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Filippo Carraro
Abstract
The painter Francis Bacon and the philosopher Gilles Deleuze agree with
Heraclitus: any phenomenon is constituted of movement or becoming
and no appearance endures. I read Francis Bacon, The Logic of
Sensation from the perspective of the Heraclitean flux. This allows me to
show the eminent role of forces (movement beneath the soil of visibility)
in the work of Deleuze, which he inherits from the Greek philosopher.
I point at sensation as Deleuzes re-thinking of the notion of becoming.
How can an artist make an object endure? The artistic product, for
Deleuze, embodies the force to recreate itself, and thus to endure in the
universe. This phenomenon is a bloc of sensation.
Keywords: creation, Deleuze, Francis Bacon, Heraclitus, movement,
real, sensation
46 Filippo Carraro
by the task of rendering movement, it is Deleuzes idea that in any
creative process becoming is affirmed together with being as in rhythm,
subsequent beats are musical when they are thought of as part of a
simultaneous silent duration.
In Bacons experience the primary pictorial subject, the Figure, is not
just a compound of colour and form. The artist is never satisfied with
rendering the visible. Deleuze believes Bacons aim is to render visible,
that is, to discover the hidden pieces of a fact and to manifest them on
the canvas. Common objects, as we see them, are images that can be
separated into their two components: form (contour) and matter (which
in painting is a question of colour). To render the visible would be to
paint what one sees: contour and colour. In order to achieve his aim of
rendering visible, however, Bacon has to paint what seeing means for
him. This is to paint sensation; otherwise he would be painting what
he senses. Therefore, to paint sensation is to re-create or re-interpret
the perspective of the subject seeing, in addition to reproducing the
object seen. Subject and object are indissoluble (Deleuze [2003] 2004:
34). For Deleuze, art does not associate a content to a correct formula
which expresses it. Instead, art is interested in decomposing (sensed
object, on the one hand, and viewing subject, on the other hand) and
recomposing (sensation). The painter shares the musicians attentiveness
for the harmony of the two moments: his aim is composition in the
sense of a melody. Better put: his art consists in a resonance between
visible and invisible, or heard and unheard. It is rhythm itself that would
constitute the Figure (71).
Bacon never paints one Figure, he rather paints coupled figures, under
the influence of a single force (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 65). Painting,
being a matter of combining the dynamic and the static aspects,
utterly prepares the audible aesthetic experience. More than melody,
thus, canvases are places of resonance (69). A Figure is sensation, but
sensation is difference of level (65). Art aims not at reproducing the
sensed model, but at reproducing sensation. (Bacons Platonism appears
rather weak when he says that his series of Popes is meant to reproduce
Velzquezs work.1 ) Bacon, in an interview (easily accessible online),
reveals to Melvyn Bragg his ambition as a painter: I want to be able
to re-make in another medium the reality of an image that excites
me, he insists. Inevitably, Bacons Figure is not one figure. It only
achieves the task of enveloping sensation by presenting not simply the
superficial level of images or clichs, but also the level beneath. Deleuze
repeats that painting is not so much about representing images as it is
about metaphysical forces. Everything is force (Deleuze [2003] 2004:
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48 Filippo Carraro
We are presented here with a figurative notion of image and a figural one.
We could say that, with Bacon, Deleuze works on a separation of levels,
and, by repeating the question what sustains?, a difference returns. The
logic of sensation can bind being and becoming together for it works
on a difference of level. Thus, we get a glimpse of a second element
of similarity between Deleuze and Heraclitus, who also considers the
confrontation of stable beings (the day as opposed to the night) to be a
function of a divine Logos (Krik [1954] 2010: 33), that is, the visible
determinations to be a product of grounding forces.
