2011, 338) and his use of this figure in his contribution
to the Routledge Handbook of Artistic Research, where he notes that “the creation
of . . . a flashing line of flight constituting a zone of reflexivity, seems to be of
immense, topical interest in today’s visual art.” He proceeds, by proposing
that “in artistic practices, it is by definition impossible to research the artistic
process in a manner different from a form of operational process. Therefore,
in artistic research, a self-reflexive movement continuously questions shifting
situations and also determines shifting positions in a constant process of inter-
acting, intermingling, and traversing of its lines and domains of analysis. As a
consequence, artistic research continually produces novel connections, accel-
erations and mutations in temporary, flexible, and open systems” (ibid.).
Still staying close to home, I will quote another colleague, Simon Sheikh
(2009, 6), who mobilises the figure of the “line of flight” as follows: “Thinking
is, after all, not equivalent to knowledge. Whereas knowledge is circulated and
maintained through a number of normative practices—disciplines as it were—
thinking is here meant to imply networks of indiscipline, lines of flight and

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utopian questionings.” Against the disciplinarity of knowledge he proposes a

radically different dispensation for the adisciplinarity of the artistic:

Indeed, we can see a number of transformations in contemporary art practices:

a certain openness or expansiveness in regards to its objects of knowledge; if not
discursive formations; an interdisciplinary approach where almost anything can
be considered an art object in the appropriate context, and where more than ever
before there is work being produced within an expanded praxis, intervening in
several fields other than the traditional art sphere, touching upon such areas as
architecture and design, but also philosophy, sociology, politics, biology, science and
so on. The field of art has become—in short—a field of possibilities, of exchange
and comparative analysis. It has become a field for alternatives, proposals and
models, and can, crucially, act as a cross field, an intermediary between different
fields, modes of perception and thinking, as well as between very different positions
and subjectivities. Art thus has a very privileged, if impermanent, but crucial
position and potential in contemporary society. But crucial in its very slippage, in
that it cannot hold its ground as a discipline or institutional place. (Sheikh 2009, 5)

A contrasting use of the same figure—line of flight—may be found in

Bernard Stiegler’s (2010, 13–14) use of the term in a contribution to a volume
on the future of art education and research, where he joins the figure “line of
flight” with the idea of the avant-garde: “I understand the potential of creative
territories: as the possibility of an avant-garde territory, that is, an area capable
of inventing a new cultural, social, economic and political model, of offering
prefigurations of alternative ‘lines of flight’ to those of a consumerist society
that has now reached exhaustion.”
I draw a fourth example from Irit Rogoff ’s use of this figure in her essay
“Turning” (2008), where in discussing the exhibition ACADEMY at the Van
Abbe Museum she writes:

There were many questions circulating in our spaces in the exhibition, with each
room and each group producing their own questions in relation to the central
one: “What can we learn from the museum?” There were questions regarding who
produces questioning: What are legitimate questions, and under what conditions are
they produced? The seminar class, the think tank, the government department, the
statistician’s bureau are sites for the production of questions, but we were suggesting
others born of fleeting, arbitrary conversations between strangers, of convivial
loitering and of unexpected lines of flight in and out of the museum. (Rogoff 2008)

My concern is the tendency for the “line of flight” to be operated as a figure

that posits artistic agency as always already (in some special sense) extra-insti-
tutional, although entangled in an institution. This tendency posits institu-
tions as fundamentally something not to be operated in good faith, but rather
as something to seep away from, to leak from, to flee from. This proposes insti-
tution as something to be opportuned by a contestatory logic that finds its
legitimation simply in the presumptuous claim to bear and honour alterity and
openness: “Long live the multiple”. This tendency at the same time, naturalises
artistic constructions (the institution of the artist for example) as pertaining
to a register or mode of assemblage that is fundamentally other than that of

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 Something Along the Lines of . . .

the university/academy/museum. Art and artist are operated as natural givens

not as historical confections formatted in the eighteenth century process of
“bourgeois revolt,”10 and in contestation and appropriation of the aristocratic
privilege to work but never to labour.

Second voice: But who will listen and who will talk in turn? There are no guar-
antees, and dialogue may also use doublespeak. It is notable that it is primarily
through a series of dialogues that the Platonic preference for the “one” over
the multiplicitous (let’s say duplicitous) “many” has been transmitted across
millennia. These Platonic dialogues have made their own journeys back and
forth across this same—“our sea,” travelling East–West, and South–North.
They are carried through the centuries by murmuring huddles in Syrian and
Alexandrine scribal halls, in Byzantine libraries, in Andalusian universities, and
in Marsilio Ficino’s Florentine workshop. They are shared with wider worlds, as
they transcribe and recode themselves from Greek to Arabic and Latin. These
dialogues echo in transcultural conversations repeating things said by saying
another thing, migrant voices respeaking the Platonic “one” good notion.

First voice: Other people have worried over this difficulty with respect to “the
line of flight.” Gerald Raunig (2010, 44) has put it succinctly and potently when
he asserts:

In 1980, at the climax of Deleuze and Guattari’s collaboration . . . the line of flight
finally became a central concept within a bundle of conceptual creations, in
vicinity to and interference with other new concepts such as deterritorialisation,
the body without organs, smooth space and nomadology. Whereas those notions
seem to have become almost ubiquitous in certain discourses over the last decades,
their specification has never reached an appropriate clarity. The effect of this
inaccuracy in the adaptation of Guattari and Deleuze’s concepts is on one hand a
depoliticisation of these concepts . . . and on the other hand—and as a result—an
extensive denunciation of its authors as “postmodern relativists,” “hippies” and
“quixotic theory-poets.”

10 The term is used here to refer to the ways in which the privileges of this “new bourgeoisie” are
simultaneously enjoyed and disdained, in the form of a particular kind of institutional habitus whereby
the salaried middle-class worker harvests salary from, and in the same moment, disinvests in, public
institutions, producing legitimising narratives variously of cynicism or the cultivation of the “beautiful
soul” as modes of “resistance.” The term “bourgeois revolt” historically has been used to describe the
revolutionary moments of the eighteenth century, and specifically the dynamics and key constituencies
of the French Revolution. More recently, commentators such as Slavoj Žižek, have modified and used
this term to reinterpret recent anti-capitalist mobilisations, arguing that the “new bourgeoisie still
appropriates surplus value, but in the (mystified) form of what has been called ‘surplus wage’: they are
paid rather more than the proletarian ‘minimum wage’ . . . and it is this distinction from common pro-
letarians which determines their status. . . . Far from being limited to managers, the category of workers
earning a surplus wage extends to all sorts of experts, administrators, public servants, doctors, lawyers,
journalists, intellectuals and artists. The surplus takes two forms: more money (for managers etc.), but
also less work and more free time (for—some—intellectuals, but also for state administrators etc.). . . .
The notion of surplus wage also throws new light on the continuing ‘anti-capitalist’ protests. In times of
crisis, the obvious candidates for ‘belt-tightening’ are the lower levels of the salaried bourgeoisie: polit-
ical protest is their only recourse if they are to avoid joining the proletariat. Although their protests are
nominally directed against the brutal logic of the market, they are in effect protesting about the gradual
erosion of their (politically) privileged economic place” (Žižek 2012, 9–10).

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Raunig references the appropriation of the literary image of Herman Melville’s

Bartleby under the figure of “the line of flight” (see also Raunig 2006) and then
proceeds to read the master text of Deleuze and Guattari so as to contest any
possible misreadings, quoting Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 225) as follows: “as
for the line of flight, would it not be entirely personal, the way in which an
individual escapes on his or her own account, escapes ‘responsibilities,’ escapes
the world, takes refuge in the desert, or else in art . . .? False impression.” In this
way, pointing resolutely at the refusal of a merely reductive reading of “line of
flight” as an invocation of subjective retreat, Raunig begins his clarification of
the figure. Raunig’s approach seems to be supported by Deleuze and Guattari’s
text:

It is wrongly said (in Marxism in particular) that a society is defined by its contra-
dictions. That is true only on the larger scale of things. From the viewpoint of
micropolitics, a society is defined by its lines of flight, which are molecular. There
is always something that flows or flees, that escapes the binary organizations,
the resonance apparatus, and the overcoding machine: things that are attributed
to a “change in values,” the youth, women, the mad, etc. May 1968 in France
was molecular, making what led up to it all the more imperceptible from the
viewpoint of macropolitics. . . . those who evaluated things in macropolitical terms
understood nothing of the event because something unaccountable was escaping.
The politicians, the parties, the unions, many leftists, were utterly vexed; they kept
repeating over and over again that “conditions” were not ripe. It was as though they
had been temporarily deprived of the entire dualism machine that made them valid
spokespeople. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 216)

Another commentator has announced that “A ‘line of flight’ is a path of muta-

tion precipitated through the actualisation of connections among bodies that
were previously only implicit (or ‘virtual’) that releases new powers in the capac-
ities of those bodies to act and respond” (Lorraine 2010, 147). Again, Deleuze
and Guattari (1987, 204) are explicit:

Lines of flight, for their part, never consist in running away from the world but
rather in causing runoffs, as when you drill a hole in a pipe; there is no social system
that does not leak from all directions, even if it makes its segments increasingly rigid
in order to seal the lines of flight. There is nothing imaginary, nothing symbolic,
about a line of flight. There is nothing more active than a line of flight, among
animals or humans. Even History is forced to take that route rather than proceeding
by “signifying breaks.” What is escaping in a society at a given moment? It is on lines
of flight that new weapons are invented, to be turned against the heavy arms of the
State.

Second voice: The Platonic dialogues have made their own journeys back and
forth across this same “our sea” . . . migrant voices respeaking the Platonic “one”
good notion. But there is more than one ocean, more than one ocean crossing.
And there is more than one way to repeat a thing said by saying another thing.

532
 Something Along the Lines of . . .

Odomankoma ’Kyerema says

Odomankoma ’Kyerema says
The Great Drummer of Odomankoma says
The Great Drummer of Odomankoma says

that he has come from sleep

that he has come from sleep
and is arising
and is arising

like akoko the cock

like akoko the cock
who clucks who crows in the morning
who crows in the morning

we are addressing you

ye re kyere wo
we are addressing you
ye re kyere wo

listen
let us succeed
listen
may we succeed . . . (Brathwaite [1968] 1973, 88–89)

The poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite speaks, repeating as he ventriloquises

for the creator-being Odomankoma, the first artist-maker. This is the Akan
creator-being Odomankoma who has made Kyerema, the drummer; and
Odomankoma also ventriloquises in turn, through Kyerema. This is an image
of words circulating not in dialogue but in rapture, in drumming, in singing,
and in speaking-through-Gods-speaking-through-us.
Brathwaite-Odomankoma-Kyerema announces the crowing of a cock in the
morning, a calling out that says, “Listen. You are being called to.” The poet
declares the divine ventriloquism of Odomankoma as a summons: “Listen. You
are being called to.” But who is this Odomankoma that pretends to call out and
address us?11

First voice: But it is perhaps within the production of summary examples and
sideways glances against concrete instances that a confusion arises that gives an
opportunity to presume the “line of flight” to be a figure of (personal) exodus/
escape/retreat/withdrawal. In giving an instantiation of the figure, Deleuze
and Guattari make reference to the Mosaic exodus: “In the case of the Jewish

11 The impact of the encounter by Brathwaite with Akan oral tradition and the Akan culture of the drum,
in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, has been widely discussed in the critical literature on Brathwaite (see
Warner-Lewis 1973; Asein 1971). The central significance of call and response within this tradition,
and its deployment within Brathwaite’s Masks has often been remarked upon. As Emily Allen Williams
(1997, 25) notes in her doctoral thesis: “Brathwaite evokes the atmosphere of ‘call-and-response’ in the
poem ‘Atumpan.’ Within this context, the audience becomes part of the artistry as the narrator/singer
solicits a response from the audience. The participation moves speaker and audience into a cohesive
unit of sharing. . . . Brathwaite, as narrator in this poem, evokes participation from the audience (reader)
as he strives to impart renewal to wounded spirits.” There is a parallelism proposed in this citation of
Brathwaite, whereby his ventriloquism, and his hailing of the reader (both of which seek to “impart
renewal to wounded spirits”) are instantiated in the call to attend to the “drowned fellow citizens” of
the Lampedusa disaster.

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people, a group of signs detaches from the Egyptian imperial network of which
it was a part and sets off down a line of flight into the desert, pitting the most
authoritarian of subjectivities against despotic signifiance, the most passional
and least interpretive of delusions against interpretational paranoid delusion,
in short, a linear ‘proceeding and grievance’ against the irradiating circular net-
work” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 122).
And there is of course, the most famous example, the reference to George
Jackson and the Black Panthers: “I may be running, but I’m looking for a gun as
I go” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 204).12 This is conjoined with the reference to
nomads and “leaving the Pharaoh thunderstruck”:

It was along lines of flight that the nomads swept away everything in their path and
found new weapons, leaving the Pharaoh thunderstruck. It is possible for a single
group, or a single individual even, to exhibit all the lines we have been discussing
simultaneously. But it is most frequently the case that a single group or individual
functions as a line of flight; that group or individual creates the line rather than
following it, is itself the living weapon it forges rather than stealing one. Lines of
flight are realities; they are very dangerous for societies, although they can get by
without them, and sometimes manage to keep them to a minimum. (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987, 204)

Interestingly, Adrian Parr (2010, 150), in the Deleuze Dictionary, reads this last
line from Deleuze and Guattari, and proposes that “art functions as a line of
flight, traversing individual and collective subjectivities and pushing central-
ised organisations to the limit; it combines a variety of affects and percepts in
ways that conjugate one another.”
These examples can easily slip into the reading of line of flight as a figure of
retreat/escape/deferral of action and as an evasion of institutions. One might
reasonably think that simply taking an institution’s resources—say a salary as a
teacher or a researcher but withdrawing from, or refusing to take responsibility
for, the (co‑)authoring of the institution’s culture or (co‑)producing its ethos
or attempting to reform its modes and protocols, constitutes such a reductive
enactment of this figure. The term “bourgeois revolt” can be used to name
this inhabiting of institutional privilege but disdain for institutional respon-
sibility or investment.13 This is not an accusation I lay at the feet of Deleuze and

12 This reference to the North American black liberation struggle theorist and activist George Lester Jack-
son (1941–71) has been discussed at length by several commentators. Michelle Koerner has examined
the use of George Jackson’s prison letters (Jackson 1971) by Deleuze, and the citations of Jackson in the
books Deleuze wrote with, respectively, Félix Guattari and Claire Parnet, arguing that these are best
understood as an insinuation of the black radical tradition into French philosophy in the 1970s. On the
basis of a close reading of Jackson’s letters, Koerner (2011) argues that running becomes both a figure of
thought and a political concept, and proposes that Deleuze’s encounter with Jackson’s writings is key to
the elaboration of the figure “lines of flight.” See also Glick (2012).
13 The term “investment” is used here not in the sense of a deployment of capital in hope of a return in the
form of profit but rather in the earlier sense of putting on the clothing—donning vestments—in this
case, taking on the mantle of an institution, a meaning that is also indicated in the term “investiture.”
The process being described here is one whereby a disinvestment is operated by the participants in
institutions, in such a manner as to maintain the institution and attendant privileges but to disavow
agency and responsibility for the failures of institution by not identifying with the act of participation,
elaborating a mythos of escape, flight, withdrawal, an ironising mode of personal witholding, and so forth.

