On Deleuze's essay 'Bartleby: or, The Formula"

The text for today’s workshop was Deleuze’s ‘Bartleby; or, The Formula’ from Essays Critical and Clinical whose subject is Herman Melville’s short story ‘Bartleby The Scrivener.’ The workshop began with a presentation by Neil Chapman of Reading University which really opened up the exciting and deeply challenging themes of the essay. This very late essay was related to another late work: ‘Immanence: A Life.’ The concern here is with encounter with life itself rather than with a particular life. This was related very productively to Giorgio Agamben’s work ‘Means Without Ends’ where naked life is an abstraction from complex forms of life. Naked life involves the dominant power’s way of understanding people as containers or blanks. For Agamben the proletariat must be imposed on a pure life. Forms of life in Agamben were related to Wittgenstein’s language games. The development of political and ethical themes opened up what is most profound and difficult to grasp in the essay ‘Bartleby; or The Formula.’

The presentation developed Agamben’s notion ‘bare life’. Also explored was the move Deleuze makes in relating Melville’s story to Robert Musil’s ‘Man Without Qualities’. Deleuze’s concern with the Proletariat suggests that here we have the man without qualities versus the sovereign state and in the American Immigrant we have the man without qualities developed in terms of a notion of ‘brotherhood.’ The American Immigrant here was explained in terms of idea that the immigrant can start from nothing (from bare life) and achieve the American dream.

The ‘foreign language produced within language’ was introduced in terms of leading up to the moment proper to ethics. This was related again to ‘bare life’ as the idea of life abstracted from particularities in Agamben which is therefore a vessel that can receive content. Deleuze’s reading of Bartleby seems to put forward an ethical program via a concept of ‘bare life’ because we have a formula – ‘I would prefer not to’ – that also blind to difference. We need then to be at a level prior to the emancipatory iteration of ‘we are the people.’ Does Deleuze suggest this?

The reference at page 72 to ‘the schizophrenic vocation of American literature’ was analysed. Does the notion of ‘vocation’ lay out how literature produces an ethical program? Given that things can happen in language, how do we move to the idea that these things should happen?

Reference was made to Baudelaire’s project of finding the epic in the everyday – like Deleuze he rejects the particular as the mediocre. Bartleby is an ‘original’ according to Deleuze. Jacques Ranciere argues that this original should be linked to the eccentric – there is no mimesis, he does not imitate and cannot be imitated. Bartleby is inexplicable, he is from no where. [This echoes Deleuze appropriation of Samuel Butler’s ‘Erehwon’ as ‘a disguised no-where [and] a rearranged now-here’, Difference and Repetition, p. 356 n. 7]

Stuttering is a difference we can’t understand and yet this is to be productive. At page 85 Bartleby offers a new humanity and this throws light on things around him. This leads to the federation of brothers found in the American Revolution. At page 84 alliance and blood pact are affirmed.

The discussion began by noting that in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ the filial is valued over alliance. This was linked to Deleuze’s critique of the familial in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ where the family is code. Philosophy arises because familial kingship structures break down. It was suggested that a concern with blood pact and brotherhood could refer to Deleuze biological account of individuation, suggesting the doubling of the production of particulars through their embryonic and more open relations (reference us back to ‘Difference and Repetition’, chapter 5). However, this reading didn’t seem to us to work given that the relevance of biological is not established by the text.

The appearance of a really existentialist movement, referencing Kierkegaard and his account of Abraham in ‘Fear and Trembling’, was suggested. Yet the nothingness of the will and nothingness of particulars and generals invoked by Deleuze seems to affirm the fullness of the virtual or ‘the whole of chance’ (as he terms it in the conclusion of ‘Difference and Repetition.’)

The references made to Musil’s ‘Man Without Qualities’ were also discussed. The novel seems to offer a nihilistic, boredom ridden milieu with no real answers. Does this relate to the productive and affirmative milieu we find in Deleuze?

A more positive account of the nothingness Deleuze invokes was sought in the pairing of Bartley’s immobility and silence (the original) with the Attorney’s line of flight (the prophet – but not the prophet of doom). This event seems to be a global event and so in a work of art it is difficult to have two of them. This is then a very productive just as a point of freezing in a physical system where everything is involved and changes. It was suggested that Bartleby inverts Sartre because he chooses not to choose. There is then an anarchy but not a human one. Reference was made to the wasp becoming orchid which in Deleuze models occurs through random choices. Yet it seems that in the human choice structure ‘the original’ (Bartleby’s formula) can randomly cut things up.

The nature of the production which is grasped prior to anything particular was also discussed. At the start of the essay Deleuze writes that ‘Bartleby The Scrivener’ is a literal text. The novel is then on the same level as life itself – it literally activates or presents an operation that is at work in how experience is productive. This was related to Deleuze’s invocation of a primary nature and of the line of flight. The latter is ideal like the ‘white light’ also mentioned (p. 83), traversing particulars but also being found in itself prior to all particulars. The prophet character as a line of flight occurs alongside the primary nature character in Melville who is either demon (Captain Ahab in ‘Moby Dick’) or Angel (Bartleby). This is developed by Deleuze at page 84 where he argues that demons and angels recognise one another – they need to break the law of the Father to do this, returning us to the notion of brotherhood, a community of celibates: avoiding both Father and sex so as to continue Deleuze’s critique of psychoanalysis. We sense that this is not at all a particular community produced ready made by the formula – as if celibacy were to be practiced and families broken up – but rather a concern with how particulars are produced. There is nothing particular about the formula of what occurs in its vicinity – this is rather ‘a zone of indetermination’. Psychoanalysis involves the Father and sex symbolically and so, for Deleuze, projects the products into the production as structural conditions or archetypes. He argues that production must not resemble its production so that celibacy and loss of father are virtual or productive conditions instead of being particulars of some actual polis.

A further point raised was Deleuze’s use of the American Revolution rather than the French revolution. If revolution produces community (through Ideas that do not resemble any particulars) and necessarily involves violence (the demon – Ahab) and refusal ( the angel – Bartleby) why not use the French Revolution? Could not Danton and Robespierre be the angel and demon characters? Is it because Napoleon imposed himself as the father figure on the liberated ‘bare life’? The universalism invoked by the American Revolution seems to appeal to Deleuze insofar as rather than respecting or letting difference be this politics values what difference does. In ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ the war machine is positive and creative. At page 87 taking to the road, being open to all and never trying to save other souls is affirmed. This notion, reminding us of Jack Kerouac, was related to Lyotard’s libidinal economy. Marxists have for a long time been arguing about the need for capitalism first before you can have communism. There is one interconnected whole which make capitalism and communism inextricable. Negri argues that the conditions are right for creating a bifurcation point. Kerouac’s ideal life involved simply moving on if the police Hassle you. This communal living is an alternative to familial structures. Is this permanently just a route out producing communities that are too flexible to solidify themselves?

The notion of a patchwork was explored as involving no pattern but with a formula for the size of the patchwork and how patches are joined. Likewise dry stone walls interest Deleuze because while it is easy to take down and move them they have a certain, necessary structure. This was related to Warhol’s painting where there is variability around a mundane concept because the variation is really around its Idea. Could we say that although the American Revolution failed it is interesting because it is a patchwork. It was suggested that philosophy must fail and so not build a new community but be like Bartleby. It is useful in the end for a philosopher to say that I’d prefer not to say.