We get to a last stage, the threat of Platonism. Difference of level is
not new in philosophy, and Deleuze has to face Platos philosophical
reasons, if he wants the Heraclitean becoming to support his point
of view on art (that the pictorial subject is not a copy, but embodies
sensation and, even, a sensation that moves). To put it differently,
Deleuze has to show that there is no model, in the height of the sky;
that the grounding forces also collapse under the strokes of becoming;
that the reality of becoming is not contradicted as an unchanging
reality. A third question arises: how can becoming be preserved? The
Heraclitean answer to this question would be that there is no mistake
in thinking becoming as a superficial effect of a stable divine ground,
precisely because, apart from metamorphoses, becoming is an immanent
principle with no depth, or a cause with no substance different than
its pure effect. War is the father of all and king of all (Krik [1954]
2010: 245). Similarly, Deleuze describes the Figure. A Figure is already
many entangled figurative moments; they fight like wrestlers, or they
re-compose the rhythmic meter. It is a war of bodies that affirm one
fact (one battle) (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 66). Our third question is
answered as follows: becoming is not contradicted because only its
surface returns only the river of succession.
Bacon never stopped admiring those static images of movement he
never abandoned the question of how to render movement (Deleuze
[2003] 2004: 58). Time marks the passage from image to image;
therefore images are present from time to time. The issue of a present
that flows (the Baconian Figure, which descends the stairs see Portrait
of a Man walking down Steps, 1972) encounters one of the most
beautiful answers in the wonder of the Obscure: one is the way up
and the way down (Krik [1954] 2010: 105). As if we were before a
paradoxical image or a geometrical improbability, the Figure is not
more the isolation of the bodies that wrestle (before up, afterwards
down), than it is the dynamic zones of the painting where the two bodies
are indiscernible a third possible body which is at once up and down.
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In any experience (for instance, the aesthetic experience I have watching
a painting) a new I is created (an I that has contracted the power of
seeing the scream). It is a phenomenon of difference, or a habituation
and repetition of ones I.
Becoming is creative because, as rhythm, it has the same force of
time to accumulate, to pass, to coagulate sensation or to destroy
it. Deleuzes forces account for a becoming that becomes something;
for Deleuze, an image truly endures on condition that it reveals the
forces that sustain it. In the creation of a body, or in the re-creation
of a Figure, a spirit becomes independent from every now and every
before. It simply appears; it simply becomes and comes into being. If
in Difference and Repetition, by creation, a body faces its destiny, in
Francis Bacon, a Figure unshackles itself from the artist, as if the creator
were able to bestow on it the strength that allows it to reproduce its
own pictorial life (see Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 1635). This is the
reality of becoming.
If Bacon represented a figure opposed to the embodiment of its fears,
he would have involved a segment of temporality in his representation.
He would have painted the scream and the horror, as if they were
two objects interacting through a spatiotemporal opposition (here is
the feared and there is the scream; horror is the future and the squeal
anticipates it). However, Deleuze notices that the artist avoids by all
means presenting a given opposition of subject and object. This supports
the Deleuzian intuition that art must rule out narration and temporal
succession. At the core of this accord between the artist and the
philosopher it is worth quoting the words by the philosopher himself:
difference remains not the given itself but that by which the given is
given (Deleuze 1994: 226). Difference is never the product more than
it is the producer. We must affirm the creative power of difference,
for it makes itself, as in the expression make the difference (28).
The challenge in painting time is that of registering the difference in
its making the individuation of a spatiotemporal opposition in its
source.
As to the destructive power of becoming, or the negative power of
difference, the Deleuzian must understand that they are moments of
a creative difference and repetition. End is just a face of becoming;
its correlate death is only its negative representation. There is no
end. (Aesthetic) experiences are products of a mechanism of difference
and repetition. In Deleuzes writings there is a connection between
becoming and Difference, different and negation. In fact, becoming
and Difference represent the positive head of a negative facial expression,
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Czannes, it is safe to say that they were both struggling for the same
task: to paint the real, to paint the world, to avoid second-hand images,
photography and clichs. In a word, their desire was to re-create reality.
As with Heraclitus, the real constitution of things is thought of as
hidden. The artist, who wants to capture a fact in its innocence, or in
the moment of its pure presence, has to select its representations, clean
its surface and reach what is beyond visibility. Painting is about creating
forces, not about imitating skills.