534
 Something Along the Lines of . . .

Guattari, but it is one I would make to many of my colleagues across the univer-
sity-academy nexus.
Yet, one must wonder at the facility and ease with which the brief decontext­
ualised referencing of Jackson and the Black Panther Party—as metonyms for
virtuous radicality and legitimate militancy—is reproduced within the nexus
of gender, race, and class privilege that is the European university and art acad-
emy.14 Could it be that the valorisation of “fleeing” and “finding”/“making”
“weapons” becomes an unhappy reworking of an avant-gardist trope that finds
its suasive charge, its affective density, and its ability to move us precisely in a
kind of half-hearted “radical chic”?

Second voice: But who is this Odomankoma that pretends to call out and
address us? Some say that Odomankoma is the first being, the first being to
become corpse: Odomankoma is many and is everywhere visible. . . . She first
created water, the primordial ocean. She then created heaven and earth by
lifting up the one and setting down the other. Then other creatures followed,
mankind and beasts, the thousands of powers, those things that are seen and
those that are not, the numerous things in this world . . . Odomankoma created
Death and Death killed her.15
This is why Odomankoma repeats “for the year has come round again.” It
is the poet-theorist Edward Kamau Brathwaite, who ventriloquises with
Odomankoma in these lines I am speaking. Kamau Brathwaite has been
described as “prominent among the artists whose theory and creative work
investigate the impact of residually oral forms as fundamental cultural con-
structs and modalities of vision in diasporan people’s imaginations” (Griffith
2010, xi–xii). Here, in this ocean-crossing imaginary, from Ghana and Côte
d’Ivoire to Barbados and Jamaica, from Africa to the Caribbean, there is a work-
ing through of the intricacies of the one, of the two, and of the many, of life and
of death, but not in the way of the Platonic “one” good notion.

First voice: Gerald Raunig’s move, to call attention to a proper usage of the
“line of flight” figure seems straightforward and clear. However, it seems
that there are possible problems with any move like this that seeks to police
Deleuzeo-Guattarian discourse. Insisting on the correct way to read a Deleuze
and Guattari text seems not the most felicitous way to negotiate the conceptual
construction enacted in these collaborative texts. This is an especially tricky

14 It is interesting to contrast this summary invocation of Jackson by Deleuze and Guattari with the very
different way in which the artist Jeremiah Day has recently engaged, through his research practice,
with the early history of the Black Panther Party, looking at its emergence from the Lowndes County
Freedom Organization (LCFO). Day’s treatment of this material opens out the complexity of grassroots
practical political organisation, and an early resistance to media capture and sensationalism on the part
of activists, a stance that is later transformed in the transfer of the Black Panther imagery and organisa-
tional impetus from Alabama to Oakland. See http://deltaworkers.org/kunstenaar/jeremiah-day/.
15 This description of Odomankoma is derived from the entry “Odomankoma Creates the Universe” in
Harold Scheub’s A Dictionary of African Mythology (2002). The text has been modified, changing the
gender of this deity from male to female. The mythology is invoked in this modified way to avoid repro-
ducing uncritically the gender politics mobilised by Kamau Brathwaite’s particular appropriation of the
Akan mythic framework.

535
 Mick Wilson

issue given precisely the refusal of rhetoric and metaphor operative across the
Deleuzian corpus.
Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 20) have indicated what they call the problem
of writing: “in order to designate something exactly, anexact expressions are
utterly unavoidable. Not at all because it is a necessary step, or because one can
only advance by approximations: anexactitude is in no way an approximation; on
the contrary, it is the exact passage of that which is under way” (my emphasis).
They continue: “We invoke one dualism only in order to challenge another. We
employ a dualism of models only in order to arrive at a process that challenges
all models. Each time, mental correctives are necessary to undo the dualisms
we had no wish to construct but through which we pass” (ibid.). This is a kind
of pragmatics: a pragmatics of writing as emergent usage; writing as a kind of
making of a conceptual tool that is not a representation of a prefigured men-
tal content. But it is also a licensing of a procedure that is a heuristic rather
than hermeneutic operation with language. Elsewhere, in an interview with
Christian Descamps, Didier Eribon, and Robert Maggiori, Deleuze is chal-
lenged on his language practice:

You emphatically reject metaphors, analogies too. But you use the notion of “black
holes,” borrowed from contemporary physics, to describe spaces you can’t escape
from once you’re drawn in; they’re linked to your notion of white walls. You see
a face as a white wall with black holes in it, and proceed to articulate faciality on
that basis. And then, earlier on in the book, you’re always talking about fuzzy sets
and open systems. These links with very contemporary science lead one to wonder
what scientists might make of a work like this. Aren’t they likely to see it as full of
metaphors? (Descamps in Deleuze 1995, 29)

In response to this challenge from Descamps, Deleuze (1995, 29) responds:

“But there are also essentially inexact yet completely rigorous notions that sci-
entists can’t do without which belong equally to scientists, philosophers, and
artists” (my emphasis). “What we’re interested in, you see, are modes of indi-
viduation 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” (ibid., 26).
So, maybe—thinking with Deleuze—it’s a mistake to believe in the exist-
ence of artworks, artists, and artist researchers: maybe it might be possible to
consider the individuation of say an encounter with an event of enquiry that
worked through and upon enquirers so as to force them to abandon their
self-images as sui generis artist radicals and bearers of a radical alterity. Enquiry
would in this way work to force us to abandon self-positioning, and in the place
of reannouncing our cherished self-images perhaps we could do something
among the living and the dead—the dead that thicken the air with Europe’s
imperial inheritance. Perhaps we could take responsibility for the institutional
privileges we disdain, even as we invest them with our livelihoods, our pres-
entations, our exhibitions, our performances, our opinions, our knowledge
claims, our grievances, and our artistic desiring.

536
 Something Along the Lines of . . .

Second voice: In the small institution that is an academic conference, we gather

to speak together inhabiting many different voices, dialogues, and imagin­-
aries. We allow ourselves to speak and to sing in strange and familiar voices. And
so throughout these dialogues there are contradictions. There are moments
of speaking-past. There are insights. There are lacunae. There are obscurities
and difficulties. There are loud and there are quieter voices. There are lulls and
swells. There are occasional storms and calming breezes. And there are serene
inevitable tidal reversals. Dreary and grim, these metaphors return eternal.

First voice: In the interview cited earlier, Deleuze is challenged on the fash-
ionability of ideas and books in a celebrity system of intellectual culture. In
response, he speaks of an affinity across different disciplines, different modes.
The interviewer challenges:

These days, books in general—and philosophy books in particular—are in an odd

position. On the one hand there’s a cult of celebrity trumpeting spurious books
concocted from current fashions; on the other hand we see a sort of refusal to
analyze people’s work, based on some hazy notion of expression. . . . A philosophy
book’s at once a difficult sort of book, yet something anyone can use, an amazingly
open toolbox, as long as they have some use for it, want to use it, in some particular
situation. A Thousand Plateaus offers us knowledge-effects; but how can we present it
without turning it into an opinion-effect, a star-effect, amidst all the chattering that
each week “discovers” some important new work? The way the opinion-makers
talk, you’d think we didn’t need any concepts at all. That we could get by just
as well with some vague subculture of magazines and reviews. Philosophy as an
institution is under threat. . . . But this book, full of scientific, literary, musical, and
ethological ritornellos, sets out to work with concepts. It actually embodies—with
great force—a gamble that philosophy can resurface as a Gay Science. (Descamps in
Deleuze 1995, 26)

Deleuze (1995, 27) responds indicating that “the question that interests us in
relation to A Thousand Plateaus is whether there are any resonances, common
ground, with what other writers, musicians, painters, philosophers, and sociolo­
gists are doing or trying to do, from which we can all derive greater strength or
confidence.” When he responds like this, it should not seem strange that a late
twentieth-century French philosopher who inhabited the university—and in
some sense thrived within the terms of its protocols, despite the horror stories
of personal professional rivalries between lecturers competing for the loyalty
of the students, and tendentious haranguing in seminars—should become the
philosopher de jure of artistic research: a philosopher whose work has become a
necessary and ubiquitous reference within the intellectual culture now repro-
duced by the twenty-first-century university. Indeed, it would seem that the
Deleuzian lexicon is creeping toward a kind of hegemony in the research rhet-
orics of artist-practitioners, and in the critical practices of university intellectu-
als across the humanities and social sciences. But, how are we to interpret this
shift in language practices and theoretical vocabularies? It is clear that Deleuze
has exercised himself on this question also. Turning again to the 1980 interview
cited above, he is asked:

537
 Mick Wilson

Some people might be surprised by the prominence given in A Thousand Plateaus

to linguistics, and might even wonder whether it’s not playing the central role
reserved in Anti-Oedipus for psychoanalysis. . . . And yet one gets the impression that
what you’re trying to [is] . . . rather to condemn linguistics’ pretensions to “close up
language within itself,” to explain utterances in terms of signifiers, and utterance
in terms of subjects. So how should we take the importance ascribed to linguistics?
Should we see it as a continuation of the battle begun in Anti-Oedipus against a
Lacan-style dictatorship of the signifier, against structuralism, indeed? Or are you
just very peculiar linguists who are only interested in what is “outside” linguistics?
(Maggiori in Deleuze 1995, 27–28)

Deleuze (1995, 28) responds:

I don’t personally think the linguistics is fundamental. Maybe Félix, if he were

here, would disagree. But then Félix has traced a development that points toward a
transformation of linguistics: initially it was phonological, then it was semantic and
syntactic, but it’s turning more and more into a pragmatics. Pragmatics (dealing
with the circumstances of language use, with events and acts) was long considered
the “rubbish dump” of linguistics, but it’s now becoming more and more important:
language is coming to be seen as an activity, so the abstract units and constants of
language-use are becoming less and less important. It’s a good thing, this current
direction of research, precisely because it makes possible convergences and
collaborations between novelists, linguists, philosophers, “vocalists” . . . and so on
(“vocalists” are what I call anyone doing research into sound or the voice in fields
as varied as theater, song, cinema, audiovisual media . . . ). The potential here is
enormous.

Second voice: When we call out for your attention in these dialogues of the
academic conference, we are also calling attention to the communities of prac-
tice that make our work possible. Doing this, we necessarily question the tired
romance of the solitary monologue of genius and of “the artist” and those repe-
titions of the same, the same, the same masquerading as the always-new-again.
But even as we call attention to our dialogues and our communities of prac-
tice, we wish to keep faith with other conversations elsewhere that call out for
us to attend upon them also. Perhaps the migrant dead, the refugee dead, the
now-included dead, talking under water, also call out to address us:

listen /
may we succeed
listen /
may we succeed.

538
 Something Along the Lines of . . .

First voice: In respect of “lines of flight,” I have spoken from a double agnos-
ticism, a double not-knowing. I do not mean a theological agnosticism, that
pronounces that certain “first things” cannot be known, but something more
akin to Thomas Huxley’s (initial formulation of) atheological agnosticism. When
Huxley produced the term (purportedly) in 1869, he claimed to indicate sim-
ply that he did not know the things that early Christian Gnostics claimed to
know of first things. Later, he did move to proscribe this claim to know on the
part of others, but initially he merely declared that he did not know. As Huxley
([1894] 1896, 239) put it, his new term “agnostic” was “suggestively antithetic to
the ‘gnostic’ of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very
things of which I was ignorant.”16 It is this moment of agnosticism, not as pro-
scription but as a beginning from avowed not knowing, with which I am trying
to align. Of course, Thomas Huxley is an embarrassing old nineteenth-century
Oxford don, and as a dusty Victorian controversialist and champion of a confi-
dent evidential science, not really the kind of intellectual collaborator or fore-
bear that one should invoke in a discussion of contemporary artistic research.17
In regard to Deleuze and artistic research, I have been speaking with a dou-
ble agnosticism: On the one hand I speak with a limited familiarity with the
Deleuzian body of work, the kind of half-not-knowing-anything-much that any
contemporary academic working in the arts and humanities today in Europe
might reasonably be expected to hold, as a consequence of a certain ascendancy
of Deleuzean citation. So, I indicate agnosticism as a kind of literal not-know-
ing of the corpus, not knowing it with any real familiarity, just knowing that it is
there, and it is seen to be generative for a wide range of disciplines, enquiries,
and practices. On the other hand, I operate a secondary not-knowing (prem-
ised upon the first) of not knowing what use or good or force operates across
the mobilisation of this corpus and its generative flows in the contemporary
university and in contemporary art: not knowing, but worrying a little at the
ways in which these figures may be seen to effect an uneven problematisation
of institutional orders—institutional orders that may broadly be designated as
the “academic” (the university/the museum—problematised) and the “artis-
tic” (the artist/the arts—naturalised).

16 Interestingly Huxley links this agnosticism to Humean scepticism and defines it as a specifically modern
thought style. Huxley ([1894] 1896, 310) elaborated his agnosticism in a more proscriptive manner when
he asserts, “That it is wrong for a man to say he is certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless
he can provide evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what Agnosticism asserts; and,
in my opinion, it is all that is essential to Agnosticism.” Of all Huxley’s neologisms, “agnosticism” was
by far the most successful, and in its widespread adoption in the late nineteenth century also carried
a strong proscriptive sense (that I am not wishing to invoke here). As Robert G. Ingersoll ([1890] 1900,
463) puts it in his “Reply to Dr. Lyman Abbott”: “The Agnostic does not simply say, ‘I do not know.’ He
goes another step, and he says, with great emphasis, that you do not know.”
17 The debates on artistic research have produced a range of rhetorics around “not knowing.” Sarat Maha-
raj’s (2009, 1) gnomic “Should we not rather speak of non-knowledge—activity that is neither hard-nosed
know-how nor its ostensible opposite, ignorance?” may be taken as indicative of this way of writing.
This rhetorical framing of enquiry as founded in not-knowing seeks a way of rehearsing and elaborating
models of enquiry, without invoking a rhetoric of knowing as “mastery,” “knowledge production,” or
“the conquest of new territories.” In citing Huxley, it is proposed that the rhetoric of not knowing might
be brought into relationship with the long traditions of scepticism that have operated across a range of
knowledge-practices, including those of the natural sciences.