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'The method of dramatisation' - reading group report

Report from Volcanic Lines reading group, Wednesday 24th January 2007

The essay in question for this session was 'The Method of Dramatization', contained in 'Desert Islands and other texts:1953-1974'; Semiotext 2004:94-116

As a kind of preliminary, I just wanted to note some vague connections to phenomenological concepts, though without any intention to ascribe any value, interpretative or otherwise, to these connections. To begin nwith then the initial move to shift the nature of the question from a 'what' (quid) to a 'how' (quia) form seems in some ways like a development from the phenomenological combination of the quid-quia questions within Husserl's noematic (quid) / noetic (quia) structure. For Husserl, of course, the quid will be 'meaning' or 'essence', whereas for someone like Sartre this seems to develop into a more basic notion of quid as investigating the thing (as an in-itself). The phenomenological shift to the combination of 'meaning' and 'way of meaning' (Husserl) as a method of returning to the things themselves could presumbaly be seen a s a development that adds the 'how' top the 'what' and in this sense Deleuze's emphasis on the 'how' alone strikes me as perhaps an attempt to move forward from this phenomenological method precisely by radically breaking with the very notion of essence (in whatever form, but predominantly the Husserlian meaning-content structure) as part of an attempt to articulate his own methods' originality.



The other possible connection that interested me recently, though this is not directly related to the 'Method' essay, was the concept of a "zone of indetermination" that can be found in Deleuze's book 'What is philosophy?' but which is prefigured in a very peculiar passge in Husser;s' 'Ideas'. In Section 27 of Ideas, famous as one of the central places in which the 'natural attitude' is characterised and Husserls' concept of presence ot the world is articulated, there is this strange account of the presence we are within in the natural attitude constituting a presence to infinity, temporally, spatially and ideally. The immediate sensuous presence of the world to hand extends infinitely, although indeterminately. At the greater reaches of this extension the indeterminacy is contingent and these regions are determined as and when attention is paid to them, flickering in and out of determinate presence as they continually fall back into indeterminate presence. The regions constitute what Husserl calls a "clear or dark, distinct or indistinct co-present margin" (Ideas:S27) and this margin forms an "empty mist of dim indeterminacy" which is precisely named as "the zone of indeterminacy" which is characterised, as previously mentioned, as infinite.

Turning back to the 'Method' essay then the first thing to note is that the shift in question structure from what (quid) to how (quia) is argued on what almost appears a pragmatic basis. The 'what' question is situated as the root of the aporetic dialogues of Plato and Deleuze argues that in the practical, substantive Platonic books, such as The Republic, the 'what' question is demoted in favour of a more open question-set. Presumably, then, there is this sense of the 'what' question - which we might tentatively characterise as the 'core Socratic' rather than 'Platonic' moment - being impractical. Reasons' practice, perhaps, is at stake.

The next notable distinction I was interested in was that between the essence and accident and the differentiation between contradiction (from Hegel) and vice-diction (from Leibniz). In particular the phrase "to have the inessential include the essential" (Desert Islands:96). As James Williams points out in his 'Introduction' to 'Difference and Repetition' (DR), this notion can be understood via the arguments about the essential difference made by the inessential, with the example of Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon being that found within Leibniz (Leibniz; Discourse on metaphysics:S13). The example of Caesar is used by Leibniz to argue for his notion of a 'complete concept' being one in which all the predicates are contained within the subject, such that the inessential (predicates) are part of the essential (subject). Deleuze seems to have a form of almost reversed Leibnizianism in mind when he talks of the inessential (predicates) including the essential (subject).

Deleuze goes on to explicitly state the classically sounding philosophical question of 'what is a thing in general' (Desert Islands:ibid) and answers with the twofiold characterisation of a thing as having qualities and extension. (It is worth noting, however, that these qualities and extsnions are "the conditon of the representation of things in general"). The concept of extension is rapidly stretched, however, and ideas such as 'territoriality' (much more prominent in later works such as 'A Thousand Plateaus') are used to push extension beyond the more commonplace 3-dimensionality of an object towards a notion of 'organisation', connecting it to notions such as grid, network and suggesting, perhaps, something like the 'meshwork' concept Manuel de Landa has put forward. The notion of the 'thing in general' (asked, amusingly, in the form of a 'what' question) appears designed to govern our understanding of the process of differentiation. Here another note should be marked, since the concept of 'differentiation' as found in the 'Method' essay is, it appears, prior to the split c/t notion found in DR (ie; Athlone 1994:209). In DR the 't' version refers to the virtual process whilst the 'c' version refers to the actual and the entwinement as a 'c/t' mark refers to the reciprocal nature of the process of determination, reciprocal between the actual individuation and the virtual Idea. Within the 'Method' essay the 't' version appears to be referring to the actualised 'thing in general'.

The crucial notion for Deleuze, however, is that the virtual needs to be posited as the condition of experience of the thing in general and the actual thing in general has qualities and extension or organisation produced by the STD's - the 'spatio-temporal differences' that underlie it. These STD's are both conceptual and natural and 'in this sense', Deleuze suggests, "the whole world is an egg". The STD's presuppose a field of intensity which they are immanent to and this intensity is precisely difference itself, hence pushing the need to develop a concept of difference (as against a merely conceptual difference - this after all being the theme of DR) in order to grasp these STD's as the condition of the world. Differences of intensity, Deleuze suggests, must communicate in order to produce these STD's and the communicative element, that which brings teh differences together is the 'obscure precursor'. (A brief note: another translation one participant had with them used the phrase 'dark precursor, clearly akin to that used in DR, and this 'dark' or 'obscure' difference couldn't be directly checked at the time as no French version of the 'Method' essay is to hand. Clearly the 'obscure' translation seems to connect the notion of the precursor to the concepts of the clear-confused and distinct-obscure more immediately).

With the notion of STD comes the concept of 'larval subjects' and the whole gamut of pre-individual subjectivities that Deleuze will maintain as central to his work. The STD's, however, form the condition for all concepts, representations and things and the crucial part of the essay in many ways is the structural role that is given to the STD's. For Deleuze the STD's are the conditions of experience (not, note, possible experience but, as he will call it in DR, always real experience - the conditions are not limited by the necessary and the impossible as they must be within Kant's structure of possible experience). Just as in Kant, therefore, something like a schema appears needed to connect the conditions and the experience and it is precisely the method of dramatisation that is named as structurally akin to the Kantian schema - "What I am calling a drama particularly resembles the Kantian schema" (Desert Islands:99). 'Drama' refers to the STD's as a collection of "abstract lines coming from the unextended and formless depth" that is "comprised of pure determinations, agitating time and space, directly affecting the soul" (ibid:98). The notion of this 'drama' is explicitly drawn from Artaud's cocnept of a 'Theatre of Cruelty'. For Deleuze the necessity of 'the method of dramatisation' is drawn from the necessity to extend the Kantian schema and its inability to determine the concept and is carried out because, for Deleuze, "poure spatio-temporal dynamisms have the power to dramatise concepts, because first they actualise, incarnate, Ideas" (ibid:99). In reference to this I think a key notion of the dramatisation of the Idea can be found in the example of Lenin that Deleuze uses in DR (Atlone 1994:190) where the 'two faces' of the Idea, love and anger, the search for fragments and the condensation of singularities, are found clearly. It also points us to indicate that STD's dramatise concepts as differentiated incarnate actualities and in order to do so they will need to dramatise the concept as having a certain quality and extension (a species and organisation). This also suggests the need for the STD's themselves to have a double aspect.

Discussion:

(no doubt a very limited account here as my note taking is not as rigorous as other members of the VL seminar series we could mention)

There was some comments on the quia / how question format, with the suggestion that the answers to quia questions are not entities but rather processes (perhaps akin to Whitehead...) and that there are different types of answer to different types of question.