Deleuzes focus on forces rather than on the represented images
shifts the idea of art as imitation to that of art as creativity. Deleuze,
by the notion of force, might be denoting a face of becoming, and
contrasting the artists creativity with the subjects static dependence
from an object-model. Creativity, however, must not be interpreted as
an inversion of such a dependence relation; in fact, Deleuze would not
simply expect Bacon to populate the world by generating unknown
images. Creativity is rather a complex process where the artist bestows
on his creature the spirit of an independent struggler for survival, not
without gaining for himself a renovated organ of sensation. For Deleuze,
the aesthetic experience is always a double creation of a Figure and of
a viewer that is, a mutually dependent process of sensation.2 Firstly,
sensation coagulates on the side of the canvas; that is, a painter moulds
a new Figure. Secondly, sensation coagulates on the side of the viewer;
that is a spectator is educated to see (I learn from Bacon to appreciate
the untold effort required to open a door). An artistic experience is a
complex moment when a bloc of sensation produces the independence of
the work from the subject, and measures their distance. This is creation
proper; that is, to render durable a moment of the world, or to make it
exist in its own right (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 172).
Bacon, as Czanne, was aware he had the mission to germinate, to
implant on canvas the seed of the unseen perception; but Bacon also
knew that he was not God. He could not create ex nihilo, for to create
is always situated in a possible creation (Deleuze [2003] 2004: ch. 11).
However creative the act of painting appears, the artist is limited to what
is already on the blank canvas. The artist starts with decomposition, deorganisation (some say reduction). He compresses what is under his sight
until it explodes. Only then will a new creation be possible: the artist
moves reality or deforms it (making any object pulsate: compressing a
head, letting a face come under explosive forces see Deleuze [2003]
2004: ch. 8; Sylvester 2008: 818). In Bacons portraits, he painted
heads, not faces. Why heads? Because the head is the de-humanised
human face. The head reminds one of a known person, but it is violently
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manipulated under the hands of the artist. (Bacons interest in that which
is impersonal or purely de-subjectified recurs in Interviews; see Sylvester
2008: 40, 51, 194ff.) The body is also mere body, just matter under
the pulsation of cosmic forces, the same that moves dust and planets
in the universe. Perhaps this is even the same that actually makes the
universe itself expand. The artist applies this merciless rhythm on heads
and on other human bodies. Up and down, inhalation and exhalation,
compression and expansion, the painter paints the forces that strike and
inhabit the body. Bacon lets invisible forces strike the head from very
different angles (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 58).
The movement that distorts Bacons Figures is not the spatiotemporal
movement that drags creatures around (from place to place) until they
meet their end. Rather, it is the same sacred source that creates them.3
What I want to do says Bacon is to distort the thing far beyond
the appearance, but in the distortion to bring back to a recording of
the appearance (Sylvester 2008: 40). Pope Innocent X, for example,
is moving in place when he makes his appearance first in the work
by Velzquez (1650) and then in the work of Bacon (1953). Change
is of two types: a change in place and a change of place. The latter is
supported by the framework of narration: firstly there is the here, and
then comes the elsewhere. The former type of change, in contrast, is
not as clear and straightforward: it is the exploration a subject makes
of its own space, of the space where the subject takes place. Change is
essentially movement, but of two types: a change in place is analogous
to a movement of creation, while a change of place is analogous to a
movement of narration. In his book on Bacon, Deleuze develops an
ontology of artistic creation, that is, a study of movement that allows
a fact to occur. The first and only rule of this ontology is to exorcise
the figurative or illustrational, of which narration is the correlate. What
Deleuze was struck by in Bacons work, and what he attempted to
provide a philosophical account for, was the way Bacon was able to
preserve the likeness between what he painted and the living object, all
the while allowing the artistic product to move in place. Bacon attempts
to preserve the likeness between the thing painted and the living thing,
but not without allowing the artistic product itself to move in place. In
so doing, Deleuze absorbs into his philosophy Bacons task of reporting
or recording sensation (Sylvester 2008: 60). Sensation is precisely what
survives change.