539
 Mick Wilson

I suspect the Deleuzian ascendancy we have been in for some time is not
entirely any-one-thing, but rather is more appropriately designated as multi-
ple—in some moments working “progressively,” in the sense of forging new
connections, entangling sites of relative privilege and sites of absolute depri-
vation; and in other moments working “regressively,” in the sense of shoring
up sites of privilege, and ensuring the maintenance of “beautiful souls” folded
in upon their refusals of contaminant flows and secured from the messy incur-
sions and the seepages of bodies in flight and the horrors of slow-attrition
liminal living in contemporary capital, bodies exposed by the failure of “our”
institutions.
My purpose here has been the modest one of looking at the way in which
one of these Deleuzian figures has been deployed within the specific context
of recent artistic research debates, in order to describe the uneven problem-
atisation of institutional orders. Specifically, what interests me is a kind of
appropriation of Deleuzian lines of flight within the rhetorical field of artistic
research and an associated metaphorics of art’s exceptionalism, “openness,”
“resistance,” and “withdrawal.”
This appropriation cannot, I think, simply be resolved by saying the Deleuze
and Guattari text is being misread, or that the concept-tool is not being used
correctly—given the invocation of pragmatics and the claims for “possible
convergences and collaborations.” I am suggesting that this appropriation
proceeds from a form of “bourgeois revolt.” I am describing an aspect of this
“bourgeois revolt” as a rhetorical practice that inhabits institutions (resources,
statuses, offices—specifically those of the university-academy-museum nexus)
but disdains institutional responsibility because the institutions is defined
as essentially and irredeemably a hopelessly closed and relentlessly manager­
ialised system, to which is contrasted the presumptive “openness” and “a dis-
ciplinarity” of art/the artistic/the artist and their intrinsic propensity for crit-
ical resistance. My proposal is that this “bourgeois revolt” finds exactly what
Deleuze proposed might be found in the Deleuze and Guattari text: it finds
“resonances,” it finds “common ground.” This is a problem.
This line of argument is not without its own problems. Even though there
is an avowed prioritisation of use over reading/interpreting/defining in the revalu­
ation of pragmatics proposed by Deleuze, it is notable that there is a paradoxical
aspect to this turn to heuristic over hermeneutic. Jean-Jacques Lecercle (2010, 123)
elaborates this paradox when he writes of Deleuze’s “notorious hostility to meta­-
phor . . . and his equally notoriously metaphorical style.” Within the immense
secondary literature spawned by the Deleuze and Guattari corpus, there are
accordingly many instances of terminological policing. We have the example of
Gerald Raunig’s work on lines of flight cited above; and we can also consider
Ian Buchanan’s (2015) careful work on the term “assemblage.” Nevertheless,
several commentators have expressed a note of concern at the distribution of
a Deleuzian lexicon across the publicity-churning of the globalised art system.
Stephen Zepke and Simon O’Sullivan (2010, 2) put it quite directly, and some-
what damningly, when they write: “Without wishing to be overly cynical about
the fashion economy of the art world, and the voracious hunger for ever new

540
 Something Along the Lines of . . .

theoretical ‘product,’ the incredible proliferation of ‘rhizomatic,’ ‘nomadic’

and of course ‘relational’ artists and artworks that have recently inundated
the art world is perhaps a symptom of a much wider transformation that is not
specific to art, but which has certainly included the latter as a willing partner.”
This serves as a preliminary to dismissing the appropriation of the term “rela-
tional” in Nicolas Bourriaud’s famous nomination of “relational aesthetics” as
a definitive tendency within the 1990s art world. (Bourriaud 2002) In this way
Zepke and O’Sullivan (2010, 3) introduce Éric Alliez’s (2010) critique of the
co-option of Deleuzeo-Guatarian figures into the rhetorics of “relational aes-
thetics” in pursuit of business-as-usual (Alliez 2010). We also have the way Brian
Massumi, Manuel DeLanda and other mediators, commentators, and cham­
pions of Deleuze have been routinely challenged on their alleged misreading
of the philosopher.
Despite this paradoxical aspect of the Deleuze and Guattari texts, and their
policing or elaboration in the secondary commentary that has accrued so
prominently around them, I would propose that the claim can still stand: The
resonances of Deleuze and Guattari’s figures within the process of “bourgeois
revolt”—as when the figure “line of flight” is employed as a mode of imaging
the exceptionalism of art, and positing practices of resistance such as the culti-
vation of the “beautiful soul” stratagem—proceeds from a problematic that is
also native to Deleuze and Guattari’s textual rhetoric. This repeated avowal of
art’s intrinsic propensity for resistance and generative agency, is key to the logic
of “bourgeois revolt”. This rhetorical operation cannot simply be exorcised
by invoking the proper reading. But then again, I am also conducting enquiry
through the work of rhetoric. I am also speaking with a forked tongue. And this
might simply be the same problem, differently enacted.

Second voice: Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 109) write of “a dissolution of forms,
a passage to the limit or flight from contours in favor of fluid forces, flows, air,
light, and matter, such that a body or a word does not end at a precise point.
We witness the incorporeal power of that intense matter, the material power
of that language. A matter more immediate, more fluid, and more ardent than
bodies or words. In continuous variation the relevant distinction is no longer
between a form of expression and a form of content but between two insepara-
ble planes in reciprocal presupposition.”
We orators speak of

Our brothers and sisters who are drowning, having crowded the boats, that
shuttle across our sea. Boats in repeating waves, in daily errands of despera-
tion. Now drowned, some of our brothers and sisters are granted European
citizenship posthumously. They become our dead fellow citizens. So they may
be buried on this side of our sea, without the costs of ferrying the sea-wet
corpses back to an African or a Levantine shore.

541
 Mick Wilson

And we, the drowned and the saved, now sing

and we, the drowned and the saved, must sing
that we have come from sleep
that we have come from sleep

we are addressing you

ye re kyere wo
we are addressing you
ye re kyere wo

listen
let us succeed
listen
may we succeed . . .

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Art, edited by Stephen Zepke and Simon Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
O’Sullivan, 43–62. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Žižek, Slavoj. 2012. “The Revolt of the
University Press. Salaried Bourgeoisie.” London Review of
Rogoff, Irit. 2008. “Turning.” e-flux 0 Books, 34 (2): 9–10.
(November). Accessed 27 May 2017.

543
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Éric Alliez is Professor at the CRMEP, Kingston University, and at the University
of Paris 8. His books include The Guattari Effect (2011), Capitalism and
Schizophrenia and Consensus: Of Relational Aesthetics (2010), L’œil-cerveau (2007),
La Pensée-Matisse (2005), The Signature of the World (2005), and Capital Times
(preface by Gilles Deleuze, 1997). He will soon publish Undoing the Image: Of
Contemporary Art (Défaire l’image: de l’art contemporain, in collaboration with
Jean-Claude Bonne, first published by Presses du réel, Paris, in 2013).

Manola Antonioli trained as a philosopher, receiving a PhD in philosophy

and social sciences in 1997 at the EHESS, Paris, under the supervision of
Jacques Derrida. She has published several monographs and edited books
on Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari,
among others. She is the author of several published articles on contem-
porary philosophy and aesthetics, the philosophy of urbanism and archi-
tecture, and the ethical and political stakes of technological evolution. Her
current research focuses on contemporary figures in space, at the intersec-
tion of philosophy, design theory, aesthetics, architecture, and urbanism.
As a researcher associated with the HAR laboratory (History of art and
representations of the University of Paris West Nanterre La Défense), she
currently co-directs research and creation projects in the fields of ecosophy
and ecological imagination, as well as in current issues (aesthetic, philo-
sophical, and political) in the theory and practice of design and architec-
ture. She teaches history and theory of design and architecture at the ENSA
Dijon, where since 2014–15 she is Course Leader in design research. She is
also Course Leader in philosophy of architecture and urbanism at the Ecole
Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture in Versailles.

Paulo de Assis is the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council

project Music Experiment 21 (musicexperiment21.eu), which challenges
orthodox definitions of musical works and their renderings. Trained as
a pianist and musicologist, he is an experimental performer and music
philosopher with wider interests in composition, aesthetics, and episte-
mology. He is the author of Luigi Nono’s Wende (2006) and Domani l’aurora
(2004), and the editor of Experimental Affinities in Music (2015), Sound & Score:
Essays on Sound, Score and Notation (2013), and Dynamics of Constraints: Essays
on Notation, Editing and Performance (2009). He is a research fellow at the
Orpheus Institute, Ghent. Email: [email protected].

Jūratė Baranova is a professor in the Department of Philosophy, faculty of

History, at Lithuanian University of Educational Sciences. Her publications
in Lithuanian include Twentieth Century Moral Philosophy: Conversation with
Kant (2004), Philosophy and Literature: Contradictions, Parallels, and Intersections
(2006), Nietzsche and Postmodernism (2007), Cinema and Philosophy (with co-
authors, 2013), and The Phenomenon of Jurga Ivanauskaitė: Between Surrealism and
Existentialism (2014). In English she has edited and published Between Visual
and Literary Creation: Tarkovsky and Ivanauskaitė (2015), Lithuanian Philosophy:

544
 Notes on Contributors

Persons and Ideas (2000), and Contemporary Philosophical Discourse in Lithuania

(2005). Recently, she co-wrote in English Gilles Deleuze: Philosophy and Arts,
financed by the Lithuanian Academy of Science (No. MIP-067/2014). She
is a member of the Lithuanian Writers’ Union and has published the liter-
ary essays Meditations: Texts and Images (2004) and The Fear to Drown (2009).
Email: [email protected].

Zsuzsa Baross is Professor at the Cultural Studies Department, Trent

University, Canada. She is the author of Posthumously: For Jacques Derrida
(2011) and Encounters: Gérard Titus-Carmel, Jean-Luc Nancy, Claire Denis (2015)
and has published numerous essays in anthologies and journals, includ-
ing Derrida Today, Deleuze Studies, Angelaki, International Studies in Philosophy,
and New Literary History. Her most recent public presentations include
as plenary speaker (“La fin du monde”) at the conference In Memoriam of
Jacques Derrida, Institut Français, Budapest (13–14 October, 2014); the sem-
inar “Le Cinéma selon Jean-Luc Godard” at the Collège International de
Philosophie, Paris (9–14 January, 2014), and at the conference “Il y a du
rapport sexuel: Le corps dans l’écriture de Jean-Luc Nancy et le cinéma de
Claire Denis” also at the CIPh, May 2013. Email: [email protected].

After studying architecture in Armenia, Anna Barseghian continued prac-

tising as a visual artist. She obtained a postgraduate degree in computer
graphic visualisation at the University of Geneva. Alongside her work as
artistic director of Utopiana, she continues to develop her artistic and
curatorial work. Recently, she designed and directed the Désir sans desti-
nie event held at the Théâtre Saint-Gervais, in collaboration with Stefan
Kristensen and the company Sturmfrei by Maya Bösch, in May 2013 in
Geneva. As an artist, she co-authored two major documentary research
projects: Arménographie (2005–8) in collaboration with Stefan Kristensen,
and Spectrographie (2010–11), in collaboration with Stefan Kristensen and
Uriel Orlow. The first is an essay on the representation of the dispersion of
Armenian through photos, video interviews, and texts, while the second is
an exploration, through videos and photos, of the existence of “ghosts” in
the ancient lands of Armenians in eastern Turkey.

Arno Böhler teaches philosophy at the University of Vienna and is founder

of the philosophy-performance festival Philosophy On Stage. He was a
research fellow at the University of Bangalore, University of Heidelberg,
New York University, University of Princeton, and University of Bremen. He
heads the PEEK project “Artist-Philosophers: Philosophy AS Arts-Based-
Research” (AR275-G21) at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, sponsored
by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). http://homepage.univie.ac.at/arno.
boehler.

545
 Notes on Contributors

Ian Buchanan is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Wollongong,

Australia. He is the founding editor of the Deleuze Studies journal and the
author of the Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory, as well as the editor of
four book series: Deleuze Connections (Edinburgh University Press),
Critical Connections, Plateaus (Edinburgh University Press), and Deleuze
Encounters (Continuum).

Edward Campbell is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Aberdeen

and co-director of the university’s Centre for Modern Thought. He spe-
cialises in contemporary European art music and aesthetics including his-
torical, analytical, and aesthetic approaches to European modernism, the
music and writings of Pierre Boulez, contemporary European opera, and
the interrelation of musical thought and critical theory. He is the author of
the books Boulez, Music and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
and Music after Deleuze (Bloomsbury, 2013) and co-editor/contributor to
Pierre Boulez Studies (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2016). He is
currently working as co-editor on The Cambridge Stravinsky Encyclopedia as
well as on a monograph on the importance of Asian and African music in
French music since Debussy. Email: [email protected].

Diego Castro-Magas was born in Santiago de Chile. He started music les-

sons (guitar performance and music theory) under the guidance of Chilean
composer Fernando Carrasco in 1992. Later, he studied guitar perfor-
mance at the Catholic University of Chile with Oscar Ohlsen (diploma
in guitar performance with summa cum laude in 2000) and at University
Ramon Llull with Ricardo Gallén and Fernando Rodríguez (MA in guitar
performance, 2005). His first solo CD was released in 2009, featuring
the first published recording of Ferneyhough’s guitar duo No Time (at
all) alongside Chilean guitarist José Antonio Escobar. He was Lecturer
in Guitar Performance at the Catholic University of Chile between 2006
and 2012. Currently, he is a PhD student in contemporary performance at
the University of Huddersfield under the supervision of Philip Thomas.
http://diegocastromagas.com. Email: [email protected].

Pascale Criton studied composition with Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Gérard Grisey,

and Jean-Étienne Marie. She earned a PhD in musicology (1999) and under-
took a musical computing course for composers at IRCAM (Paris) in 1986.
Her works explore sound variability, ultrachromatism, multi-sensoral recep-
tions, and the spatialisation of listening. Artistic director of Art&Fact, she
initiates concerts combining music, architecture, and materials that invite
the public to experience new sound representations (Écouter Autrement,
Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2015). Her works are performed internationally
by ensembles such as l’Ensemble 2e2m, l’Itinéraire, Aleph, Accroche Note,
Taller Sonoro, and Dedalus, are commissioned by the French Ministry of
Culture, Radio France, and Sacem, and are published by Jobert Editions.
She is currently an associate researcher at the Lutherie Acoustique Musique

546
 Notes on Contributors

laboratory (Pierre and Marie Curie University, CARS). Her encounter with
Gilles Deleuze determined her interest in philosophy and from 1974 to
1987 she became one of his interlocutors concerning music. She recently
co-edited Gilles Deleuze, la pensée-musique (Cdmc, Symétrie, 2015). http://
www.pascalecriton.com. Email: [email protected].