The issue of examples came up, with some suggestion that the examples Deleuze uses might somehow limit his accout of conditions, infecting it with the empirical, specifically his own bourgeois tastes. Comment was made that Derrida has suggested that a focus on exmaples can reveal the implicit presuppositons of philosophers, it being one of the routes through which 'conceptual contraband' can be smuggled in. It is also not just a matter of purifying the examples since there might be nothing but a set of examples.

The role of 'anger' came up, connecting the quote on Lenin in DR to an asnwer Deleuze gives to questions about the 'Method' in which he connects anger to larval subjects, using the idea of an explosion of anger as an example of the larval subject (Desert Islands:107,108).

The role of the dark precursor was questioned (see comment above about 'dark' or 'obscure') and the thought raised there there might be something interesting in Agambens' discussion of the 'dark' and the problems associated with it (I am not familiar with this, so perhaps someone else can comment further?).

A brief discussion touched on the role of the familiar, again in part with reference to examples and the abstact nature of the 'Method' essay. Many artists, it was suggested, are working with Deleuze enthusiastically because they come across something familiar in his thinking about the world and his method of making the familiar unfamiliar - this was connected to Novalis and his concept of the rasing something to its 'highest power', clearly of central concern for Deleuze more widely.

Next week (28th) the essay under discussion will be 'Bartleby, or The Formula' from 'Essays Critical and Clinical'. A workshop with Andrew Benjamin at Goldmsiths, on animals, was also announced.

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'A fantastic decomposition of the self.' Deleuze on Individuation in 'The Exhausted', Essays Critical and Clinical.

Presentation:
'A fantastic decomposition of the self.' Deleuze on Individuation in 'The Exhausted', Essays Critical and Clinical.

Linking 'a fantastic decomposition of the self' with its individuation means that the self is disconnected from its established notions of itself in order to connect it with its own production. Deleuze's concern with the production of experience is developed in his engagement with Samuel Beckett in The Exhausted Hereafter 'TE'). He develops the continuity of production behind the discontinuity of what has already been produced. He finds that the latter, as discontinuous and countable, is exhausted or decomposed by the doubling of its own production in Beckett's work. This is effected through an art or science of exhaustion. A ‘fantastic decomposition’ is then a stage in the process of production or individuation that Deleuze is concerned with.

This presentation seeks to follow the stages Deleuze identifies in Beckett's uncovering of the production of real experience and to grasp the nature of this continuity behind the discontinuous. Our concern is with the account of individuation this provides and how this dissolution of produced or composed terms must in fact be presupposed.. In this way we find that for Deleuze composition and decomposition must form a couple that are inseparable.

Exhaustion is first specified as a rigorous purification that grasps the conditions for the production of experience. In order to explain this Deleuze straight away distinguishes it from tiredness. This point is crucial for the whole essay and for the account of individuation we are seeking to locate. The distinction is put succinctly in the following passage: 'The possible is only realised in the derivative, in tiredness, whereas one is exhausted before birth, before realising oneself, or realising anything whatsoever.' [TE, 152] Exhaustion is then a condition of experience's ongoing production, a condition in place before anything is established because it concerns a level that is pre-individual. It is a stage of the production that is always already underway. It is only after 'birth', or after the individuation of the self that is always ongoing, that realisation can be conceived. Realisation is derivative or a feature of what is already individualised because it concerns 'the sum of total possibility.' [TE, 152] Only already produced terms can form a sum because they are discontinuous and countable. Thus the possible is 'realised in the derivative' because it produces a tiredness that comes from our attempts to realise different possibilities concerning already produced objects and meanings, and according to the different preferences and goals we have accumulated. This is the sum of possibility that is tiring but restricts us to the realm of what is possible on the basis of what has already been produced. Exhaustion is much more profound because it invokes the horizon of a continuous production and allows Deleuze to conceive individuation in terms other than the realisation envisaged on the basis of a sum of possibility. Continuous production is also developed by Deleuze in terms of the notion of multiplicities. We find an elaboration of this production through continuity as it is opposed to discontinuity or discreteness that excludes this production through the internal resources of the multiplicity: 'Riemann defined as “multiplicities” those things that could be determined in terms of their dimensions or their independent variables. He distinguished discrete multiplicities and continuous multiplicities. The former contain the principle of their own metrics (the measure of one of their parts being given by the number of elements they contain). The latter found a metrical principle in something else, even if only in phenomena unfolding in them or in the forces acting in them.' [Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 39].
We also find here an echo of the first page of Difference and Repetition where repetition is distinguished straight away from generality. The latter involves resemblance and equivalence whilst repetition involves irreplaceable singularities. Deleuze argues that ‘To repeat is to behave in a certain manner, but in relation to something unique or singular which has no equal or equivalent.’ [Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Paul Patton translation, Athlone edition- hereafter 'DR'), p. 1]. We shall see that for Deleuze exhaustion also attains a production of the singular and in this way is to account for activity.

In Difference and Repetition Deleuze identified the ideal game of the dice-throw as the horizon of the future which did not operate according to a sum total of all possibility:

'Nothing is exempt from the game: consequences are not subtracted from chance by connecting them with a hypothetical necessity which would tie them to a determinate fragment; on the contrary, they are adequate to the whole of chance, which retains and subdivides all possible consequences.' [DR, p. 283]

The continuity that replaces a sum of possibilities ensures that all the resources of the game are in play and nothing about the result is presupposed: '...a game which would be nothing else but play instead of being fragmented, limited and intercut with the work of men.' [DR, p. 283] In The Exhausted Deleuze develops Beckett's exhaustion in a way that echoes this earlier work strongly. It does not concern countable terms, or the sum of previously accumulated products but new distributions of the singular. In Difference and Repetition we find that between singularities or differences – which are the resources of the dice throw – there is a continuity which makes them distinct-obscure. In other words, their distinction and richness as distinct Ideas is realised through their relations, the obscurity that expresses their continual interactions. Throughout The Exhausted we witness a concern with attaining continuity by dissolving or decomposing forms but this must be the condition of new compositions or individuations. We find an echo of the distinct-obscure and the clear-confused of Difference and Repetition in composition-decomposition. They model the process of production, providing the resources of decomposition (as with obscurity or confusion) behind the singularities involved in an account of composition (as with distinction or clarity). Deleuze finds an account of the singularity in the ‘image’ which we will come to later. It is the horizon of exhaustion that is really productive for Deleuze and is behind the distributions and distinctions that allow us to conceive of a sum of possibility in the first place.

Deleuze finds in Becket an 'art or science of exhaustion.' It is an accumulation of what has been produced constituting a sum which must be exhausted in order to uncover the productive process. Deleuze writes: 'Beckett's characters play with the possible without realising it; they are too involved in a possibility that is ever more restricted in its kind to care about what is still happening.' [TE, p. 153] Exhaustion as an art or science proceeds through 'exhaustive series, that is, exhausting series.' [TE, p. 154] Deleuze writes that for Beckett there is to be an 'inventory' of the decomposition of the self. [TE, p. 155] This art or science of exhaustion sees different arrangements multiply, showing for Deleuze the openness of this horizon because all these permutations, this inventory, attains a level of continuity. The decomposition of the possible, of the sum of possibilities that make up the self and set boundaries to its relations, involves inclusive disjunction as the means of attaining continuity. This is the continuity of a common production shared by all terms but something which is preindividual and requires the ungrounding of compositions such that new compositions may arise.