Painting, in Deleuzes Francis Bacon, ministers the liberation of what
is beneath representation (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 49, 52) it captures a
presence that survives change. Though faithful to a vision of flux, what
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Deleuze is looking for is that element in flux which does not change, die
or vanish. He looks into the way Bacon speaks about and understands
his own work, and works out the philosophical implications of an
artistic movement that tries to trap a living fact alive. The resulting
Logic of Sensation constitutes the philosophers attempt to extrapolate
from the work of Bacon the kind of movement that allows sensation to
endure, that is, to persist in its rhythm.
What Deleuze wants to rule out is the type of movement that would
never allow a fact to endure (namely, the movement of narration, the
chain of which merely displaces sensation rather than allowing it to
accumulate around the image). Bacon must exorcise figuration. The
sole movement that inhabits his Figures must not be a movement that
takes place in time; instead, time collapses on the original moment
of the Figures appearance. It is the Figures movement of creation.
Figures are not to tend to any model outside of time or to a narrative
completion in time. They have to endure in the portion of time that
allowed them to come to be and to reproduce that movement this
is why Deleuze insists on Bacons capacity of painting time as such.
They must stand up on their own, allowing a moment of the world
to exist by itself (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 164, 172). In much the
same way, Merleau-Ponty was sensitive to Czannes wish to render
the type of movement that sustains itself, is preserved in the object,
and does not pass away. This is the issue of a creating original-time.
Merleau-Ponty writes about Czanne: an emerging order, of an object
in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes (MerleauPonty 1964a: 14). In Deleuzes words: the artist concentrates a bloc of
sensation from the whirlwind of time and makes this bloc imperishable,
or at least it tends toward this direction as much as possible.
Art must endure; the subject painted on the canvas must be capable to
stay where he is, to do what he is doing, to scream his scream, forever.4
The study of appearances (as it is understood by Merleau-Ponty)
allows Deleuze to conceive of becoming as subject to the laws of
aesthetics. Aesthetics, in this sense, means simply that I see, or that
which allows me to see. In Deleuzes hands, the philosophical problem
of sensuous determination may point at a series of artistic solutions.
Among these Deleuze selects Bacons paintings and interviews. It is here,
with the converging of becoming and Bacons Figures, that Deleuzes
notion of difference is illuminated by Bacons notion of sensation (that
which hits upon ones nervous system). The action of a force on a body
creates sensation: here an organ might temporarily take place. An eye
sees and allows the body to see; it moves. From a sensation localised
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on the head it transits to other parts of the body. Other parts of the body
become visible:
Painting gives us eyes all over: in the ear, in the stomach, in the lungs [. . . ]
This is the double definition of painting: subjectively, it invests the eye, which
ceases to be organic in order to become a polyvalent and transitory organ;
objectively, it brings before us the reality of a body, of lines and colors freed
from organic representation. And each is produced by the other: the pure
presence of the body becomes visible at the same time that the eye becomes
the destined organ of this presence. (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 52)
Logic is the realm of the ordered surfaces of meaning, and the sight
that seizes upon such layers captures something of the reality that logic
organises. It is as if the terms of some logic had the same creative power
upon reality that the divine Verbum has on the shaping of being. Deleuze
discovers some of those terms, and these are in line with Heraclituss
obscure but divinised reality.
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Deleuze describes the artistic experience of creation as follows. In the
first place the artist has to face the chaos by means of introducing on his
canvas a-pictorial marks. This destroys the emerging figuration. It is as if
the dominion of our daily sight is destabilised by measured doses of the
unseen it is in this pre-pictorial moment that the invisible chaotic reality
of flux shows its face. However, the experience of this latent catastrophe
can be dealt with in very different ways; every great painter has to find
his way in it. Where painters differ is in their manner of embracing this
non figurative chaos, and in their evaluation of the pictorial order to
come, and the relation of this order with this chaos (Deleuze [2003]
2004: 103). Deleuze designates the different manners with a technical
term: the notion of diagram. Van Goghs diagram, for example, is the
set of straight and curved hatch marks that raise and lower the ground,
twist the trees, make the sky palpitate (102). A diagram is called an
operative set, and it is a possibility of fact not the fact itself (110).