Elena del Río is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Alberta,
Canada. Her essays on the intersections between cinema and philosophies
of the body in the areas of technology, performance, and affect have been
featured in journals such as Camera Obscura, Discourse, Science Fiction Studies,
Studies in French Cinema, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Film-Philosophy,
The New Review of Film and Television Studies, Canadian Journal of Film Studies,
SubStance, and Deleuze Studies. She has also contributed essays to volumes on
the films of Atom Egoyan and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, on the philoso-
phy of film, and on Deleuze and cinema. She is the author of Deleuze and the
Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection (Edinburgh University Press, 2008)
and The Grace of Destruction: A Vital Ethology of Extreme Cinemas (Bloomsbury,
forthcoming 2016). Email: [email protected].

Luis de Miranda completed his PhD on the concept of “esprit de corps” at

the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of several books of fiction
and non-fiction. His novel Who Killed the Poet? has been translated into
several languages. The journal Deleuze Studies published a translation of
his essay on Deleuze and the lines of life, “Is a New Life Possible?” (2013).
https://luisdemiranda.com/

Lucia D’Errico is an artist devoted to experimental music, performing on

acoustic and electric guitar, bass guitar, oud, and several other plucked
string instruments. As a performer and improviser, she collaborates
with contemporary music groups and with theatre, dance, and visual art
companies. She studied classical guitar at Conservatorio B. Marcello
in Venice and modern languages at Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice.
Currently, she is undertaking doctoral research (ME21 at the Orpheus
Institute, Ghent, docARTES programme at Leuven University) on recom-
posing Baroque music. She is also active as a freelance graphic designer.
http://luciaderrico.altervista.org. http://toondealer.altervista.org. Email:
[email protected]

Zornitsa Dimitrova is a doctoral graduate of University of Münster and holds

degrees in Indology, philosophy, and English literature from the universi-
ties of Sofia and Freiburg. Her dissertation, “Expression as Mimesis and
Event,” sketched out an emergentist dramatic theory governed by inter-
weaving ontologies ofimmanence and transcendence. She has published
on dramatic theory and on philosopher Gilles Deleuze; her research inter-
ests include performance and ritual studies, event theories, and mimesis.

547
 Notes on Contributors

Lilija Duoblienė is Head of the Educational Department at the Faculty of

Philosophy, University of Vilnius, Lithuania. She obtained an MA diploma
in history and social sciences (1984) and didactics of philosophy (1996), and
a PhD in the field of didactics of philosophy (2000) at Vilnius University.
Her research concerns the philosophy and ideology of education, creativity,
and cultural encountering. Her works are based on the theories of Michel
Foucault, Michel de Certeau, John Dewey, and Gilles Deleuze. Recently,
she has been working on Deleuze’s philosophy, applying it to the fields
of education and music. She has written a monograph and many articles,
including on developing Deleuze’s philosophy in the field of education and
creativity, and recently has been involved in the research project “Gilles
Deleuze: Philosophy and Art.”

Adreis Echzehn is a conceptual artist, author, film-maker, and photographer.

He previously worked as a bar pianist and published stories in print media
like Die Zeit, El País, DTV books, La Repubblica, GEO Magazine, and so on.
He was a joint owner of a publicity agency when he conceived durable peri-
odicals, for example, for doctors at leisure or football connoisseurs. He
has received various awards, such as the international Premio Mezzogiorno
Chiama Europa in Rome. http://www.spaciergang.org. Email: behindme@
gmx.at.

Einar Torfi Einarsson is an Icelandic composer and researcher. He obtained

his PhD from the University of Huddersfield, where he studied on the
Jonathan Harvey Scholarship. His music has been performed throughout
Europe by ensembles such as ELISION, Klangforum Wien, and Ensemble
Intercontemporain. His research interests lie in the interplay of poststruc-
turalist philosophy and notation. In 2013–14 he was a postdoctoral research
fellow at the Orpheus Institute (ORCiM, Ghent, Belgium). Currently he lec-
tures at the Music Department of the Iceland Academy of the Arts, where he
also serves as the coordinator for the Composition Research Unit (CRU).

Jae Emerling is an associate professor of modern and contemporary art in

the College of Arts and Architecture at the University of North Carolina,
Charlotte. In 2011 he was a visiting professor of contemporary art in the
Faculty of Arts at VU Amsterdam. He received his PhD in art history from
the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Theory for Art
History (2005) and the award-winning Photography: History and Theory (2012),
both published by Routledge. His work has also appeared in the Journal of
Visual Culture, CAA Reviews, Journal of Art Historiography, and the Los Angeles–
based magazine X-TRA: Contemporary Art Quarterly. He is currently working
on a book about the aesthetic-historiographic concept of transmissibility.
Some of this work has recently appeared in two anthologies, Contemporary
Art about Architecture (2013) and Bergson and the Art of Immanence: Painting,
Photography, Film (2013). Email: [email protected].

548
 Notes on Contributors

Lois Fitch received her doctorate from Durham University after studying with
Max Paddison. After completing a teaching fellowship at Durham, she
became Programme Leader, BMus, at Edinburgh Napier University, and, in
2008, moved to the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, where
she is now Head of Undergraduate Programmes. In 2012 she received an
Early Career Fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to
complete her monograph Brian Ferneyhough (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect,
2013). Future projects include returning to the subject matter of her
PhD (Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon, and the writings and music of Brian
Ferneyhough) and undertaking research into performers’ annotations and
performance practice in contemporary scores. Email: Lois.Fitch@rncm.
ac.uk.

Mike Fletcher is a multi-instrumentalist and composer who performs through-

out the UK and Europe. As a nominee for the ECHO Rising Stars 2014/2015
programme he has recently appeared at the Barbican Centre as part of
the London Jazz Festival, Hamburg’s Laiezhalle, and BOZAR in Brussels.
Mike works predominantly in the fields of jazz and improvised music,
with his primary interest being in balancing composition with improvisa-
tion. In 2013, he was chosen by BBC Radio 3 to tour on lead alto with the
European Jazz Orchestra under the direction of Ann-Sofi Søderqvist and
has more recently toured Europe with his trio as part of the ECHO pro-
ject. Mike is currently undertaking a PhD in composition at Birmingham
City University and is preparing a chapter for inclusion in a forthcom-
ing edited collection of academic articles in the field of jazz studies.
http://www.mikefletchermusic.com.

Paolo Galli studied composition at the Istituto Superiore di Studi Musicali

Gaetano Donizetti (Italy) from 2001 to 2010. Subsequently, from 2011 to
2013, he undertook a master’s in composition at the Royal Conservatoire
Antwerp, under the supervision of Professor Wim Henderickx. In 2014
he was accepted as a doctoral student of the docARTES programme;
at the same time, he decided to pursue his career as a researcher at the
Royal Conservatoire Antwerp. His deep interest in vocal music and lin-
guistics is shown by some of his latest compositions, such as Il mare come
materiale for soprano and ensemble (2012), on a text by Giorgio Caproni,
and r‑p‑o‑p‑h‑e‑s‑s‑a‑g‑r for solo mezzo-soprano (2013), on a text by E. E.
Cummings. Furthermore, in 2015, he collaborated in the ME21 project
“Deleuzabelli Variations,” coordinated by Paulo de Assis, by composing “. . .
heraus in Luft . . . ,” a comment on Diabelli Variations 21–28. Email: paolo.
[email protected].

Verina Gfader is an artist and researcher based in London. Beyond academic

work she is Creative Director for EP, a new book series across art, archi-
tecture, and design from Sternberg Press, Berlin; she is currently research-
ing for the second volume, Design Fiction. Her postdoctoral research, after

549
 Notes on Contributors

studies in visual media, photography, and fine arts, included a research

residency at Tokyo University of the Arts (Geidai) to explore structural
coherence between non-commercial Japanese animation and geographi-
cal, institutional, and social ideas. Her current focus is on animation, vital
lines, and concepts of vitality; volcanic islands, statelessness, and distant
fictions; cognitive capitalism; and text and alliance, expanded geographi-
cal space, and the accumulative nature of knowledge in art. In her practice
she pursues models, drawing, text material, and fictional institutions. Her
projects include Adventure-Landing: A Compendium of Animation (authored
book, 2011), “Talk Geometries: Towards Anime’s Sensorial Vocabularies”
(invited speaker), Kinema Club Conference for Film and Moving Images
from Japan XIII, Reischauer Institute, Harvard University (2014); and “Saas-
Fee Summer Institute: Art and the Politics of Estrangement” (participant),
Saas-Fee, Switzerland (2015).

Lindsay Gianoukas, stage name of Lindsay T. Gianuca, is an actress and

dancer who works in theatre, cinema, advertising, and television in Brazil.
As a dancer, she performs in contemporary dance and tap. She graduated
in social communication and journalism (PUCRS), has a predilection for
writing, and has never stopped working and investigating in the field of
the arts. Holding a master’s degree in performing arts (UFRGS), her main
research fields are contemporary arts, creative processes, and their relation
to philosophies of difference. Currently, she is a collaborating partner of
the Brazilian Association of Research and Post-Graduate Programmes in
the Performing Arts (ABRACE) and is as a professor at the Universidade
Federal de Pelotas (UFPEL), where she teaches subjects such as bodily and
vocal expression, fundamentals of dramatic language, and others subjects in
the Dramatic Arts Graduation Programme from the Arts Centre (CA). She
lives in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Email: lindsaygianoukas@
gmail.com.

Paolo Giudici is an associate researcher at the Orpheus Institute, Ghent,

and an artist-researcher living and working in Padua, Italy. Email: paolo.
[email protected].

Keir GoGwilt graduated from Harvard University (2013) with high honours
and was awarded the Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts. Currently he is enrolled
as an MA candidate in music (integrative studies) at UCSD, where he is
the inaugural recipient of the Prebys Award. As a violinist, Keir has soloed
with orchestras including the Chinese National Symphony, Orquesta
Filarmonica de Santiago, and the Bowdoin International Music Festival
Orchestra. He has collaborated closely with composers such as Matthew
Aucoin, Tan Dun, and Tobias Picker, and has performed as a recitalist and
chamber musician at the Spoleto Festival in Italy, the Shalin Liu center at
Rockport, and Miller Theatre. He has served as associate concertmaster
of the Canadian Opera Company and recorded for Tzadik records. Keir’s

550
 Notes on Contributors

scholarly work draws on critical theory to reimagine technics, hermeneu-

tics, aesthetics, and politics as they relate to musical composition and per-
formance. Email: [email protected].

Ronny Hardliz is an independent practising artist and researcher holding an

MA in architecture from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH)
in Lausanne. Currently he is a candidate for a mixed-mode PhD entitled
“‘wall sandwich’—The Architectural in Art Practice from Destruction to
Non-Construction” at the Art and Design Research Institute of Middlesex
University in London and is a Swiss National Science Foundation
DocMobility fellow in the doctoral degree programme “Curatorial/
Knowledge” within the Department of Visual Culture at Goldsmiths
University of London. Email: [email protected].

Rahma Khazam is a British freelance writer and art critic based in Paris,
France. She holds degrees in philosophy (University of Edinburgh) and
art history (Sorbonne, Paris) and a PhD in art and aesthetics (Sorbonne).
Her key research areas are aesthetics, contemporary art and architecture,
modernism, and the theory and history of sound art. Her writing has been
published in artist catalogues, thematic anthologies, and contemporary art
magazines such as Frieze, Springerin, and Artforum.com. She has lectured at,
taught at, or participated in conferences at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des
Beaux-arts, Paris, Tuned City, Berlin, University of Winchester, UK, Ecole
Supérieure d’architecture de Paris Malaquais, Université de la Sorbonne
Paris 8, Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius, Lithuania, Ecole Supérieure
d’Arts et Médias de Caen-Cherbourg, CUNY New York, Latvian Academy
of Music, Riga, UNSW Sydney, and the Royal Museums Greenwich. She is a
member of AICA (International Association of Art Critics). Email: rahma.
[email protected].

Stefan Kristensen holds a PhD in philosophy (University of Geneva and

Paris I, 2007). He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the History of Art
Unit, University of Geneva, and a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt
Foundation, University of Heidelberg. He has published several articles on
twentieth-century art, philosophy, and psychology. He is co-founder of the
Utopiana association with Anna Barseghian and has been actively involved
in the design and organisation of most of its events and projects. He is also
developing with Anna Barseghian an artistic practice centred on the rep-
resentation of absence.

Oleg Lebedev is a teaching assistant in philosophy at the Université

Catholique de Louvain (Belgium). His research interests have so far focused
on cinematic realism (especially among French theoreticians and critics
influenced by Bazin, such as Daney and Comolli), and on the conceptu-
alisation of the link between politics and aesthetics proposed by Jacques

551
 Notes on Contributors

Rancière. His current research pertains to the theory of subjectivity and

individuation in the philosophy of Deleuze.

Jimmie LeBlanc is a Canadian composer who was born in the Province of

Quebec. He studied composition and musical analysis at the Conservatoire
de musique de Montréal and completed a doctorate in music composition
at the McGill University Schulich School of Music. Ensembles that have
performed his music include Ensemble Contrechamps, Esprit Orchestra,
Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, and Camerata Aberta. Recently, he was the
recipient of the Lutosławski Award 2008 and won the 2009 Canada Arts
Council Jules-Léger Prize for New Chamber Music for his work L’Espace
intérieur du monde. He is the author of Luigi Nono et les chemins de l’écoute
(L’Harmattan, 2010), “Xenakis’ Æsthetic Project: the Paradoxes of a
Formalist Intuition” (Xenakis Matters, Pendragon Press, 2012), and “Serge
Provost: Une approche spectrale de la transtextualité” (La création musicale
au Québec, PUM, 2014). Email: [email protected].

Erin Manning holds a University Research Chair in Relational Art and

Philosophy in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal,
Canada). She is also the director of the SenseLab, a laboratory that explores
the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix
of the sensing body in movement. Her current art practice is centred on
large-scale participatory installations that facilitate emergent collectiv­
ities. Current art projects are focused around the concept of minor gestures
in relation to colour, movement, and participation. Publications include
Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Duke University Press, 2013),
Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2009), and, with Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of
Experience (Minnesota University Press, 2014). Forthcoming book projects
include a translation of Fernand Deligny’s Les détours de l’agir ou le moindre
geste (Duke University Press) and a monograph entitled The Minor Gesture
(Duke University Press). http://senselab.ca. http://erinmovement.com.

Nicolas Marty is a doctoral student in musicology at the University of Paris

La Sorbonne, where he studies listening to acousmatic musics. He finished
his studies in computer music at the Conservatory of Bordeaux in 2010
and is currently attending Jean-Louis Agobet’s classes on instrumental com-
position and Christophe Havel’s courses in electroacoustic composition.
He is lecturer in computer music at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne.
With François Delalande he edited issue 8 of the journal Musimédiane
(“Electroacoustic music”) and organised the session euroMAC2014
“Listening to Electroacoustic Music through Analysis,” of which he is
preparing the proceedings for publication. His compositional aesthetic
rests on a form of extended and contemplative temporality. The pulsed
or striated element is relegated to the background, in favour of a smooth,
yet punctually articulated, deployment of space. The human element

552
 Notes on Contributors

is set aside as much as possible to privilege other forms of existence.

http://marty.nicolas.chez.com/.