We find this continuity through exhaustion in Beckett's novel Murphy in the following line: '“Yes or no?” said Murphy. The eternal tautology.' [Beckett, Murphy, p. 27] If we took our bearings from a sum of possibilities we would not find this a tautology because the different and exclusive possibilities, the ‘Yes or no?’ would not have been exhausted. Realisation of possibilities proceeds through preferences and goals as it calculates with a sum that is tiring due to its enormity. Yet this sum is discontinuous and so unable to realise production through continuity that exhausts every term capable of being combined in a sum. It excludes the previous preferences and goals, closing off potentials that may otherwise be encountered and made use of. For Deleuze Beckett seeks to avoid this exercise of 'exclusive disjunctions' [TE, p. 153] by decomposing previous compositions in the continuous production that is common to each one. In Murphy the assortment of biscuits 'would spring to life before him, dancing with the radiant measure of its total permutability,...' [Beckett, Murphy, p. 57] The art or science of exhaustion is a matter of having 'learnt not to prefer any one to any other', making each interchangeable, as with Murphy's biscuits. Elsewhere in the novel Beckett writes: 'Murphy was one of the elect, who require everything to remind them of something else.' [Beckett, Murphy, p. 40] Such continuity, where things are related by their production, rather than being isolated by an essential or fixed composition, establishes the 'fullness' that Murphy cannot partake in until all produced and subsequently established distinctions are exhausted. It is the fullness we find in a production that does not resemble its products, one that cannot be modelled on the accumulations or previous products which are discontinuous or a sum of possibilities. They find this when they cease to be a sum through their interchangeability and place in an exhausting/exhaustive series. They are continuous in a way that undermines distinctions and our use of distinct things in action for certain ends. However, this process must produce new compositions capable of new actions if it is to have a productive relation to individuation.

For Deleuze we must therefore see the potential 'springing to life' of Murphy's biscuits as a stage in the account of individuation. Exhaustion must not be a hopeless surrender to 'the undifferentiated, or into the famous unity of contradictories, nor is one passive: one remains active but for nothing.' [TE, p. 153] The ‘life’ in question is that of production with the horizon of continuity and not the discontinuity that prevents things from relating and having a common production. We don't find this if all differences are cancelled because then everything is related but by being the same and not through difference. On the one hand exhaustion attains a production which does not resemble its products – it is called 'Nothing' – and yet it must be productive through difference and in accounting for the production of the new. What is this Nothing? It is the 'Nothing, of which each thing is a modification.' [TE, p. 153] Nothing is continuity freed from the discontinuity that holds among produced or composed things. Each thing merges with its own production which is precisely 'Nothing' because it does not resemble any 'thing' that has previously been produced. Murphy's learning 'not to prefer any one to any other' means giving up the oppositions between composed terms that stand in the way of total permutability and continuity, a principle of production itself through which all things relate. Combination of cases shows what is between every case, what is behind their composition and qualified extension. Deleuze seeks in Beckett what is continuous behind the continued distributions of discontinuous terms and the activity, involving significations, objects, habits, goals and preferences, that this makes possible. This echoes Bergson's concern with the breakdown of the 'sensory motor schema' which Deleuze develops in Cinema 2 [cf pages 20 and 45]. In Beckett one is no longer able to stir one's limbs but one must not lie down because this is tiredness. To lie down is to be active in a way directed towards the getting rest and having energy for the next day. With exhaustion there is no such goal or preference because these are undermined by the scope of a production where nothing must be presupposed about what can happen next and no calculation made about the future.

How is 'the fantastic decomposition of the self' to involve the milieu in which individuation takes place? Exhaustion must be a process common to every term, one found by combination through inclusive disjunction to include every term and so exhaust their isolation. Deleuze writes: 'The combinatorial exhausts its object, but only because its subject is himself exhausted.' [TE, p. 154]In this way the difference between subject and object is to emerge from the production that exhaustion returns to. Actual activity has come to an end so that terms – subject, object, thing – may find their common production through their shared exhaustion, through their merging with the continuity of Nothing. This is again continuity in 'the formless and unformulated' that must nevertheless be coupled with the formed and formulated. This relates to Deleuze’s critical assault on language at the end of the essay – words are 'so burdened with calculations and significations, with intentions and personal memories, with old habits that cement together that one can scarcely bore into the surface before it closes up again.' [TE, p. 173] This emphasises how all subjective terms must be overcome. The subject is decomposed by the horizon of the future and milieu of individuation where the time of the future is played out again and again in new organisations of space, in new compositions enabled by continual decompositions. We have so far been concerned with the first way of exhausting the possible – 'forming exhaustive series of things' [TE, p. 161] – but we have already found that Deleuze finds further levels in Beckett.

According to Deleuze in Beckett’s work we find a language I that exhausts the possible with words, with exhaustive series, but we need a second language in order to exhaust words themselves as a further stage of exhaustion and decomposition. [TE, p. 156] This is the language of voices, characterised as blendable flows or waves by Deleuze. His notion is that Beckett exhausts words by relating them to Others who emit them. The Other is a possible world. Yet rather than existing as something given or unproduced this Other is itself accounted for by being exhausted. The possible world of the Other is 'Long since exhausted, without our knowing it, without his knowing it.' It is exhausted in its turn such that the Other forms with me 'the same dead foreign language'. [TE, p. 158] The Other and myself are the same character, both exhausted, as with subject and object, as with Murphy's biscuits. Again both 'merge with Nothing' in the sense of escaping all produced terms and their discontinuity. However, we see with the self and Other a structure involved in the production in experience of individuated or composed entities. This echoes Deleuze's notion of the Other-structure in Difference and Repetition which is a stage in the production of experience but takes its bearings from a production that is continuous. At Difference and Repetiton page 282 Deleuze elaborates 'The delineation of object, the transitions as well as the ruptures, the passage from one object to another, and even the fact that one world disappears in favour of another, the fact that there is always something else implicated which remains to be explicated or developed – all this is made possible only by the other-structure and its expressive power in perception. In short, it is the Other- structure that ensures individuation within the perceptual world.' Yet we must also go to '…those regions where the Other-structure no longer functions, far from objects and subject that it conditions, where singularities are free to be deployed or distributed within pure Ideas, and individuating factors to be distributed in pure intensity. In this sense, it is indeed true that the thinker is necessarily solitary and solipsistic.' Deleuze here argues that the Other-structure ensures individuation but he wants to preserve 'regions where the Other-structure no longer functions.' These regions are the continuous production in question but must nevertheless be productively related to the Other-structure. Deeper levels of exhaustion in Beckett concern very positive notions about regions prior to the Other-structure which we shall now move on to investigate.

Deleuze finds a critique of language of language in Beckett’s writings. He finds that words are bound to the particular and general for Beckett and will seek what is universal in the visual and aural. Yet the universality of a continuous production must not detract from its production of the singular, the production of new compositions through decomposition is via a process of exhaustion that brings us to the continuous again and again. Deleuze identifies a third language in Becket through which this stage of exhaustion is dramatised. This language is not concerned with combinable objects or transmitting voices, as were languages I and II respectively. It concerns Images and an 'any-space-whatever' which are respectively the time and space of production rather than of products. These are positive notions that are reached through exhaustion and so they are productive time and spaces that are behind produced times and spaces.