Firstly, the question above receives a negative answer. Deleuze does
not see the artistic product as an arresting of the flux which characterises
any appearance whatsoever; instead, Deleuze is addressing art in general,
though of course he focuses on the work of Bacon in particular. In
the work of different artists, the flux finds virtually compossible resting
points (Bacon and Kandinsky, Kandinsky and Pollock, and so on). In this
sense it is not only Bacons Figures that are an answer to the Heraclitean
flux; it is also Deleuzes Figure-ness (the fact established by a bloc of
sensation).
There is still another reason for giving a negative answer to the
question above. If the work of the artist tries, at any price, to limit
the chaos which precedes the becoming of the object, it does not do
so by collapsing movement onto rest or difference onto the model. The
fact that a bloc of sensation is able to endure does not mean that a
bloc of sensation receives a fixed shape; to endure means not to be
so to be lips, to be teeth, to be tongue. What enduring requires
at the very least is to be able to re-create the movement that first
allowed the appearance of a mouth. The Figure traps movement as a
fact the fact that a mouth moves. A mouth becomes a scream a mouth
screams. And a scream becomes an ear the ear that listens to the scream.
Deleuze speaks of a metamorphosis that does not dissolve the mouth
into a sound, and the sound into its listener: sensory becoming is the
action by which something or someone is ceaselessly becoming-other
(while continuing to be what they are), sunflower or Ahab (Deleuze
and Guattari 1994: 117). Thus, Deleuzes idea is not that the artistic
product is a visible portion of an invisible chain in metamorphosis.
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Art does not need an object as we commonly see it (like what happens
with photography), because art can deal with its invisible becoming
and produce the schema of a new possible appearance of it. With the
notion of diagram, Deleuze reformulates the concept of flux in terms
of what allows invisible movements to make an object appear. The
diagram, being an operative set, balances itself between probability and
obscurity; it gives access to new areas of sensation. It is true that art
needs contours (just as appearance needs something to be seen), thus
it necessarily stops movement, as Deleuze acknowledges and above
all, a new figuration, that of the Figure, should emerge from the diagram
and make the sensation clear and precise (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 110).
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Most of the chapters from 111 in Francis Bacon reproduce the
schema of the Heraclitean flux-movement whilst offering the aesthetical
answer Bacon put forward a fact, or stable reality. Thus, we now
read the work by Deleuze aiming at grasping both the terms of the
metamorphoses, and a stable fact that sustains those opposites. That is,
those terms of a logic of sensation that, underneath the range of visibility
of the naked eye, grants our worldly sensation.
Preliminary Movement: The Painter Jumps into the Canvas and the
Canvas Offers Him a Chance to Escape Chapter 11
A canvas is never blank, not even before the artist paints on it. It is
an imposition: our sight is dominated by historical clichs, and the less
visible they are, the more powerful they are. Bacons cleaning woman
would not see these clichs; she would think that the canvas was empty.
On the contrary, Bacon knows in advance that that which is in his
head or around him in his studio represents the most probable, that
is, the image which is already given on the canvas. The blank canvas
is not a mirror, but it contains virtually with high probability what
is usually seen around. There is already a flowing of appearances that
reaches the canvas from the head of the painter, or from his room. In
addition, a response of the canvas is already there, and this is a less
probable mirroring of that which is around a distortion. An artist sees
those invisible movements that support both probable figuration and its
distortion. He apprehends Bacon says the presence of pre-pictorial
connections between the movements of his brushes and the emergence of
an actual object. A Figure emerges: the Heraclitean flux (the movement
that takes the man and the canvas closer) has found the first measure of
its own motion. Between figuration and chaos an artist makes an object
again, a pictorial Figure.
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the intensity of the sensation (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 45). The exchange
occurring between the Figure and the Figures perceiver is the becoming
real of the sensation itself, its bypassing of the perceivers subjectivity
and its formation as a bloc of sensation. This is the Figure then: defined
by the income of directed forces while emanating filtered sensations. This
is its equilibrium, this is the flux of which the Figure is the filter; this is the
eternal pulsation of opposites and the emergence of the acrobat. Bacon
has obtained the subject of what Merleau-Ponty calls the continual
rebirth of existence: the Figure.