Frédéric Mathevet defines himself as a visual artist and composer. He is an

associate researcher at ACTE (UMR 8218) in Paris I (CARS), a doctor of arts,
and Co-editor-in-Chief of online magazine L’Autre Musique and of the lab-
oratory of the same name, which interweaves researchers and practition-
ers in a liberated creative act. He has published two handbooks on visual
art, the second dedicated to music, and has participated in exhibitions in
Paris, Montreuil, Toulouse, and London. He has given several multi-me-
dia concerts, including Making the skin 2 for a bodhràn (Nice, Paris, Noisiel),
Rec-u-Aime for a cello, a mezzo-soprano and a knitter (La ferme du buisson),
Baritone (Petit Bain, Divan du monde), and The Exorcist for voice, bass and pre-
pared piano (Cité du cinéma). http://flavors.me/mathevetfrederic. Email:
[email protected].

Vincent Meelberg is a senior lecturer and researcher at the Department of

Cultural Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and at
the Academy for Creative and Performing Arts in Leiden and The Hague.
He studied double bass at the Conservatoire of Rotterdam and received his
MA both in musicology and in philosophy at Utrecht University. He wrote
his dissertation on the relation between narrativity and contemporary
music at the Department of Literary Studies, Leiden University. Meelberg
has published books and articles about musical narrativity, musical affect,
improvisation, and auditory culture, and is founding editor of the online
Journal of Sonic Studies. His current research focuses on the relation between
musical practices, interaction, and creativity. Beside his academic activities
he is active as a double bassist in several jazz and improvisation ensembles
as well as being a composer. Email: [email protected].

On John Miers: The familiar question regarding the ability of the art object
to embody or communicate knowledge that artist-researchers frequently
encounter is inverted in the case of the cartoonist-researcher: the art form
is frequently used for factual narratives and explanatory texts, and held
by educators to be a highly effective means of transmitting information.
Developing my artistic research methodology has largely comprised resist-
ing the urge to explain rather than explore theory. My work as a scholar
emerges directly from my work as a cartoonist: it was through artist’s talks
at academic symposia that I was introduced to the emerging discipline
of comics studies, and the desire to develop my cartooning motivates my
research. My PhD explores the role of visual metaphor in meaning-making
in comics, and my ongoing research aim could be described as an attempt
to frame the making of comics as primarily an act of drawing rather than of
storytelling. Email: [email protected].

553
 Notes on Contributors

Elfie Miklautz is Professor of Sociology at the WU Vienna University of

Economics and works on the interface of art and science. In her interdisci-
plinary research she combines sociological, philosophical, anthropological,
and aesthetic concepts. She has worked on topics such as symbolic econ-
omy, material culture, gift exchange, creative industries, and music aesthet-
ics. Her current work deals with knowledge through art.
Email: [email protected].

Catarina Pombo Nabais received a PhD in philosophy from Université Paris

VIII, Vincennes—Saint-Dennis, with the thesis “L’Esthétique en tant que
Philosophie de la Nature: le Concept de Vie chez Gilles Deleuze. Pour une
Théorie Naturelle de l’Expréssivité. Regards sur la Littérature” (2007),
under the supervision of Jacques Rancière. She is a postdoctoral researcher
at the Centre of Philosophy of Science of the University of Lisbon (CFCUL),
was Head of the CFCUL Science and Art FCT Research Group from 2008
to 2014, and since 2014 is Head of the CFCUL Science-Art-Philosophy LAB.
She is the author of Deleuze: Philosophie et littérature (Paris: L’Harmattan,
2013).

Tero Nauha is a performance and visual artist. He studied fine arts at the
Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. He is a PhD candi-
date in artistic research at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts
Helsinki. His research uses a critical approach to schizoanalysis applied to
artistic practice in the context of post-industrial capitalism. He is a mem-
ber of the Performance and Philosophy group, IFTR, and the Society for
Artistic Research. His research has been presented at PSi, IFTR, and the
Performance and Philosophy and New Materialism conferences, among
other venues. His artistic works have been presented at Manifesta10,
Frankfurter Kunstverein, Theaterdiscounter in Berlin, CSW Kronika in
Bytom, Poland, Performance Matters in London, New Performance festival,
Turku, and Kiasma Theatre in Helsinki, and others. http://www.teronauha.
com.

Marc Ngui is a Toronto-based artist born in Georgetown, Guyana. His practice

includes drawing, painting, animation, and installation. He also works as
a cartoonist and has published two graphic novels, Enter Avariz (2002) and
The Unexpurgated Tale of Lordie Jones (2005), and is currently working on a
third. With Magda Wojtyra, Ngui is one half of the collaborative art pro-
ject Happy Sleepy. Marc has exhibited work at the JR Ishinomaki Line Art
Festival, Onagawa, Japan; Supermarket Art Fair 2013, Stockholm, Sweden;
the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery, Kitchener; Fine and Dandy Gallery,
Toronto; Doris McCarthy Gallery, Toronto; Open Space Gallery, Victoria;
and the Toronto Comics Arts Festival.

554
 Notes on Contributors

Andreia Machado Oliveira received a multidisciplinary PhD from UFRGS

(Brazil) and Université de Montréal (Canada). She is a professor in the
graduate programme of visual arts and graduate programme in net-
worked educational technology at UFSM (Brazil), is currently chair of the
InterArtec/Cnpq research group and of the Interdisciplinary Interactivity
Lab (LabInter), and is a member of the SenseLab (Montreal, Canada). She
is a multimedia artist with expertise in the fields of art and technology, con-
temporary subjectivity, and interactive systems. Email: andreiaoliveira.br@
gmail.com.

Gabriel Paiuk is a composer and sound artist from Argentina currently resi-
dent in the Netherlands, where he is a faculty member of the Institute of
Sonology (The Hague). His works take the form of sound installations and
performative works for instruments and particular loudspeaker set-ups and
have been performed by ASKO ensemble, KNM Berlin, Slagwerk Den Haag,
Francesco Dillon, Rank Ensemble, Modelo62, and Ensemble 306, among
others. He was awarded the Gaudeamus composition prize in 2006 for his
electronic work/sound installation Res Extensa. In 2009, he was Director of
the Center for Advanced Studies in Contemporary Music, Buenos Aires. In
recent years he has articulated his compositional practice with theoretical
research, leading to talks and workshops in contexts such as the master’s in
artistic research at KABK (The Hague), the Amsterdam School for Cultural
Analysis (University of Amsterdam), and the KASK School of Arts (Ghent)
and to a publication in Organised Sound. http://www.gabrielpaiuk.com.
Email: [email protected].

Federica Pallaver is a goldsmith living in Bolzano, Italy. After completing her

studies in goldsmithing in Florence in 1992, she further studied by work-
ing with Giampaolo Babetto in Padua (1992) and completing courses at
the Sommerakademie in Salzburg (Austria) with Robin Quigley (1994) and
Erico Nagai (2001), in Florence at Alchimia with Giovanni Corvaja (2006),
and in Padua at the Pietro Selvatico Institute of Art with Graziano Visintin
(2008). Her works have been displayed in individual and collective exhi-
bitions in Italy, at Prisma gallery (Bolzano), Cristiani gallery (Turin), Ugo
Carà Museum of Modern Art (Trieste), Fioretto gallery (Padua), Alchimia
(Florence), in Germany at Oko gallery (Berlin) and Schmuckfrage gallery
(Berlin), in England at the Roundhouse (London), in Lithuania at AV17 gal-
lery (Vilnius), and in Russia at the Amber Museum (Kaliningrad). In 2010
she was invited to the 13. Erfurter Schmucksymposium in Erfurt (Germany).
Since 1996 she has owned an atelier in Bolzano. Email: [email protected].

Andrej Radman has taught design and theory courses at TU Delft Faculty of
Architecture since 2004. In 2008 he joined the section affiliated with archi-
tecture theory as an assistant professor. A graduate of the Zagreb School
of Architecture in Croatia, he received a master’s degree with honours and
a doctoral degree from TU Delft. Radman is a member of the National

555
 Notes on Contributors

Committee on Deleuze Scholarship and the editorial board of the peer-

reviewed journal for architecture theory, Footprint. His research focuses on
radical empiricism in general and the legacy of the founder of the ecologi-
cal approach to perception, J. J. Gibson, in particular. He is a licensed archi-
tect and recipient of the Croatian Architects Association Annual Award for
Housing Architecture in 2002. Email: [email protected].

Felix Rebolledo is a PhD candidate in social and institutional psychology

(UFRGS, Porto Alegre, Brazil), a lecturer in screenwriting and documen-
tary theory at UNIFRA in Santa Maria, RS, Brazil, a researcher at LabInter/
UFSM, Brazil, and a member of the SenseLab (Montreal, Canada). He is
a member of the editorial collective of the journal Inflexions. His research
interests revolve around cinema and the image. Email: [email protected].

Anne Sauvagnargues is Full Professor at Paris West University Nanterre,

she has written several books and articles on art and Deleuze and Guattari
including Deleuze and Art (Paris, 2005; Bloomsbury 2013), Deleuze: L’empirisme
transcendantal (Paris, 2010), and Artmachines: Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon
(Edinburgh University Press, 2015).

Martin Scherzinger is Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and

Communication at NYU Steinhardt. His research specialises in sound stud-
ies, music, media, and politics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,
with a particular interest in the music of European modernism and after,
as well as African music and transnational musical fusions. His research
includes the examination of links between political economy and digi-
tal sound technologies, the poetics of copyright law in an international
frame, the relation between aesthetics and censorship, the sensory limits
of mass-mediated music, the mathematical geometries of musical time,
and the history of sound in philosophy. This work represents an attempt
to understand what we might call contemporary “modalities of listening”;
that is, the economic, political, metaphysical, and technological deter-
minants of both mediated and (what is perceived as) immediate auditory
experience. Email: [email protected].

Janae Sholtz is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Coordinator of

Women’s and Gender Studies at Alvernia University. She recently published
The Invention of a People: Heidegger and Deleuze on Art and the Political with
Edinburgh University Press. Sholtz researches continental philosophy with
a focuses on French thought and is interested in subjects such as drama­-
tisation, the event, transgression, immanence, powers of affect, and the
aesthetic/political conjunction.

556
 Notes on Contributors

Steve Tromans is a Birmingham-based pianist and composer working pre-

dominantly in the disciplinary fields of jazz and improvised music. He
has given in the region of six thousand performances at a national and
international level, and composed over one hundred works for a variety of
ensembles and music-making situations. Tromans’s Birmingham-Chicago
Improvisers’ Ensemble project, bringing together expert improvisers from
the UK and the USA, was featured on BBC Radio’s Jazz on 3 programme
in 2013 and 2015. In recent years, Tromans has undertaken practice-as-
research in improvised performance, giving mixed-mode lecture-recitals at
a host of academic conferences/guest workshops, and has received publi-
cation in a series of music and performing arts journals and books. He is
currently a postdoctoral researcher in jazz at Birmingham City University.
http://www.steve-tromans.co.uk.

Toshiya Ueno is a professor, critic, and TJ/DJ at the Department of Transcultural

Studies, Faculty of Representational Studies, Wako University, Tokyo, and a
visiting professor at the Department of East Asia Studies, McGill University,
Montreal 2007–12 (winter semesters). In the 1980s he was involved with free
pirate radio in Tokyo, which Félix Guattari visited and did a workshop with.
He has published numerous books in Japanese on critical theory, cultural
studies, and social philosophy and is currently preparing a book on Guattari.
Among his publications in English are “Guattari and Japan” in Félix Guattari
in the Age of Semiocapitalism, edited by Gary Genosko (Deleuze Studies special
issue 6 [2], 2012) and “Unlearning to Raver” in The Post Subcultures Reader,
edited by David Muggleton and Rupert Weinzierl (Berg, 2003).

Susanne Valerie is Professor of the central artistic subject Acting at the

University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Max Reinhardt Seminar.
As an actress she played starring roles at national state theatres across
Europe (Vienna, Basel, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Berlin). Parallel to her profes-
sional work as an actress she studied philosophy at the Goethe-University
Frankfurt and the University of Vienna and achieved her PhD in philoso­
phy in 1995. In 1997 she founded the Viennese art factory GRENZ-film,
together with the Vienna-based philosopher Arno Böhler. http://personal.
mdw.ac.at/granzer.

Mhairi Vari is a Scottish artist based in London and represented by Domobaal

Gallery. She completed postgraduate studies in fine art at the Royal Academy
Schools, London, and exhibits internationally. Recent exhibitions include
Elbow curated by Ian Dawson, CandC Gallery, London; perpetual doubt, con-
stant becoming—John Street, Domobaal Gallery, London; LOL Memory, Art13
Project, Olympia, London; Repeater—Park Avenue (permanent installation),
New York; Domain, Domobaal Gallery, London; Haste Ye Back—Desert Rose,
ARTicle Gallery, Birmingham. In 2010–11 she was Wheatley Fine Art Fellow
at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design. Vari works as a visiting lecturer
on BA and MA Fine Art courses around the UK. Email: [email protected].

557
 Notes on Contributors

Mick Wilson is an artist, educator, and researcher based in Sweden and Ireland.
He is currently the first Head of the Valand Academy of Art, University of
Gothenburg (2012–); was previously the founder Dean of the Graduate
School of Creative Arts and Media, Ireland (2008–12); and before this was
first Head of Research for the National College of Art and Design, Ireland
(2005–7). Edited volumes include, with Paul O’Neill, Curating Research
(2014), Curating and the Educational Turn (2010), and, with Schelte van Ruiten,
SHARE Handbook for Artistic Research Education (2013). He has been active in
developing doctoral education across the arts through his work as Chair
of the SHARE Network (2010–14), as a member of the European Artistic
Research Network, EARN (2005–), and as Editor-in-Chief for the recently
established Platform for Artistic Research Sweden, PARSE Journal (2015–).
Recent art projects/exhibitions include: Aesthetics Jam, Taipei Biennial
(2014), Joyful Wisdom, Rezan Has Museum, Istanbul (2013), The Judgement is
the Mirror, Living Art Museum, Reykjavík (2013), some songs are sung slower, the
Lab, Dublin (2013), and Of the Salt Bitter Sweet Sea: A Public Banquet, CHQ,
Dublin (2012). Recent publications include “Opening to a Discussion
on Judgement,” PARSE 1, Judgement (2015), “Dead Public: An Unfinished
Enquiry” in Vector: Artistic Research in Context (2014), “Anachronistic
Aesthesis” in Experimental Aesthetics (2014), “Between Apparatus and Ethos:
On Building a Research Pedagogy in the Arts” in Artists with PhDs: On the
New Doctoral Degree in Studio Art (2014), “We are the Board, but What Is an
Assemblage?” in Art as a Thinking Process (2013), “Come Promises From
Teachers” in Offside Effect: Papers from the 1st Tbilisi Triennial (2013), “Blame It
on Bologna” in MetropolisM (2013), and “Art, Education and the Role of the
Cultural Institution” in European Management Models in Contemporary Art and
Culture (2013). He was co-convenor with Paul O’Neill and Janna Graham of
the 4th Moscow Curatorial Summer School, 2015.