Let's concentrate first on the Image. It is said to 'ascend to the indefinite'. In Beckett's words, in Murphy writing about the character Celia, 'Then it was finished, the days and places and things and people were untwisted and scattered, she was lying down, she had no history.' [Beckett, Murphy, p. 86] The Image is a ritornello and a process, making it independent of both objects and memories. The Image is then not a personal memory, It resounds and it colours, making it a process within experience itself. It cannot be a psychological property of the subject because subject and object have already been exhausted, their difference having been shown to be itself something produced. Now we are concerned with processes of production and not with attributes of an already produced entity. As Deleuze puts it – '...the image is more profound because it frees itself from its object in order to become a process itself, ...' As such it '...no longer needs to be realised in a body or object.' [TE, p. 168] The names, combined exhaustively in language I, and voices of the Other, exhausted at the limit in language II, are then interrupted by the pure Image. The Image attains the indefinite because discontinuous possibilities and the opposition of self and Other have been exhausted. Yet it remains completely determined. Its complete determination must arise through the continuity of the production of which it is part. It must realise its distinction through obscurity. It resounds or colours through the resources of a continuous, obscure-distinct, production. This allows it to operate and occur in the ongoing production of experience, rather than being bound to previous forms or being unproductive in experience. In Beckett's words, describing Murphy: 'He could not get a picture in his mind of any creature he had met, animal or human. Scraps of bodies, of landscapes, hands, eyes, lines and colours evoking nothing, rose and climbed out of sight before him, as thought reeled upward off a spool level with his throat.' [Beckett, Murphy, p. 141] These scraps are completely determined but belong to no body or object, they operate as a process in experience without presupposing the forms and compositions already built up.

Deleuze strongly identifies this re-thinking of the image in Beckett as affirming the production of the new. The Image must be the new and never set up a barrier to the new by conserving a content. With the image 'what counts is not its meagre content but the energy it has harvested.' [TE, p. 160] This shows that exhaustion is wholly positive insofar as it leads us to something other than a content that would accumulate as yet another composition. The image never lasts very long because it is singular, 'inseparable from the movement through which it dissipates itself.' [TE, p. 168] It is continuous with the production of the new and therefore will not accumulate or solidify a content because this would block the new images to come and its role as a process that makes different and opens a new horizon. They merge with 'the dissipation of their condensed energy' such that they are singular and do not prescribe contents but offer a new relation through which content can be composed differently. Rather than following from previous compositions of content according to a linear succession of time the image is an instantaneous production that interrupts this succession: 'There is a time for images, a right moment when they can appear or insinuate themselves, breaking the combination of words and flow of voices.' Yet this break must also exhaust combinations and flows, it must be 'a moment very near the end, an hour close to the last.' [TE, p. 161] This is a clearing of the space of composition through decomposition. This is also developed in Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, see pages 80-84f.

If the Image were to have a different temporality it would have a different horizon and operation. It operates in the instant. We can refer to the problem-solution structure which means that a problem does not establish new form of individuation but establishes a horizon for forms of solution or individuation. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze writes 'The Idea of fire subsumes fire in the form of a single continuous mass capable of increase. The Idea of silver subsumes its object in the form of a liquid continuity of fine metal.' [DR 171] This is a continuousness that does not resemble what it produces, this having been exhausted. For this reason it must interrupt the course and succession of its products, forms of solution or individuation, rather than simply supplying it with ready made forms. We do not then copy the content of the image but realise new connections in the instant thanks to how diverse new images or potentials coexist in the Idea. One form of realising the Idea or image must not dominate because for Deleuze the actualisation of virtual Idea is differenciation rather than being marked by resemblance or generality. For this reason we find that Beckett's notion of falling preserves the necessary temporality of the image. Deleuze quotes the following passage from Beckett: 'The image is a pant, a breath, but it is an expiring breath, on its way to extinction. The image is that which extinguishes itself, consumes itself: a fall. It is a pure intensity, which is defined as such by its height, that is, by its level above zero, which it describes only by falling.' [TE, p. 170] Therefore in The Exhausted the dissipation of energy is shown to be positive – it ensures a singular Image and one occurring in the instant and therefore not being accounted for by the linear succession of time. Deleuze quotes Becket writing of 'the simple games that time plays with space, now with these toys, and now with those.' [Beckett, ‘Texts for Nothing’, p. 74] This captures the intervention of an instantaneous Image in space, the problems set for space to solve which draws upon a time of production. Thus one Image does not follow from another in a linear and actual succession but each occurs in the instant and relates in a non-linear and continuous time. It is what Deleuze elsewhere calls, borrowing the concept from Shakespeare, a 'time out of joint.' ['On Four Poetic Formulas That Might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy' in Essays Critical and Clinical, also published as the Preface to Kant's Critical Philosophy]

The second aspect of the language III, 'any space whatever', does for space what the Image does for time. The 'any space whatever' is populated and well trodden – including by us and yet it is neither here nor there. Deleuze finds that in Beckett a manner of walking is a ritornello just as a Images are. Thus 'Any-character-whatever' 'traverses the square following a given course and direction.' This motor ritornello is a conveyor belt because it is a movement with no object. Here it is a question of exhausting space. Just as linear time is overcome by the instantaneous time of Images and their virtual coexistence, so qualified and extended spaces are overcome by 'any-space-whatever'. It is not organised by established representations, neither by words, objects or memories. Its potential organisation involves the instantaneous time of the image, the injection of problems which it responds to with solutions, precisely individuations or compositions of the self. Here elements are defunctionalised, homogeneous and are thus defined only as parts of a space, ensuring continuity as in the case of images coexisting in Ideas. This clears the ground because it ensures that forms produced in the past and accumulated do not determine how space can function in its encounter with the Image. This is space open the horizon of the future through its capacity to respond to the time of the image.

Developing the Nothing with which everything merges there is a ghostly dimension that further elaborates the continuous production Deleuze seeks in Beckett's work. The latter is ‘Nothing’ from the point of view of the produced, the actualised and with its sensori-motor schema. It is then ghostlike from this perspective, what Deleuze calls 'The ghostly dimension of an indefinite impersonal'. [TE, p. 166] Yet it involves a fullness attained through exhaustion, something Murphy saw as a potential in his biscuits. We reach the indefinite and impersonal through the exhaustion or decomposition of words, memories and objects. Images are played out when the time of Image is staged in the 'any space whatever'. We have 'a woman, a man and a child without any personal coordinates.' They are ghostly because they do not resemble already composed forms. Ghostlike is the life without the forms that define what has been composed and made personal. These Images are processes that trigger new forms, new solutions or individuations, and so must themselves ‘fall’ away rather than becoming established and must not prescribe a content. The impersonal and indefinite can effect any self through its own exhaustion or decomposition, they belong to no-one or thing and so are pre-individual. They do not resemble what they produce. They are the instances of a renewed problem and ghostly because they do not presuppose former solutions and do not resemble them. It is ghostly that the order of succession of what has gone before doesn't count because 'All parts of space plunge into the void, each revealing the emptiness, into which they are plunging.' [TE, p. 165] They reveal emptiness in their lack of reference to the organisation of space and time, abandoning all precedent or basis in a sum of probabilities.

It is in music that a continuity is to be found that avoids the terms Beckett is said to exhaust. It is adequate to the space we have reached so that:
'It is onto this ghostly frame that the music is hurled, connecting voids and silences, following a ridge line like a limit to infinity.' [TE, p. 167]
This is a ‘frame’ without established and personal coordinates. ‘Infinite’ here is the continuous production we have been concerned with. 'Void and silence' are connected by this continuity because they are its interventions in language and experience, they are singular or remarkable images connected by a continuous production. They are connected by a rhythm that orders their occurrence not according to linear succession but according to a non-linear production brought about by the coexistence and interaction of these images in a continuous production. Here difference relates to difference. The instantaneous images can be connected only through the production they are part of and this is expressed by rhythm rather than by given ways of connecting things. Rhythm is the time aspect of music and involves the grouping of units of time into larger and larger groups. All sorts of groupings and connections can emerge through rhythm and this makes a productive movement. This accounts for new distributions of words, subjects and objects in an ‘any space whatever’ because both time and space are free of presuppositions and able to respond with new compositions to the image that occur in the instant. These images must all be continuous but not according to their successive occurrences in a linear or chronological time. They relate through rhythm and its groupings, a ‘time out of joint’.