In the remaining part of the book that we will focus on (chapters
111, excluding those already analysed, namely 6, 8 and 11), Deleuze
explores the logic of the Figures movements; that is, its logic of
sensation. From now on the terms of these movements will be eminently
Baconian: animal, hysteria, and so on. These terms introduce
levels of complexity of the Figures movement within Bacons work
alone, therefore they cannot really be used to refer to the work of
any other artist. The Logic of Sensation is an aesthetical answer
to the problem of the Heraclitean flux: everything is in motion,
yet some reality makes its way towards being, passing from the
realm of invisible forces towards the surface of a canvas. What
follows is precisely the exemplification of this rule of motion in
Deleuzes Logic of Sensation. Deleuzes work is the analysis of
the levels of complexity through which the artistic object passes.
Every chapter corresponds to a certain level of complexity. In order
for the birth of the artistic object to take place this is where Deleuze
responds to the problem of the Heraclitean chaos we must read through
Deleuzes presentation in reverse order. The reason for this is that
Deleuzes presentation proceeds by unfolding the logic of sensation,
while another task is pursued: the concentration of all movements onto
one single coagulation of reality.
From the Fall to the Figure Chapter 10, Considering the Case
of a Triptych
A sensation, being defined by different levels of intensity, circulates
throughout the painting (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 76). This is already
Deleuze says a third level of complexity, with the third level
corresponding to a movement that, step by step, will eventually lead to
an artistic answer a real permanence on the canvas. Different objects
stand for active and passive rhythms (no doubt activity and passivity
represent relational notions, as the definition of rhythm suggests), and
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materiality is subjected to) is the body of those forces that escape the
organised-body and can do without it. The real body is the body without
organs, that is, a hysteric body that makes present. Within any body
there are the intensities of a sensation, which, when encountered, create
an organ: that is our body, or what one easily claims to be a fixed, or
given, state. The organ is nothing but a hysteric adjustment (Deleuze
[2003] 2004: 47) for a provisional liberation of tension. In that point,
at that time, painting discovers the pure presence of which it is made:
movement, the hysterical movement of a body. Hysteria is the new
figure, the new aesthetic discovery that derives from the vibration of
a body without organs and the organism through which to escape.
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Every chapter points to a certain level of the Heraclitean flux, and names
two opposite constituents; chapter 7, for instance, names the body as
given, and the hysteric body without organs. Every chapter represents
a level of complexity of the flow. However, there is never mere flow,
but Figure-ness too: the perceiver of the flow, its measure and its filter.
After all, the human body, is in a sense a filter (Sylvester 2008: 199).
For instance, in chapter 4, the flow is represented by the coupling of
Bacons human and animal body. They become, restlessly turning into
their opposite, man into dog, dog into man. Yet the canvas grasps
hold of these forces of chaos, which, without this grasping hold, would
lead to a vanishing of humanity and animality in their meaningless
narration. In this way, Bacon paints the Figure-spirit. This is precisely
what both emerges from and resists the flux. Heraclitus is challenged
by the presence of attendants: they experience the flux and measure the
sensation it emanates, upon their body. The spirit is not the end. The
flow leads back towards its opposite. The Figure-spirit is then the subject
of a renewed motion, more superficial than the others: athleticism. At the
same time the Figure wants to pass to a vanishing point to the contour in
order to dissipate into the material structure (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 17);
and the material structure curls around the contour in order to imprison
the Figure (14). Eventually, the pulsation between the Figure and the
material structure allows the last shape of the Baconian universe to
emerge: the matter of fact. This is precisely the event occurring between
the Figure and the material structure, via the round contour. The fact, or
the matter of fact, rules out figuration because its movement is capable
of being without distance and duration. The fact is the bloc of sensation.