Elisabet Yanagisawa is an artist and PhD student at University of Gothenburg.

She is currently finishing her dissertation in artistic research titled “Proximus
sensibilis: The Abyss of the Surface.” The study investigates the philosophy
of matter and affect through the perspective of East Asian aesthetics and
Western philosophies. Focusing on the Japanese concepts of yūgen, wabi,
sabi, and iki, her research emphasises aspects of intuition, artistic self-culti-
vation, and sensuous knowledge through an exploration of the concepts of
folding, the inorganic, and ethico-aesthetics in the philosophy of Deleuze
and Guattari, the notion of conatus and the principle of affect in Spinoza,
and the idea of ontological beauty in Whitehead. Through her artistic prac-
tice, Yanagisawa explores multi-sensibility in participatory artworks such as
her Dreaming of the Intimacy of Materia, and by reassessing the way of tea,
olfactory art, and haptic matter. Her work has been exhibited in Japan and
she has curated shows of Japanese artists in Sweden.
Email: [email protected].

558
 Notes on Contributors

Audronė Žukauskaitė is a senior researcher at the Lithuanian Culture

Research Institute. Her recent publications include the monograph
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Philosophy: The Logic of Multiplicity (2011,
in Lithuanian), and an edited volume entitled 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, 2015).

559
 Index of Names

A Berio, Luciano 37, 85, 90, 128, 160

Abramović, Marina 355 “A-Ronne” 85
Adorno, Theodor W. 34, 45, 54, 77, 84, 178, 450, 451, Gesti 160
474 Sequenza I 128
Agamben, Giorgio 17, 294, 447, 452, 453, 471, 527, Berlioz, Hector 316
542 Beuys, Joseph 225
Agawu, Kofi 33, 34 Bidima, Jean-Godefroy 354, 355, 481, 487
Alliez, Éric 15, 20, 75, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, Biermann, Gregg 16, 346, 347, 348, 349, 350, 351, 353
306, 541, 542, 569 Iterations 346, 347, 351, 352
Alphen, Ernst van 81 Labyrinthine 351
Althusser, Louis 45, 54, 252 Magic Mirror Maze 346, 347, 348, 349, 350,
Apollinaire, Guillaume 486 351, 352
Arigo, José 340 Spherical Coordinates 351
Artaud, Antonin 32, 118, 242, 248, 388, 476 Bifo (Franco Berardi) 489, 490, 492, 493, 494, 502,
Asam, Jacopo 387 503, 504, 505, 506, 507, 508
Ascott, Roy 17, 395, 399, 400 Bissonnette, Larry 496, 499, 502
Assis, Paulo de 36, 309 Bizet, Georges 316
Attali, Jacques 359 Black Panthers 534
Augé, Marc 435, 436, 473 Blake, Ran 171
Blanchot, Maurice 261, 450
B Leautréamont et Sade 261
Bach, J.S. 163, 282, 316, 571 Blanc, Nathalie 434, 436
Bacon, Francis 16, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 115, Blas, Zach 372, 373
116, 118, 119, 127, 222, 223, 228, 230, 240, 307, 316, Bogue, Ronald 148, 261, 262, 271
324, 326, 332, 375, 376, 377, 378, 379, 381, 382, Bonnard, Pierre 316
384, 385, 440, 525 Bonne, Jean-Claude 15, 20, 293, 294, 295, 297, 298,
Badiou, Alain 296, 299, 300, 302, 543 306
Baggs, Amelia 497, 498, 502, 508 Bonnet, Antoine 129, 135
Bakhtin, Mikhail 179 Bosse, Abraham 304
Barad, Karen 254, 255, 256, 487 Boudon, Philippe 304
Barthes, Roland 30, 37, 261 Bouguereau, William Adolphe 115, 127
Sade, Fourrier, Loyola 261 Boulanger, Etienne 434, 436
Bartók, Béla 135, 316 Boulez, Pierre 13, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39,
Bluebeard’s Castle 135 40, 43, 52, 53, 54, 55, 107, 128, 135, 326
Bascom, Julia 498, 508 “. . . Auprès et au loin” 38
Bataille, Georges 30, 179, 261, 454 Dialogue de l’ombre double 128
La Littérature et le Mal 261 Le Marteau sans maître 31, 33
L’Érotisme 261 Penser la Musique Aujourd’hui 37, 38
Bateson, Gregory 459 Pli selon pli 31, 33
Baumann, Stefanie 482, 487 Répons, 135
Bayle, François 135 . . . explosante-fixe . . . 135
Tremblement de terre très doux 135 “Time Re-explored” 37
Beckett, Samuel 15, 33, 272, 273, 274, 276, 277, 316, Bourriaud, Nicolas 541, 542
321, 463, 559 Brathwaite, Edward K. 19, 526, 533, 535, 542, 543
Beethoven, Ludwig van 118, 316 Braxton, Anthony 171
Bene, Carmelo 91, 101, 221, 222, 223, 224, 227, 229, Brod, Max 451
230, 234, 236, 238, 239 Bruno, Giordano 395, 400, 423
Manfred 91 Buchanan, Ian 18, 253, 473, 476, 487, 540, 542, 569
Benjamin, Walter 17, 47, 332, 446, 448, 449, 450, 451, Bukatman, Scott 370, 371
452, 472, 473, 475, 476, 542 Bureau, Marie-Christine 435, 436
Bergson, Henri 18, 154, 155, 227, 295, 316, 327, 396, Buren, Daniel 297, 306
441, 442, 475, 510, 511, 513

561
 Index

C Nietzsche and Philosophy 195

Cage, John 18, 52, 53, 107, 109, 113, 137, 183, 185, 316, “Occupy without Counting: Boulez, Proust,
355, 357, 360, 363, 517, 522, 523, 524, 525 and Time” 37, 55
Canetti, Elias 316 Proust and Signs 244, 248, 251, 316, 441
Caproni, Giorgio 90, 91, 92, 101, 103 Spinoza: Practical Philosophy 150, 202, 425
Careri, Francesco 433, 434, 436 “The Exhausted” 276
Carter, Betty 171 The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque 56, 66, 425, 445
Casals, Pablo 111, 112 The Logic of Sensation 16, 78, 84, 114, 115, 127,
Cassidy, Aaron 13, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 240, 316, 324, 375, 377, 381, 385, 440,
66, 77, 160 520, 525
The Crutch of Memory 65 “The Method of Dramatization” 10, 11, 12, 20
The Pleats of Matter 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, “The Shame and the Glory: T.E. Lawrence” 32
64, 66 “What is the Creative Act?” 68
Castellucci, Romeo 15, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari
248, 249, 250, 251 Anti-Oedipus 36, 40, 44, 45, 55, 76, 259, 303,
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 316 307, 313, 314, 316, 463, 489, 490, 492,
Cendo, Raphaël 14, 114, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127 500, 501, 502, 503, 508, 538
In Vivo 14, 114, 123, 125, 126, 127 A Thousand Plateaus 16, 17, 37, 38, 39, 55, 84,
Cézanne, Paul 316 105, 108, 112, 113, 127, 273, 276, 294, 300,
Charles, Ray 20, 34, 103, 137, 144, 171, 220, 385, 463, 302, 303, 305, 308, 311, 313, 314, 316, 317,
508 318, 341, 344, 354, 360, 390, 400, 401,
Chopin, Frederic 135, 316 414, 431, 436, 441, 463, 482, 487, 516,
Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn 371 537, 538, 542
Christo, Vladimirov Javacheff 225 What is Philosophy? 104, 181, 294, 308, 317, 349,
Churchill, Caryl 14, 219, 220 350, 354, 359, 405, 438, 440, 460, 516,
Far Away 219, 220 520, 525
Clark, Lygia 225 De Niro, Robert 316
Claudel, Paul 30, 32, 35 Derrida, Jacques 36, 40, 369
Colebrook, Claire 457, 462, 518, 519, 520, 524 Descamps, Christian 536, 537, 542
Colli, Giorgio 212, 243, 251 Descartes, René 206
Collins, Suzanne 49, 253 Desmond, Paul 171
Connor, Steve 277, 496, 508 Despret, Vinciane 340, 344
Corner, Philip 18, 517, 523 Dewey, John 173, 298, 308
Creal 18, 510, 511, 512, 513, 514, 515 Dhomont, Francis 135
Crimp, Martin 14, 217, 220 Forêt Profonde 135
Criton, Pascale Dietz, Howard 14, 167, 171
Chaoscaccia 13, 67, 70, 71, 73, 74 digital art 15, 309, 310, 312, 477
Cull, Laura 19, 224, 233, 235, 239 Disney, Walt 366, 369, 373, 374
Ditko, Steve 380, 385
D Donnellan, Anne 499
Dalí, Salvador 316, 320 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 250, 251
Damasio, Antonio 46 Duchamp, Marcel 295, 296, 297, 316, 483, 486
Davis, Miles 83, 84, 171 Dufourt, Hughes 31, 34
Debussy, Claude 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 128, 135, 316 Erewhon 31
La cathédrale engloutie 128 Dumézil, Georges 431
Pelléas et Mélisande 135 Dylan, Bob 440
Degani, Zoé 15, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229,
230, 231, 233, 234, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240 E
The Bath 226, 227, 228, 229, 231, 234 Eco, Umberto 117, 127
The Lesson 226, 231, 232, 233, 235 Eisendle, Hannah 387
DeLanda, Manuel 40, 41, 42, 43, 54, 460, 541 Eisenstein, Sergei 16, 331, 332, 366, 368, 369, 374
Deleuze, Gilles Battleship Potemkin 331
Cinema 1: The Movement-Image 154 Ekman, Paul 46
Cinema 2: The Time-Image 135, 153, 154, 251 El Greco 320, 381
Coldness and Cruelty 15, 261, 262, 265, 267, Emelianoff, Cyria 434, 436
270, 271 Engels, Friedrich 28, 252
Difference and Repetition 10, 11, 12, 20, 27, 34, 43, Eribon, Didier 536, 542
54, 75, 118, 127, 169, 244, 247, 251, 274, Ernst, Max 81, 84, 212, 251, 316, 516
295, 302, 316, 318, 335, 357, 360, 396, van Eyck, Hubert and Jan 15, 312
400, 406, 445, 447, 460, 463, 525
Essays Critical and Clinical 34, 240, 262, 463 F
L’Abécédaire 9, 10, 12, 20 Fanon, Frantz 30
Logic of Sense 12, 217, 220, 316, 317, 438, 460 Fant, Gunnar 91, 96, 97, 98
“Making Inaudible Forces Audible” 37, 55 Feldman, Morton 135, 154

562
 Index

For Philip Guston 135 Hegel, Georg W.F. 83, 295, 299, 442
Ferneyhough, Brian 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84 Heidegger, Martin 18, 55, 105, 113, 249, 251, 323, 444,
Bone Alphabet 82, 83, 84 476, 477, 478, 523, 525
Carceri d’Invenzione I 81 Henri, Pierre 27, 118, 128, 543
Etudes transcendantales 80 Sommeil 128
Ficino, Marsilio 531 Symphonie pour un homme seul 128
Fincher, David 135 Variations pour une porte et un soupir 118
Fight Club 135 Heraclitus 243, 251
Finnissy, Michael 77 Hergé (Georges P. Remi) 378, 382, 385
Fischinger, Oskar 372 Herzog, Werner 316
Fitzgerald, Scott 273 Higgins, Dick 18, 362, 517, 524, 525
Flaubert, Gustave 298 Hitchcock, Alfred 16, 316, 346, 351, 352
Fluxus 18, 517, 523, 524, 525 Rear Window 16, 346, 351
Foucault, Michel 14, 15, 36, 37, 40, 45, 55, 175, 197, Hobbes, Thomas 304, 305, 308
200, 201, 254, 255, 261, 297, 300, 301, 304, 308, Hölderlin, Friedrich 300
311, 315, 316, 317, 318, 319, 320, 321, 323, 324, 415, Holl, Steven 457, 464
425, 435, 436, 441, 452, 460, 464 Horkheimer, Max 45, 54, 178, 474
Discipline and Punish 55, 197, 308 Hübler, Klaus K. 160
The Order of Things 315 Cercar 160
Fournier, Pierre 111, 112 Hume, David 316
Frankfurt School 106, 110, 477 Husserl, Edmund 154
Freud, Sigmund 36, 265, 268, 475, 476 Huws, Bethan 18, 483, 484, 485, 486, 487
Fromanger, Gérard 307, 316, 440 Huxley, Thomas 539, 543

G I
Gallope, Michael 354, 355 Ivanauskaitė, Jurga 15, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323
García Lorca, Federico 331
Gates, Bill 478 J
Gehry, Frank 306, 308, 472 Jackson, George 115, 117, 127, 385, 534, 535, 542, 543
Gendron, Sarah 274 Jakobson, Roman 13, 85, 91, 92, 94, 96, 97, 98
Genosko, Gary 240, 254, 259, 364, 486, 487, 493, Jameson, Fredric 18, 471, 473, 476, 477, 479, 480
508, 557 Jannequin, Clément 76
Gibson, James J. 17, 456, 460, 461, 464 Jobs, Steve 478
Gillespie, Dizzy 171 Jolivet, André 29, 31, 34
Ginsberg, Allen 316 Joly, Benoit 379, 380, 381
Giotto (di Bondone) 316 Joyce, James 34, 316
Godard, Jean-Luc 16, 316, 326, 327, 328, 329, 330, 331,
332, 334, 335, 336, 360 K
Histoire(s) du cinema 328, 329 Kafka, Franz 33, 200, 201, 210, 303, 307, 316, 447, 450,
King Lear 336 451, 452, 454, 455
Puissance de la parole 331 The Castle 450
Goethe, Johann W. 300, 557 The Trial 200, 201, 210, 450
Gombrowicz, Witold 316 Kandinsky, Wassily 316
Goodman, Steve 43, 55 Kane, Sarah 14, 216, 221
Gramsci, Antonio 176, 185 Cleansed 216, 221
Griffero, Ramón 238 Kanno, Mieko 65, 66, 160
Grisey, Gérard 128, 136 Kant, Immanuel 38, 83, 182, 205, 268, 271, 316, 318,
Jour, Contre-Jour 128 462, 512
Groensteen, Thierry 16, 375, 377, 382, 385 Kaprow, Allan 355, 450
Guattari, Felix Kelty, Christopher 367
Anti-Oedipus Papers 302 Kentridge, William 367, 371, 373
Chaosmosis 13, 74, 364, 425 Kerouac, Jack 316, 320
Schizoanalytic Cartographies 253, 259, 458, 464, Klee, Paul 315, 316, 405, 415, 417
486, 487 Kleist, Heinrich von 112, 113, 300
Klossowski, Pierre 261
H Sade, Mon Prochain 261
Haacke, Hans 479 Köselitz, Heinrich 194
Halle, Morris 91, 92, 94, 96, 97, 98 Kracauer, Siegfried 474, 475, 476, 480
Hall, Jim 171 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von 263, 265
Hannula, Mika 481, 487 Krauss, Rosalind 367, 371, 373
Haraway, Donna 256 Kubrick, Stanley 129
Harman, Graham 40, 55, 183 2001: A Space Odyssey 129, 131
Harper, Adam 43, 55, 516 Kurtág, György 86, 87, 88, 89
Hayworth, Rita 350 Kwinter, Sanford 458, 459, 464
Hegarty, Paul 359, 362, 363