Deleuze writes that for Beckett: 'Music succeeds in transforming the death of this young girl into a young girl dies; it brings about this extreme determination of the indefinite like a pure intensity that pierces the surface,...' [TE, p. 173] Here 'this' thing which has a place in the succession of products, of words, of objects, becomes instead an Image, a process of death made singular. This is because the images occurs without being tied to any body or object, it is indefinite and impersonal, ghostly because it is preindividual. In this way all definite and personal terms are exhausted and this image emerges from its relation to all other images and relates what it produces in an 'any space whatever' to all other productions. In his Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation Deleuze talks about the difference between 'distributive unity' and 'limitative unity.' [p. 84-85]The former is separation without isolation and expresses the continuity of production which is attained through exhaustion. This rhythmic being and union that separates the selves who are realised and makes them individual in very different and creative ways. Yet it does this by relating their singular production to the whole of production, through the unlimited continuity of this. Deleuze refers to Beckett's television work as using music or vision to loosen the grip of words, separating or even opening them up. This is when they encounter their outside, the continuity that produces them but also demands they make way for the new. This gives them a unity that distributes anew, breaking solidified orders. This means that Images can interrupt words and objects but rhythm ensures new distributions or groupings of images are always occurring and none is established. It means that whole of time is always brought into play. This is for Deleuze to clear the way for the ever new that is only realised through this whole: 'Visual image is carried along by the music, the sonorous image that rushes toward its own abolition. Both of them rush toward the end, all possibility exhausted.' [TE, p. 169]

Deleuze asks whether there is salvation for words in a new style where they open up by themselves. This would be 'A music proper to a poetry read aloud without music.' [TE, p. 173]The succession and the discontinuity we found with the sum of possibility would need to be overcome it the rhythm and an ‘any space whatever’ were to be realised in a style that overcame the solidified and habitual. Deleuze refers to Beckett's practice of boring holes in the surface so that 'what lurks behind' might at last appear: 'to allow for the emergence of the void or the visible in itself, the silence or the audible in itself...' [TE, p. 173] This void is continuous and so refers to the 'in itself' without division into forms or compositions. This echoes Deleuze concern in Difference and Repetition with how 'Ideas occur throughout the faculties and concern them all.' Deleuze suggests we take the social multiplicity or Idea – 'it determines sociability as a faculty, but also the transcendent of sociability which cannot be lived within actual societies in which the multiplicity is incarnated, but must be and can be lived only in the element of social upheaval (in other words, freedom, which is always hidden among the remains of an old order and the first fruits of a new).' [DR, p. 193] The faculties are structures involved in individuation and respond to the transcendent object, the Idea where the variety of 'the social' coexists ‘in itself’ and with the whole of time, suggesting again the distinction of Idea through their obscurity. Deleuze is concerned with the 'in itself' of the visible and the audible also in order to realise in individuation an images produced by the coexistence of all the varieties of the visible or of the audible.

Referring to Beckett's late works Deleuze characterises his style: 'Sometimes short segments are ceaselessly added to the interior of the phrase in an attempt to break open the surface of words completely, ... And sometimes the phrase is riddled with dots and dashes [traits] in order to ceaselessly reduce the surface of words,...' [TE, p. 173-174] This exhaustive process operates between the words to uncover their common production in the linguistic Idea or multiplicity. Deleuze argues that a new style is needed because of the problem of how visions or sounds are to be distinguished. This concerns the problem not simply of minimal distinction between sounds and visions but their differenciation, the production of very different sounds and visions through the audible in itself and the visible in itself. At this point the rhythm of a production that groups images in new ways, realising new connections between these processes, is operating. The surface is broken open or reduced in this new style such that we are closer to the Idea and its production of images by bringing together diverse visions and sounds into the common production that realises the ‘in itself’ in different ways. Finding the Idea in which the variety coexists is to find the point of exhaustion where new images are produced in order to give rise to new compositions or individuations upon an 'any space whatever.'

This conclusion has tried to draw together the ‘art of science of exhaustion’ through the theme of individuation. This theme seems to recur throughout Deleuze work and he seeks to account both for continuity and for the discontinuity that is a condition of action and relations between individuals. The account of the time of image and of the ‘any space whatever’ provides an account of how new singularities can be distributed. The problem of accounting for the non-exhausted or composed through exhaustion and decomposition are great and with in more depth in other of Deleuze’s writings. Indeed it is one of the productive problems animating his thought as a whole. However, it is in the space and time of production uncovered in The Exhausted that we grasp the potential for individuation provided by exhaustion just as we do find in other apparently destructive and negative terms elsewhere in Deleuze, from fractures and cracks to schizophrenia and discord.
_____________________________________________________

The discussion during the workshop was very rich and productive. One issue raised was about the value of exhaustion over a process of fragmentation. Isn’t a fragment more appropriate to Deleuze’s own mechanisms of production? This would suggest that a fragment is injected into the process of production. Another issue was the mention of the sublime at page 170 The Exhausted. If the sublime involves fear, awe and alienation does this equate with exhaustion? The sublime reaches a peak – the zenith of sensation. However, it was argued, for Deleuze exhaustion still involves sensation, it still involves a zenith but one that falls away such that the sublime is never established or fixed.

A connection was made to the move beyond action and the notion of the rhizome where everything is connected to everything else, this is where intensities happen. It cannot be put in an intentional, conscious or logical sequence.

The move beyond the possible to the production of the real led the question to be raised of whether exhaustion is positive in Deleuze but negative in Nietzsche, despite their common ground. Exhaustion in Nietzsche’s critique of morality involves being hypersensitive and involves alcohol, luxury and decadence, bring about reaction rather than action.

Deleuze philosophical notion of energy was related to his critique of entropy. This was referred to Derrida’s notion of dehiscence in the image of the bud of a flower bursting where most of what is released will die but all are of interest. The excess of dehiscence leads to chance driven encounters and avoids a linear and chronological succession or causality.

The example of an animal walking across a desert was suggested as a case where life will push until it drops. Exhaustion will only come with death. It was asked whether exhaustion is moral and humanistic in Deleuze or physiological. This echoes debates about whether the notion of ‘becoming other’ in Deleuze is human centred. This was related to Kantian structures, invoking a human anthropology, and the problem that it is contradictory for the subject to be got rid of in a specifically human way (cf. Keith Ansell Pearson Germinal Life [Routledge, 1999] especially pages 188-189).

Reference was also made to Beckett’s characters and how they keep returning in his work – he calls them all back and they keep moving all the time, reappearing.

Also mentioned with the collection of stones talked about in Anti-Oedipus, echoed in Beckett’s Molloy. Here the notion of constructing desiring machines out of a heap of stones is developed.

Is The Exhausted the closest Deleuze ever got to writing about death? Death is not the end because the life or singularity of the image comes from its fall or dissipation. It becomes a ballistic image, it was suggested. This was related in the point in Difference and Repetition where Deleuze talks about personal death and impersonal death. The latter is going on all the time in the life span of an actual entity, singular points composes the body and compose thought in relation to an environment and in relation to thought in the widest sense. Singular images each die or fall, intensity tends towards zero. As exhaustion death is impersonal and seems to go on continually. The life span between birth and death was discussed – we cannot make a whole of this series. Other series are multiplied by the complication of the whole. It was suggested that constituting a series is itself yet another event in a life and that we cannot therefore get to ‘the’ series.