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game of an incessant movement from the invisible to the visible and
again into the invisible and not from nothing and into nothing. The
aesthetical creation does not proceed ex nihilo (like Gods creation). It
requires an unformed material. Indeed, art co-creates the real and cocreation is a form of re-creation.8 In chaos there is matter (the meat
that Bacon has to shape); while in the void there is nothing, not even
the invisible. The chaos that the artist starts from is unintelligible,
mysterious, yet it can be grasped in a schema: the becoming opposite
of each opposite. The Obscure confronted the problem of becoming:
everything is just what it is as long as it becomes its opposite. He called
this river and flux. Thus, flux is not simply pure chaos, for pure
chaos is beyond representation how can the pure metamorphosis be
painted, or described? Heraclitus gave the schema of chaos, the river,
and described it as the hidden flowing of every piece of meat into its
opposite.
What does not emerge in Ancient Greece, however, is an account
of how something becomes something, for Heraclitus seems to have
stopped before this problem. For him, indeed, things simply become. In
Heraclituss notion of becoming we also find the problem of endangering
its nature, that is, providing a proof that a multitude is not simply
one as in the example of the wise man, who fails to distinguish the
day and the night, for they are one (Krik [1954] 2010: 155). But how,
then, does something become that something? The original intuition
of an aesthetics that creates, like Deleuzes, is precisely this: unity is
multiplicity (Deleuze [1983] 2002: 24), the opposites never melt into
one. A man becomes an animal, but not even the deepest sorrow can fuse
together man and dog. We can still sense the difference. To sense is to
affirm a difference. For difference, rather than being the static opposition
of a double identity (subject and object) is the dynamic instance at the
origin of individuation (the self individualises and the indeterminate
assumes contours). The affirmation of a difference is the superficial effect
of a spirits becoming something.
It is here that Deleuze intervenes. His idea is that art has something to
say to chaos. Deleuze shares with Heraclitus the view that the cosmos is
a compound of terrific invisible forces (chaos). However, the case is not
true that chaos is pure darkness, because darkness, like void, allows no
flesh: something rises towards the surface and becomes visible. Thus, if
there is chaos, there is flesh, hence there is something; and whatever it
is (dust, apples or heads), it is able to endure in the life of the universe.
Deleuze is still in agreement with Heraclitus when he claims that what
endures is unseen by most. The colour changes, the object changes, the
67
apple changes . . . but art has something to say to the river of becoming
because there are apples that render themselves independent from the
flow of becoming-something-else. They exit the circle of the model,
stand up on their own, and become themselves the forces that allow
any material to express its sense (and the sensation turns colouring see
Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 167). There are things which move faster
than the movements of the cosmos, and these things are artistic products,
blocs of sensations. The Verbum creates reality, but does not refer to
anything; it just makes things come into being by naming them. Thus,
it does not express any opinion, contrary to what most think. Ordinary
language, perhaps, expresses opinion, but not the Verbum. Art co-creates
reality; it compels its object to run faster than any possible referent,
and to germinate in time even without a perceiver. All art needs is a
support or material; aside from that it is autonomous or sufficient it is
a sacred source (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 172). Apples and smiles
are preserved untouched, and so are organs and mouths. These are terms
of an aesthetic language that, without giving opinions, re-makes the real.
(Not only different affirmations, but also affirmations of differences.)
Notes
1. I refer to Bacons Study after Velzquezs Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953.
Every molecular region of the Figures model (by Velzquez) is faithfully remade, just with the exception of the irrational and hysteric presences of his
body which are liberated (Sylvester 2008: 26).
2. To be at once at various levels to be force and to be effect, like the motive power
that takes the form of the displaced foot on the path is to be the artistic Figure.