563
 Index

L Michaux, Henri 30, 32

LaBelle, Brandon 146 Miller, Henri 316, 385, 505
La Borde (clinic) 175, 253, 488, 489, 492, 499, 500 Mitchell, W.J.T. 152, 153, 505
Labov, William 85 Mizoguchi, Kenji 16, 330, 334
Lacan, Jacques 18, 36, 267, 268, 269, 271, 510, 512, 538 Chikamatsu Monogatari 330, 334
Lachenmann, Helmut 13, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, Ugetsu Monogatari 334
111, 112, 113, 160 Molotiu, Andrei 375, 379, 380, 385
Accanto 109 Mondrian, Piet 316
Pression 13, 105, 106, 108, 109, 113, 160 Monet, Claude 316
TemA 109 Mouffe, Chantal 513, 514
Lamarre, Thomas 366, 368, 369, 373 Mozart, Wolfgang A. 135, 163, 316
Landecker, Hannah 367, 373 Munk, Andrzej 16, 332
Laruelle, François 15, 252, 256, 257, 258, 260 Murnau, F.W. 331, 332
Latour, Bruno 14, 17, 41, 55, 145, 146, 147, 395, 398, Nosferatu 331, 332, 337
400 Mussorgsky, Modest 316
actants 53, 145, 147, 150
actor–network theory 14, 41, 146, 147 N
Lawrence, D.H. 78, 84 Nancy, Jean-Luc 17, 336, 395, 397, 398, 400
Lawrence, T.E. 32, 33, 84, 316, 464 Navarra, André 111, 112
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques 540, 543 Neto, Ernesto 304, 305, 306
Leibniz, Gottfried W. 11, 16, 17, 20, 56, 63, 65, 66, 346, Leviathan Toth 304, 305
417, 421, 422, 423, 425, 462, 463, 487 Nietzsche, Friedrich 14, 36, 46, 55, 179, 193, 194, 195,
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 30 196, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 204, 205, 209, 210, 211,
Lichtenstein, Roy 378 212, 244, 251, 262, 295, 296, 307, 441, 493, 514, 516
Luca, Gherasim 101, 484, 508 Beyond Good and Evil 196, 199
Lucier, Alvin 355 On the Genealogy of Morals 205, 206
The Gay Science 208, 537
M Thus spoke Zarathustra 206
Maggiori, Robert 536, 538, 542 Nono, Luigi 13, 14, 86, 87, 88, 89, 152, 153, 154, 156,
Magritte, René 315, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323 157, 158
Mahler, Gustav 128, 316 No hay caminos . . . a Andrei Tarkowskij 14, 152,
“Titan” Symphony (1st) 128 153, 157
Malabou, Catherine 372, 460, 464 Omaggio a György Kurtág 86, 87, 88, 89, 104
Mallarmé, Stéphane 316, 329
Malraux, André 30, 32 O
Manet, Édouard 315, 316 Oiticica, Hélio 225, 297
manifold 14, 101, 152, 153, 350, 352, 386 O’Sullivan, Simon 253, 260, 375, 385, 540, 541, 542,
Manning, Erin 18, 174, 185, 381, 460, 464, 486, 487, 543
488, 493, 497, 508, 569 Oury, Jean 253, 487, 508
Manovich, Lev 367, 370, 374 Overbeck, Franz 193, 194, 200, 202, 209
Mantel, Gerhard 13, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113 Ozu, Yasujirō 129
Marcuse, Herbert 106, 113 Tokyo Story 129
Martin, Stewart 306, 323, 324, 336, 337, 353, 389, 450,
451, 452, 542 P
Marx, Karl 36, 178, 295, 451 Paik, Nam Jun 523
Grundrisse 178 Paillard, Joffrey 435, 436
Massumi, Brian 36, 41, 42, 43, 46, 47, 49, 50, 55, 84, Parmegiani, Bernard 128
113, 127, 174, 307, 308, 314, 344, 346, 347, 348, 353, Incidences / Résonances 128
398, 400, 414, 415, 425, 436, 460, 464, 487, 504, Points contre champs 128
508, 516, 519, 525, 526, 541, 542, 543 Parnet, Claire 9, 10, 12, 20, 103, 326, 440, 441, 461,
Matisse, Henri 294, 296, 297, 300 463, 534
Matta-Clark, Gordon 297 Parr, Adrian 168, 173, 534, 543
Maturana, Humberto 355 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 316
Mauss, Marcel 29, 30 Paté, Gilles 434, 436
Mazzola, Guerino 146 Patton, Paul 10, 20, 34, 54, 127, 172, 173, 251, 400,
McCloud, Scott 141, 379, 385 463, 525
McCormack, Timothy 14, 114, 124, 125, 126, 127 Pei, I. M. 472
The Restoration of Objects 14, 114, 124, 125, 126, Peirce, Charles S. 303
127 Pelbart, Peter Pál 253, 260, 488, 489, 492, 493, 495,
Mehldau, Brad 171 496, 499
Meillassoux, Quentin 459, 465 Picasso, Pablo 331
Melrose, Susan 169 Guernica 331, 332
Melville, Herman 532 Plato 172, 203, 204, 213, 420
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 323 Phaedo 204, 213
Messiaen, Olivier 29, 31, 33, 34, 37, 76 Republic 35, 203, 204, 213, 343

564
 Index

Poe, Edgar Allan 316 Sloane, Everett 350

Pollock, Jackson 115, 117, 127, 316 Smalley, Denis 128, 130, 136
Pons, Christoph 340, 344 Empty Vessels 128
postdramatic theatre 14, 214, 215, 218 Smith, Jeff 307, 308, 324, 380, 381, 385, 438, 445,
Prod’homme, Lucie 130 523, 525
Leçon du silence 130 Smith, Marquard 438
Proust, Marcel 37, 55, 69, 224, 242, 244, 246, 248, 251, Socrates 204, 205
316, 441, 475 Solomon, Andrew 306, 490, 491, 492, 496
À la recherche du temps perdu 224, 316 Souris, André 130, 136
Spencer, Douglas 453, 456, 465
R Spinoza, Baruch 14, 17, 149, 194, 196, 199, 202, 203,
Rachmaninov, Sergei 135 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 213, 214, 215, 220, 316,
Rancière, Jacques 298, 299, 308, 329 416, 425, 461, 463, 519, 525, 558
Ra, Sun 171 Ethics 12, 17, 145, 150, 205, 213, 215, 416, 519
Raunig, Gerald 531, 532, 535, 540, 543 Steinberg, Leo 143
Ravel, Maurice 108, 128 Sterckx, Pierre 378, 385
Reik, Theodor 267 Sternberg, Josef von 316
Reisman, Leo 171 Stevens, George 332
Renoir, Jean 16, 330 Stewart, James 351, 352, 505
La règle du jeu 330 Steyerl, Hito 367, 372
Rimbaud, Arthur 132, 206 Liquidity Inc. 367, 372
Ritzer, George 473, 480 Stiegler, Bernard 530, 543
Robbe-Grillet, Alain 129 Stivale, Charles J. 9, 10, 20, 173, 220, 463, 508
Rodowick, D.N. 346, 347, 349 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 69, 107, 119, 135
Roffe, Jonathan 168, 173 moment form 119
Rogoff, Irit 530, 543 Stravinsky, Igor 316
Rosenberg, Harold 295, 308 Suoranta, Juha 481, 487
Rosny, J.H. (aîné) 11, 12, 20 Sylvester, David 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84
Røssaak, Eivind 351
Rossellini, Roberto 336 T
Roma, città aperta 336 Taormina, Michael 10, 20, 27, 34, 55, 75, 307, 463
Ruyer, Raymond 460, 461, 465 Thoburn, Nicholas 493, 508
Thomas, Chantal 103, 113, 251, 263, 271, 306, 308, 373,
S 473, 480, 543
Saariaho, Kaija 128 Tintoretto, Jacopo 316
L’amour de loin 128 Titian (Tiziano Vecelli) 316
Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von 261, 262, 264, 265, 266, Tomkins, Silvan 46
268, 270, 271, 316 Toop, David 43, 55, 84
Sade, Marquis de 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 268, Tortelier, Paul 111, 112
269, 270, 271, 316 Truffaut, François 316
Saison, Maryvonne 316 Tudor, David 107, 113
Šarapovas, Andrius 16, 358, 359, 361, 362, 363, 364 Tuner, Victor 179
Silverdust 356, 358, 359, 360, 361, 362, 363, 364 Turnage, Mark-Anthony 77
Sartre, Jean-Paul 320, 471, 478 Turner, William 179, 180, 181, 316, 385
Sauvagnargues, Anne 11, 15, 20, 115, 127, 261, 270, 271,
357, 460, 462, 465, 569 U
Savarese, Ralph 496, 499, 509 Uno, Kuniichi 226, 227
Schaeffer, Pierre 109, 135 Ursprung, Philip 453
Schaeffner, André 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35
Schafer, R. Murray 359 V
Schiller, Friedrich 268, 298 Vadén, Tere 481, 487
Schmidt, Eric 476 Valéry, Paul 116
Schubert, Franz 243 Väliaho, Pasi 372, 374
Schumann, Robert 37, 159, 163, 164, 165 Van Lier, Henri 141, 143
Kreisleriana, op. 16 159, 163, 164, 165 Varela, Francisco 355
Schwab, Michael 19, 282, 483, 487, 571 Varèse, Edgard 356, 357
Schwartz, Arthur 14, 167, 171 Velazquez, Diego 315
Segalen, Victor 30, 32, 34 Verdi, Giuseppe 316
Shalev-Gerz, Esther 18, 481, 482, 483, 486, 487 Vermeer, Johannes 316
Shaw, Artie 171, 464 Vernon, Jim 355, 365
Sheikh, Simon 529, 530, 543 Virno, Paolo 51, 55, 178, 186, 255, 260
Simondon, Gilbert 11, 15, 17, 20, 272, 273, 274, 275,
352, 353, 357, 395, 396, 397, 398, 399, 400, 401, Vollaire, Christiane 435, 436
402, 403, 465, 509
Slager, Henk 527, 529, 543 W

565
 Index

Wagner, Richard 37, 135, 316 X

Waldron, Mal 171 Xenakis, Iannis 69, 128, 135
Walker, Deborah 67, 71, 73, 74 Pithoprakta 128
Wallin, Jason 357
Webern, Anton 37, 135, 163, 164, 165 Y
Variations op. 27 164, 165 Yokoyama, Yuichi 367
Weinreich, Max 317 Young, La Monte 135
Welles, Orson 16, 346, 349, 350, 351
The Lady from Shanghai 16, 346, 349, 350 Z
Whitehead, Alfred N. 18, 420, 458, 465, 501, 510, 511, Zepke, Stephan 354, 356, 540, 541, 542, 543
516, 558 Žižek, Slavoj 458, 460, 464, 465, 531, 543
Wik, Annika 481, 487 Zourabichvili, François 249, 251, 268, 271
Wright, Frank Lloyd 306 Zumthor, Peter 457

566
 Index of Subjects
A body without organs 10, 126, 274, 276, 277, 305, 313,
actual 11, 18, 38, 42, 63, 126, 132, 133, 156, 158, 172, 174, 407, 476, 531
180, 244, 263, 273, 276, 329, 334, 350, 356, 371,
395, 401, 417, 422, 438, 439, 440, 443, 460, 471, C
472, 473, 502, 513, 524 capitalism 36, 37, 39, 44, 45, 51, 52, 54, 55, 75, 84, 104,
aesthetics 13, 16, 43, 116, 235, 245, 248, 258, 293, 298, 113, 127, 166, 177, 185, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257,
305, 310, 346, 354, 359, 367, 370, 372, 450, 453, 259, 260, 277, 301, 302, 303, 305, 307, 308, 313,
541, 544, 546, 551, 554, 556, 558 314, 344, 372, 400, 414, 436, 441, 451, 453, 458,
affect 18, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 463, 464, 472, 473, 474, 476, 477, 478, 479, 480,
54, 177, 194, 231, 258, 269, 300, 350, 351, 355, 357, 487, 493, 502, 507, 508, 514, 516, 518, 542
362, 368, 388, 405, 442, 460, 499, 517, 518, 519, cartography 301, 303, 324, 329, 434, 486, 501
520, 521, 522, 523, 524, 527, 558 chaosmosis 175, 180, 182, 489, 492, 493, 494, 497, 501
affects 296, 301, 350, 351, 352, 354, 355, 356, cinema 9, 12, 16, 19, 27, 49, 129, 134, 135, 136, 152, 153,
357, 362, 371, 387, 405, 406, 420, 433, 154, 156, 223, 251, 311, 314, 316, 320, 327, 328, 329,
437, 439, 440, 461, 462, 501, 517, 518, 331, 334, 336, 346, 347, 348, 349, 350, 352, 353,
519, 520, 521, 522, 523, 524, 534 360, 385, 387, 388, 400, 401, 441, 458, 464, 474,
agency 37, 147, 149, 150, 298, 301, 311, 318, 319, 328, 478, 538
335, 350, 366, 368, 369, 462, 490, 506, 511, 528, communism 450, 508, 512
530, 534, 541 conatus 514, 558
anthropocene 39, 54 contemporary 15, 17, 18, 19, 39, 44, 45, 50, 51, 52, 76,
artificial intelligence 48, 399 78, 79, 118, 170, 177, 178, 183, 273, 293, 294, 295,
artistic research 1, 9, 12, 17, 18, 66, 167, 168, 171, 208, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 302, 303, 309, 310, 312,
252, 256, 260, 282, 281, 283, 383, 395, 396, 400, 313, 339, 340, 355, 370, 372, 373, 402, 404, 431,
404, 415, 437, 438, 452, 481, 483, 487, 526, 527, 433, 435, 446, 452, 453, 456, 457, 474, 475, 476,
529, 537, 539, 540, 543, 553, 554, 555, 558, 569, 478, 518, 530, 536, 539, 540
571 contemporary art 293
assemblage 17, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 52, 54, 85, contemporary philosophy 15, 273, 293, 295
101, 118, 177, 178, 182, 205, 207, 226, 250, 254, 298, creation 15, 53, 85, 91, 96, 97, 98, 101, 105, 168, 216,
300, 346, 348, 349, 354, 356, 357, 361, 362, 363, 223, 224, 234, 235, 246, 261, 266, 270, 294, 301,
368, 391, 393, 443, 460, 530, 540 310, 317, 320, 326, 328, 330, 335, 336, 348, 354,
agencement 10, 11, 300, 301 355, 357, 361, 362, 363, 377, 388, 397, 405, 431,
assemblage theory 40, 41, 42, 43, 54, 460 432, 437, 438, 481, 492, 502, 510, 511, 512, 513, 514,
autism 313, 495, 497, 498, 499, 500, 508, 509 518, 524, 527, 529
autistic perception 495, 496, 499, 500, 501, creativity 183, 300, 301, 302, 320, 327, 341, 348,
503, 507 350, 511