The three languages which Deleuze finds in Beckett (page 156) were discussed and it was argued that the later texts of Beckett strongly emphasise the relevance of this model. Words come no longer to be used. It was suggested that triads come up a lot in Deleuze – yet it was also noted that we can find many four fold structures. Deleuze uses lists all the time, including the eight postulates of The Image of Thought at the end of chapter three of Difference and Repetition. However, it was suggested, we tend to expect lists to be exhaustive. The importance of more than two terms – such as actual and virtual – was brought out in relation to the danger of the actual falling into the virtual unless other terms involve the virtual in the actual, as individuation can be said to do, as can the doubling of spatio-temporal dynamisms in the emergence of an 'elementary consciousness' (something talked about in Difference and Repetition at page 220). Death is for Deleuze to clear the ground for the virtual production that is continually involved in actualisation.

Another area developed was the role of Klossowski given that Deleuze says he got the notion of intensity from him. Deleuze and Guattari saw ‘disjunctive synthesis’ as a way of describing the essential nature of Kossowski’s fictions. Klossowski’s work on Nietzsche’s wrestling with his own physiological states of sickness was developed and this revealed its deep relevance to Deleuze’s engagement with Beckett. It was a question for Nietzsche of whether he should be on the side of his body or his thought – they were in a battle against each other. Nietzsche’s aphoristic style expresses the incoherent forces going on beneath consciousness but without representing them. This develops a pathos of thought. Reference was made to Nietzsche’s The Gay Science where he criticises Spinoza for arguing that we need to understand rather than condemn. Nietzsche sees this as seeking a neutral position of understanding when neutrality can only be a temporary truce of the forces of the unconscious involving the lowest energy and no feeling. Yet in Deleuze exhaustion is correlated with a particular possibility of thought, a new distribution of images or singularities. For Nietzsche things can’t cancel out and Deleuze takes this over. Unconscious forces are all different in kind. The production of an agent, of a sensory motor schema, comes out of this unconscious. Exhaustion then is about getting beyond agency but to have individuation you have to get back to it too.

Deleuze's criticism of European Buddhism was raised because here the right balance, the right level of energy, involves disinterest. Beckett, it was pointed out, is often accused of nihilism. It was suggested that Deleuze’s anti-Kantianism leads him to affirm in Beckett the exhaustion of possible experiences. This again lead to the problem of whether we have the physiology of exhaustion or a specifically human exhaustion. Kant’s work in The Critique of Pure Reason was characterised as involving the exhaustion of the possibilities of cognition via the excessive movement beyond the limits of the rational that defines 'the human' in Kant.

It was argued that in Beckett there is a whole system of at work that keeps things moving.

The theme of the ‘any space whatever’ was related to Deleuze's Bergsonism and the notion in Bergson that you can only see the image when you are free of all movement. The image is what sets everything in motion.

Also discussed where passage in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra where Zarathustra is forced to lie down and how he is opposed to 'the philosopher of sleep'.


Bibliography:

Beckett, Samuel (1993) Murphy, Montreuil and London: Calder Publications.

Deleuze, Gilles (2003) Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, London and New York: Continuum Press.

- (1998) Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, London and New York: Verso.

- (1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, London: The Athlone Press.

- (1989) Cinema 2, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, London: The Athlone Press.

- (1988) Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Zone Books.

Read the full post here - with comments discussion at the bottom of each page.

Colloquium - Darren Ambrose on 'The Logic of Sensation' and 'What is philosophy?'

The Colloquium given by Darren Ambrose, of Warwick University, was an extremely effective presentation on the diagrammatic and led to a very productive discussion. We are very grateful to our speaker for coming to Greenwich and adding a great deal to Volcanic Lines program. This report on the paper and discussion is taken from my notes. Please let me know if I’ve misrepresented anything.

The paper began by looking at What is Philosophy? and the pedagogical relation of philosophy to science and art that is expounded therein. The three elements presented by philosophy – plane of immanence, conceptual personae and concepts – were related to the diagrammatic, personal and intensive. The plane of immanence or diagrammatic is the pre-philosophical plane. There is a shared notion of creativity in the function in science, the concept in philosophy and the percept and affects in art. The initial diagrammatic function was emphasised by reference to Deleuze‘s engagement with Francis Bacon who shows that both art and philosophy involve taking ‘a witches flight.’

The nature of philosophy as a creative attempt to comprehend through created concepts was emphasised. The real genetic conditions of ontological actuality demand a pragmatic constructivism and a radical self movement within thought. Philosophy is then the creative ontology of the virtual. Bacon’s practice was related to this. He has said in interviews that when he begins a painting he has no idea what he is doing, what is going to emerge. This relates to Deleuze and Guattari’s requirement that we have no readily available conceptual forms when we are forced to think. We don’t know what to do with what we encounter. This means that forces of recognition aren’t governing things – something the speaker related to critique of ‘the image of thought’ in chapter three of Difference and Repetition. Later Deleuze argues that the concept needs an idiot if it is to be realised. This is a new type of idiot who turns the absurd into the highest power of thought and in this way is creative. The idiot is born of exasperation and lack of conceptual resources to deal with the singular event.

Reference was then made to remarks Deleuze and Guattari make in What is Philosophy? about Hegel’s efforts at concept creation. For them Hegel doesn’t know where to stop with the concept. He institutes a madness of the concept and extends it to all fields. Deleuze and Guattari argue that we need the non-philosophical to do philosophy. This is a condition of creativity and demands that we refer to art and science in search of the non-philosophical. How can the artwork reveal something to philosophy about the diagrammatic conditions of creating? This was referred to the intrinsic self ordering and creative self positing of the material used in art. This helps lay out the plane of immanence diagrammatically. The matter that is involved is not passive – we have the intrinsically expressive components of matter. These are virtual elements and processes of becoming. Acts of creation amount to the inscription of lines of differentiation. This is then to tap a reservoir, the non-philosophical plane of immanence.

The speaker introduced counter-effectuation at this point as something involved in the philosophical act which is a return upstream to the pre-individual problematic conditions of experience. It was emphasised that this must be a work of creation because there is no pre-existing means of doing so. Insightful reference was made again to Hegel and the presuppositions of thought that enable concept creation for him. This gives a certain direction and image of thought according to Deleuze and Guattari, a criticism also made by Schelling. Deleuze and Guattari seek to rid philosophy of pre-existing images of thought. For them the philosophy is the friend of the concept because of the vital and infinite self movement of undifferentiated thought is the outside realm that forces us to think and is at the basis of a fundamental encounter. This is ‘the being of the sensible’ or that by which the given is given. It is imperceptible and is the limit at which transcendental exercise of the faculties is attained. In this way, it was argued, the dimension of the transcendental or virtual opens itself up through the sensible.

This was explained as making new forces visible and formulating the problems that they pose. This systematic disruption of the faculties was described as the necessary diagrammatic element of philosophy or the plane of immanence. It was argued that the real genetic conditions of experience or the actual that lead to the invention of an entirely new metaphysics. This is the diagrammatic creation of a process of differentiation.

The plane of immanence was defined further as pure, undifferentiated movement. This movement must be radically conceptless. This was characterised as setting out an enabling image of thought that is conceptless. This movement that can be carried to infinity is a non-philosophical concept that mustn’t be encroached upon by the madness of the concept. This was related to the requirement that Deleuze and Guattari make that everything begin with the hatred of philosophy – misosophy. The pre-philosophical field is the internal condition of thought and this plane of immanence must be preserved through an initial act of misosophy. There must be a relation with art and science to do this, an intertwining and co-implication. Philosophy then must erect itself on the ground of the unthinkable and imperceptible exteriority. This was related to Bacon’s implicit catastrophe and hysteria within the act of painting. It was argued that this connects with the intuitive diagrammatic procedure that initiates philosophical practice.