Aesthetics, for Deleuze, can let this possibility become real; that is, art can create
a Figure. The artist and the spectator belong to the movement of creation: they
are one of the aspects of becoming. The other aspect of becoming is the work of
art. If, on the one hand, there are the creator-artist and the creature-work, on
the other hand, there is the one who sees and that which is seen. In the aesthetic
experience sensation depends on creation. But here, where the creativity of the
artist shapes a bloc of sensation, a turn occurs. The dominion of the objective
images of the artists world gains life, the Figure senses. We have the impression
that it is the work of art that watches the spectator, as in the case of the forest
and Paul Klee (Merleau-Ponty 1964b: 167). Becoming undergoes an inversion
of dependence of viewer and viewed. Creation occurs not more on the canvas
than on the organs of the spectator. Sensation creates (the artist paints what he
sees) because creatures sense (the Figure is like the organ of sight through which
the spectator sees a new world). To be at various levels means to be already
inside the painting, almost be the Figure. It means to be not more sensation or
creation, than it means to be their becoming.
3. The words by Bacon are: an illustrational form tells you through the intelligence
immediately what the form is about, whereas a non-illustrational form works
first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact. Now why this
should be, we dont know. This may have to do with how facts themselves
68 Filippo Carraro
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
are ambiguous, how appearances are ambiguous, and therefore this way of
recording form is nearer to the fact by its ambiguity of recording (Sylvester
2008: 567).
Understanding what the artistic work is about is to take into account its power
as an artistic product: rendering visible (according to Klees remark) is more
than merely rendering the visible. And this, far from simply being the artists
concern, also has philosophical implications. Two different kinds of notions
of visibility are contrasted at present: Deleuzes and Merleau-Pontys. While
the latter believes that visibility concerns a question of vision (appearances),
Deleuze transforms visibility into an ontological issue. For Deleuze, the artist
does not only contribute to the education of our natural vision (see MerleauPonty 1964a: 14), but also presides over the coming into being of the thing as
such. While Merleau-Ponty believes that art reinforces the capability of vision
that lies beyond what is seen, Deleuze puts forward the idea that art reproduces
the materialisation of the thing as such. Merleau-Ponty, in contrast, is concerned
with the exact study of appearances (Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 11).
Bacon ascribes to every organ a certain function, and actually he seems to make
the creation of an organ dependent on its function (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 48,
512). But one has to contrast between an organic function and an inorganic
one. An organic function, such as eating for survival, is ascribed to the mouth
by someone that takes the existence of a mouth (and the life of an organism)
for granted (a biologist). An inorganic function, in contrast, has nothing to do
with the vital activity of an organism. In Bacon, for instance, the mouth takes on
another function entirely: it becomes a hole through which an affect escapes.
With Bacon and Deleuze, then, one has the chance to question the organic
being of the mouth itself (rather than its biological use), both its emergence
into the realm of being and its disappearance. While in biology, for example, a
vital function serves as the teleological aim of an organs existence, in Bacons
painting, and in Deleuzes ontology, the function sustains the being of the
organ as such, giving it a consistency, or a shape, independent of an organic,
teleological aim. Deleuzes notion of function is found prior to the one of organic
function: it is the organ-isation of the (organic) function.
How can anything create and be created? An object painted on a canvas
is created: apples. However, Czannes apples are illuminated from within
(Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 12). Bacons heads are similar to Czannes apples: they
are solid bodies with a solidity that is self-creating; or again, they are sensations
that are thickened into meat. Thus apples and heads can create: they create
themselves. But not ex nihilo because then it is a matter of belief; they create
themselves for a viewer. Bacons attendants are signs of viewers. In front of an
attendant a head, or a Figure, or an apple, deploys its meat. An attendant is
a constant or point of reference in relation to which a variation is assessed
(Deleuze [2003] 2004: 13). In Bacon there is not only the function-Figure but
the function-Perceiver, too (but they can be united into one).
Deleuze [2003] 2004: 55.
Bacon seems to maintain that art does not make the real in the same way that a
god creates things. For when God produces something, his creature is nature.
Bacon, however, thinks that the product of men, and of the artist himself, is
artificial. Every production, in other words, is a form of re-production; thus even
art, while co-producing the real, is actually re-producing something real. This,
nevertheless, should not be confused with the fact that the artificial reproduction
of the real is a second-hand reproduction. On the contrary, he believes that
reality in art is something profoundly artificial and that it has to be recreated
(Sylvester 2008: 172).
69
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