B D
Baroque 16, 56, 62, 63, 65, 66, 128, 346, 420, 425 dance / dancing 31, 128, 174, 176, 177, 179, 181, 182,
becoming 10, 15, 18, 36, 37, 44, 52, 53, 67, 82, 131, 148, 183, 184, 185, 222, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 230, 231,
172, 177, 182, 195, 204, 208, 222, 229, 230, 231, 233, 240, 341, 358, 360, 361, 362, 363, 491
237, 239, 272, 273, 274, 275, 277, 294, 295, 300, dark precursor 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 17, 18, 27, 46, 48, 141,
301, 310, 317, 318, 328, 334, 341, 343, 349, 355, 356, 169, 170, 172, 173, 208, 244, 275, 317, 318, 319, 323,
359, 361, 363, 371, 386, 387, 388, 396, 397, 398, 327, 328, 335, 336, 356, 358, 360, 362, 363, 406,
399, 400, 408, 409, 410, 411, 412, 413, 435, 439, 456, 462, 511, 517
440, 441, 442, 444, 456, 473, 482, 488, 494, 500, obscure precursor 10, 11, 13, 27, 28, 30, 31, 34
501, 510, 524, 528, 538, 557 somber precursor 10, 12
becoming-animal 275, 488 desire 36, 37, 43, 44, 45, 47, 51, 54, 75, 193, 195, 211,
becoming-child 275 241, 254, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 297, 301,
becoming-imperceptible 15, 272, 273, 274, 302, 307, 308, 350, 438, 442, 462, 464, 475, 489,
275, 277 490, 493, 501, 502, 503, 506, 510, 512, 513, 514,
becom(ing) indiscernible 158, 182 515, 523
becoming music 355, 363 desiring-assemblage 300
becoming-other 86, 275 desiring-constructivism 301
becoming-thought 18, 517 desiring machines 39, 52, 196, 198, 199, 205,
becoming-woman 275 462, 490, 503
becoming zero 387 desiring-production 36, 42, 44, 45, 48, 51, 52,
permanent becoming 10, 272, 273 254, 303, 462, 502
birdsong 76 diagram 14, 15, 16, 27, 38, 73, 107, 108, 116, 164, 165,

567
 Index

298, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, 319, 324, 375, immanence 13, 18, 41, 43, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110,
377, 378, 382, 384 111, 199, 239, 252, 253, 254, 255, 257, 273, 275, 276,
diagrammatic 15, 17, 67, 164, 165, 293, 298, 301, 300, 302, 438, 439, 443, 444, 452, 511, 512, 517,
302, 303, 304, 408 518, 521, 523, 524, 528, 547
digital art 15, 309, 310, 312, 477 improvisation 14, 117, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149,
disparate 11, 12, 28, 38, 68, 75, 105, 220, 244, 329, 335, 150, 367
336, 387, 512, 528 informal music 117
interpretation 10, 50, 52, 70, 77, 83, 107, 109, 111, 112,
E 131, 138, 149, 176, 242, 261, 266, 268, 320, 347, 360,
ecumenon 39 364, 423, 486, 501, 519
empiricism 40, 43, 50, 440, 456, 460, 461
encounter 32, 54, 83, 98, 145, 146, 147, 179, 180, 216, L
219, 230, 244, 309, 326, 332, 334, 340, 371, 387, lines of flight 53, 111, 253, 300, 301, 359, 392, 523, 526,
399, 407, 415, 439, 440, 444, 461, 471, 494, 506, 528, 529, 530, 532, 534, 539, 540
529, 533, 534, 536 linguistic turn 40
experimentation 9, 15, 43, 50, 52, 67, 71, 107, 159, 160,
294, 298, 300, 302, 303, 305, 360, 441, 510 M
to experiment 387, 437, 440 manifold 14, 101, 152, 153, 350, 352, 386
expression 11, 43, 44, 47, 61, 65, 67, 69, 70, 72, 73, 77, metallurgy 401, 402
78, 79, 82, 109, 111, 112, 115, 117, 118, 126, 167, 172, microcinematography 367
173, 178, 200, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 230, microtunings 70
240, 242, 246, 252, 253, 254, 257, 295, 301, 302, milieu 16, 17, 40, 70, 72, 275, 294, 395, 396, 397, 398,
305, 321, 324, 341, 346, 354, 356, 357, 359, 381, 399, 400, 456, 460, 517
382, 406, 415, 441, 443, 444, 456, 460, 498, 499, modulation 10, 17, 254, 348, 349, 357, 402, 404, 420,
500, 501, 506, 537, 541 443, 460
monad 422, 423, 424
F montage 63, 135, 198, 200, 201, 305, 309, 326, 327,
fascism 331, 332, 449, 450 329, 330, 331, 332, 334, 335, 336, 358, 361, 362,
fauvism 300 366, 370
figural 13, 14, 79, 81, 83, 114, 115, 117, 118, 120, 121, 123, multiplicity 10, 40, 44, 53, 69, 156, 157, 163, 165, 166,
124, 125, 157, 346 180, 184, 299, 317, 318, 360, 362, 363, 396, 397,
fold 10, 16, 17, 54, 65, 66, 220, 346, 347, 349, 352, 415, 398, 423, 438, 440, 456, 482, 501, 503, 506, 513,
417, 418, 419, 420, 421, 422, 423, 425, 439, 441, 514, 524, 559
443, 444 musique concrète 109
folding 16, 56, 62, 175, 346, 349, 352, 398, 404,
419, 420, 440, 443, 506, 558 N
refolding 175 neo-phenomenology 457, 458, 459
unfolding 47, 108, 129, 131, 132, 154, 157, 169, neurodiversity 12, 464, 490, 492, 495, 500, 506, 507
173, 175, 215, 344, 352, 370, 471, 478, nomadism 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 359, 401, 405, 431,
494, 526 432, 433, 435, 541
fuscum subnigrum 11 nomadology 431, 531
nô theatre 29, 30, 31
G
gagaku 29, 30, 31 O
game theory 432 objectile 420
gestalt 76, 155, 370, 460 object oriented ontology 40, 183
gridding 375, 377, 381, 382, 384 ontogenesis 17, 273, 275, 277, 400
ontology 14, 40, 43, 143, 183, 214, 215, 216, 218, 219,
H 220, 235, 272, 273, 275, 297, 299, 303, 346, 348,
habit 155 357, 458, 462, 513, 514
haecceity 10, 115, 116, 273, 275 origami 13, 66
haptic 72, 115, 116, 117, 454, 457, 558 muscular origami 13
heterogeneity 38, 171, 302, 315, 317, 318, 319, 321, 323,
346, 483, 486 P
heterophony 31 percepts 350, 355, 357, 362, 387, 388, 405, 406, 439,
hylomorphism 401, 405 440, 520, 534
performance 14, 15, 49, 50, 65, 66, 77, 78, 81, 82, 83,
I 105, 106, 111, 112, 140, 145, 146, 147, 149, 152, 154,
image 157, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170,
crystal-image 130, 131, 132 171, 172, 173, 178, 181, 198, 200, 224, 228, 229, 247,
duration-image 130 250, 252, 253, 255, 256, 257, 258, 359, 362, 363,
movement-image 14, 129, 135, 153, 155, 156, 364, 383, 438, 483, 518, 522, 523, 524, 526, 545,
276, 313 546, 547, 549, 551, 554, 557
time-image 14, 129, 135, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157, phenomenology 168, 251, 464, 465
158, 244, 251, 276, 316 plane of composition 13, 16, 350, 355, 439

568
 Index

plane of consistency 13, 17, 39, 68, 69, 294, 415, 419, 164, 165, 166, 303, 318, 416, 418, 420, 425, 458
423, 424 striated 18, 37, 38, 39, 74, 431, 433, 435, 481, 483
plane of immanence 105, 106, 107, 109, 273, 275, 276, structure 10, 42, 49, 52, 53, 61, 68, 78, 107, 109, 111,
300, 439, 511, 528 124, 126, 129, 131, 179, 180, 218, 222, 230, 231, 233,
planomenon 39 238, 239, 244, 247, 265, 267, 269, 276, 304, 341,
plasmaticness 369 349, 351, 352, 360, 387, 398, 408, 433, 438, 443,
postdramatic theatre 14, 214, 215, 218 475, 486, 490, 512, 522
psychoanalysis 185, 344, 490 subjectivity 12, 40, 41, 51, 54, 174, 182, 218, 219, 220,
246, 253, 273, 277, 310, 344, 367, 372, 457, 459,
R 462, 475, 494
refrain 10, 68, 148, 150, 181, 182, 341, 342, 343, 344,
354, 355, 356, 357, 360, 361, 507 T
Renaissance 310, 312, 315 technical objects 310
representation 11, 30, 68, 78, 79, 82, 108, 115, 129, 131, territory 10, 53, 78, 148, 182, 216, 253, 341, 343, 431,
177, 198, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 222, 223, 224, 225, 458, 460, 514, 530
228, 230, 233, 239, 242, 243, 246, 250, 258, 266, deterritorialisation 37, 44, 51, 53, 148, 150, 163,
267, 295, 302, 304, 305, 311, 315, 328, 332, 345, 301, 302, 305, 354, 357, 361, 362, 458, 531
347, 348, 349, 350, 367, 369, 376, 377, 401, 405, reterritorialisation 148, 150, 161, 301, 302, 354,
438, 441, 442, 459, 462, 498, 536 357, 458
resistance 19, 36, 43, 50, 79, 81, 83, 110, 175, 176, 179, territorialisation 341, 354, 357, 510
180, 181, 209, 282, 300, 301, 305, 336, 339, 341, transcendence 13, 105, 106, 107, 110, 111, 273, 461
342, 343, 434, 518, 523, 524, 525, 527, 528, 531, plane of transcendence 105
535, 540, 541, 571 transduction 15, 17, 272, 275, 277
rhizome 10, 38, 39, 43, 52, 53, 54, 317, 318, 408
U
S untimely 195, 196, 198, 202, 208, 294, 296, 327, 328,
schizoanalysis 12, 15, 36, 38, 43, 252, 253, 258, 316, 332, 438, 441, 442, 496
490, 492, 495, 500, 501, 503
schizophrenia 36, 37, 39, 55, 75, 84, 104, 113, 127, 166, V
185, 259, 277, 303, 307, 308, 313, 314, 344, 400, virtual/virtuality 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 50, 101, 102,
414, 436, 441, 458, 459, 463, 477, 487, 500, 502, 156, 158, 165, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180, 181, 183, 184,
508, 516, 542 215, 242, 244, 245, 253, 273, 274, 275, 276, 294,
schizoproduction 252, 254, 255, 256, 260 305, 327, 329, 330, 332, 334, 336, 346, 347, 349,
semiotics 114, 115, 117, 144, 254, 301, 357, 443 350, 354, 355, 372, 395, 396, 415, 417, 420, 421,
sensory-motricity 311 422, 423, 424, 425, 433, 435, 439, 440, 443, 444,
simulacra / simulacrum 14, 167, 168, 169, 172, 181, 182 458, 460, 510, 511, 512, 513, 532
singularity(ies) 10, 12, 54, 68, 106, 112, 115, 168, 175,
178, 179, 273, 275, 276, 299, 300, 317, 346, 350, W
357, 358, 360, 364, 402, 404, 424, 432, 439, 441, war machine 300, 301, 303, 431, 432, 433, 513
442, 461, 500, 501, 503, 527
smooth 18, 19, 37, 38, 39, 69, 71, 74, 96, 97, 360, 361, Z
363, 370, 432, 433, 435, 436, 471, 472, 483, 531 Zen Buddhism 357
strata / stratum 10, 15, 37, 39, 56, 126, 159, 160, 163, zig-zag 326, 327, 332

569
Editor © 2017 by Leuven University Press /
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Authors Volume 2
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Lucia D’Errico
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Cover image
Pieter Lozie, “Gent Lightning
20140609 2.55 am,” from Lighting,
Rainbow, 2014. Courtesy of ©Pieter
Lozie. All rights reserved.

Illustrations on pp.
“Illustraties page 288, 289, 426,
427, 466, 467
© Lucia D’Errico
Press
Wilco B.V., The Netherlands
The Orpheus Institute has been providing postgraduate education for musi-
cians since 1996 and introduced the first doctoral programme for music prac-
titioners 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, work-
shops, 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 perspec-
tives 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-grow-
ing 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 spe-
cific areas, each led by a principal investigator of substantial international rep-
utation as a practising musician. The work of the Orpheus Institute is dissemi-
nated through events, publications, and musical performances, and through its
active animation of discussion within the sector.
The Orpheus Institute Series encompasses monographs by fellows and associ-
ates 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,
the series is meant to enhance and advance discourse in the field of artistic
research in music and to generate future work in this emerging and vital area
of study.

Other titles in this series:

– Artistic Research in Music: Discipline and Resistance
Jonathan Impett (ed.)
2017, ISBN 978 94 6270 090 1

– Experimental Encounters in Music and Beyond

Kathleen Coessens (ed.)
2017, ISBN 978 94 6270 110 6

– Experimental Affinities in Music

Paulo de Assis (ed.)
2015, ISBN 978 94 6270 061 1

– Artistic Experimentation in Music: An Anthology

Darla Crispin and Bob Gilmore (eds.)
2014, ISBN 978 94 6270 013 0

– Multiple Paths (CD): Bach / Parra / Tenney

Juan Parra Cancino, with Ensemble Modelo62
2014

– Composing under the Skin: The Music-making Body at the Composer’s Desk
Paul Craenen
2013, ISBN 978 90 5867 974 1

– Sound & Score: Essays on Sound, Score and Notation

Paulo de Assis, William Brooks, Kathleen Coessens (eds.)
2013, ISBN 978 90 5867 976 5

– Experimental Systems: Future Knowledge in Artistic Research

Michael Schwab (ed.)
2013, ISBN 978 90 5867 973 4

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