Deleuze’s The Logic of Sensation was said to develop Francis Bacon as the modern paradigm concerned with intrinsic expressive sensuality of paint and resistance to cliché by avoiding narrative in favour of the brutality of fact. What can be done with the materiality of paint on its own. Painting conveys a static or potential violence of reaction and expression. Deleuze finds Bacon paintings to be experimental rhythm assemblages of flesh and bone. Flesh and bones, it was explained, are rhythmic limits, each pushing the other to its limit. Deleuze’s Bacon presents the lived reality of the sub-representational domain and the simultaneous elevation of the Figure. The Figure is rhythmic and not narrative and this means elements are interrelated but not as symbols. This connection was made between the pre-figurative act of painting and the pre-philosophical elaboration necessary to concept creation. In the case of Bacon’s painting this was characterised as the avoidance of probabilistic givens and clichés that always already inhabit the canvas. Bacon’s preparatory work was explained as the initial making of random marks, sweeping and brushing motions. This clears out locals or zones on the canvas. It is a practice that presupposes clichés and removes, brushes over or covers them with these acts. It was explained that Bacon calls this a diagram ore graph in interviews conducted with David Sylvester. The setting up of a diagram or graph is random but productive possibilities are produced.

Such physical acts of painting are also found in Pollock’s work but for Deleuze this presents only the diagram. However, it was explained, Bacon productively negotiates with the diagram to produce a figure. The automatic random ground is therefore risky because it threatens to overwhelm the subsequent figuration. In the midst of probabilistic and figurative givens a catastrophe overcomes the painting. Another possible world is introduced into the visual world of figuration. The painters hand intervenes to interrupt the sovereign optical organisation and the diagram operates as suggestive of a new sense. Marks then must be used to make out possibilities of fact.

The diagram was defined in this sense as chaos and the germ of new order of rhythm. It unlocks new orders of sensation. But, it was emphasised, the diagram must not be allowed to eat away at the entire painting. The diagram is a necessary prerequisite of the fact. Sensation must be rendered clear and precise via a new form of figuration.

Such groping experimentation chimes with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion that to think is always to follow a witches flight. Matter carries with it virtual singularities as implicit and so form is something ‘suggested’ out of the material itself. Bacon surrenders to the matter of paint to follow it and follow its virtual singularities.

Bacon’s method was them summarised:
1. We mist begin with inevitable figurative givens because they always already inhabit the canvas.
2. Catastrophic intervention – scrambling.
3. Utilising the catastrophe to allow the materiality of the paint to facilitate the emergence of a new form of resemblance.

The diagram was now defined ‘an inherently fecund prerequisite’ involving ‘the continual injection of a manual diagram into the visual whole’. For Bacon painting will only capture the nature of reality if the painter doesn’t know how to do it. It must then be allowed to breed its different forms but without its chaos destroying the Figurative forms.
This was related again to a ‘systematic disruption of the faculties via a diagrammatic procedure.’ Thus it was concluded that both art and philosophy undertake a witches flight.


Q. The discussion that followed this exhilarating paper began with a question about Deleuze’s borrowing of concepts from many sources and his borrowing of the term ‘diagram’ in particular. A. It is a term Bacon used in an interview to talk about how he paints. It is a term that appear in the Foucault and Kafka: A Minor Literature books also. This opened an interesting discussion about the different meanings of the term in Deleuze and how it is translated into English. In the Bacon book ‘graph’ is used but translated in English as ‘diagram.’

Q. Another question was about the term ‘fact’ in The Logic of Sensation.
A. Our speaker suggested that ‘fact’ is again adopted from Bacon vocabulary and his concern for a ‘factual expression of reality.’ We can, it wads argued, say that ‘fact’ and ‘event’ are synonymous but must raise the question over whether Deleuze does buy wholesale into Bacon’ notions, his way of talking about his work. Is Bacon adopting Bacon’s language and relating it to philosophy? It was suggested that Deleuze might miss the self mythologizing that Bacon seems to indulge in when talking about his work.

Q. A question was raised concerning the relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s invention of concept through his experience of Cezanne’s painting.
A. In answer the relation between Cezanne’s ordered pictorial logic of sensation was related to Bacon’s disorganised and brutal logic.

Q. A further question made reference to the ‘haptic’ which appears in the last section of A Thousand Plateaus and in The Logic of Sensation.
A. This disruption of the purely optical by creating a tactile object involves the notion of the eye touching the object. This was related also the move away from the striated to the smooth in A Thousand Plateaus. The speaker referred to arts beginning with tactile but this being superseded according to certain art historians. For Deleuze and Guattari, on the contrary, it is not superseded but persists.

Q. The relation of misosophy to Dadaism was also raised, whether the former was an anti-philosophy as the latter is an anti-art.
A. The speaker argued that misosophy is in all creativity while Dadaism was a historically situated and conditioned activity. Philosophy must maintain in itself a non-philosophical element.

Q. Further discussion of Deleuze and Guattari’s borrowing of concepts from many sources followed.
A. Do they create or borrow concepts? Yet, the speaker argued, the use of pre-existing concepts is the creation. This is like the artists who re-vitalised and reenergised paint when many people said painting was dead.

Q. Is Damian Hurst a clichéd take on Bacon?
A. This lead onto the decisional process that come after the initial laying. The speaker emphasised the significance of the decisions and judgements of the artists. For Bacon the painter has developed a sensibility through practice – this is a decisional structure. The philosopher must do the same.

Q. The notion of misosophy was returned to.
A. There is a need for deep love for the concept because in this the counter-effectuating misosophy operates. It was explained that Bacon didn’t see himself as being aggressive to Velasquez in his Popes but one that must dismantle and not repeat the original in order to get back to it. A question on the diagram in music led the speaker to refer to Stockhausen and Cage as counter-effectuating existing compositional techniques. Messiaen is drawn upon by Deleuze and Guattari because he goes back to bird song and uses it as a diagrammatic procedure. He does not just transcribe birdsong into music like Beethoven.

Q. Another questioner suggested that Deleuze and Guattari write in way that is difficult so that they scramble the matrix out of which the new thing comes.
A. The speaker recalled Bacon’s claim, in an interview with Melvyn Bragg, that he has sheer pleasure in playing with colour. Deleuze and Guattari likewise seems to have pleasure in creating the shock to thought.

Q. A questioner mentioned that in his interview with Bragg Bacon also talked of his love of gambling, relating to the manipulation of chance that Deleuze identifies. Only the painter knows how to make chance work, how to manipulate the marks.
A. This was related by the speaker to Deleuze’s work on cinema and the film makers manipulation of chance through a cinema of more open duration. Bacon’s influence on David Lynch was mentioned. Hoe allows accidents that happen on set to be included and so embrace them.

Q. It was suggested that Pollock is better than Bacon and that Deleuze’s taste is sedate and bourgeois. He imposes a specific plane of immanence or transcendental structure and so fall into the weakness he identifies in Kant. Why is the mark not a fact?
A. Our speaker agreed that there was a problem with why we must move to the act of decision and beyond the automatism of just the marks. We need a plane of consistency, a rigor to stop things falling apart. Drug writing fails to communicate the strength of the sensation. The structure or plane of consistency is needed.

Q. Final remarks included the observation that Deleuze and Guattari prefer psychosis over neurosis and perhaps the mark is a neurotic signs. It is a sign system of the unconscious with no object whilst psychosis is closer to disjunctive synthesis.

Q. Also Does Deleuze resolve the haptic and visual sensation?
A. Rhythm finishes The Logic of Sensation rather than a tactile genesis.

Final remarks included the observation that Deleuze’s use of ‘the tree greens’ (from Whitehead) means that colour is experience and we are in it. It was also noted that Cezanne wants something to touch but goes for colour and not clay, making this more ‘paradox of sensation’ that a ‘logic of sensation’.

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