by Daniel Smith
Properly speaking, there is no “theory of art” in Deleuze; “art” itself is a concept, but a purely nominal one, since there necessarily exist diverse problems whose solutions are found in heterogeneous arts. Hermann Broch wrote that “the sole raison d’être of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover,”30 and each of the arts, and each work of art, confronts its own particular problems, utilizing its own particular material and techniques, and attempting to capture intensive forces of very diverse types. To say that the aim of art is not to represent the world, but to present a sensation (which is itself a composition of forces, an intensive synthesis of differential relations), is to say that every sensation, every work of art is singular, and that the conditions of sensation are at the same time the conditions for the production of the new. For this reason, we will limit ourselves here to Deleuze's examination of the œuvre of a single artist in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation.
2. The “Figure.” One of the most important concepts in Deleuze's analysis of Bacon is what Deleuze calls, following Lyotard, the “figural,” which stands opposed to figuration or representation. The danger of figuration or representation in painting is that it is both illustrative and narrative. It relates the image to an object that it supposedly illustrates, thereby subordinating the eye to the model of recognition and losing the immediacy of the sensation; and it relates the image to the other images in the painting, thereby tempting us to discover a narrative link between the images. As Bacon says, “The story that is already being told between one figure and another begins to cancel out the possibilities of what can be done with the paint on its own.”31 Figuration plays a similar role in painting as does recognition in philosophy. Painting has neither a story to tell nor an object to represent; the painting itself is a sensation, an encountered sign. But this is precisely what constitutes the difficulty of the artistic task: “It is a very, very close and difficult thing,” says Bacon, “to know why some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tells the story in a long diatribe through the brain.”32 We return to Deleuze's formula: the sensation produced by the painting is something that can only be felt or sensed.
How does one attain a sensation in painting? Bacon's attempt to “paint the scream” is an exemplary case in point. His aim is not to paint the visible horrors of the world before which one screams, he says, but rather the intensive forces that produce the scream, that convulse the body so as to create a screaming mouth; the violence of a horrible spectacle must be renounced in order to attain the violence of the sensation. Expressed as a dilemma, one might say: either he paints the horror (the “sensational”) and does not paint the scream, because he represents a horrible spectacle and introduces a story; or he paints the scream directly (the “sensation”) and does not paint the visible horror, because the scream is necessarily the capture of an invisible force. If Bacon, like Cézanne, was so severe with his own works, and either destroyed or renounced many of his paintings, including many of his screams, it was because they failed to attain the sensation, and fell back into the clichés of figuration and narration. Deleuze poses the problem in this way: “If force [intensity] is the condition of sensation, it is none the less not the force which is sensed, since the sensation ‘gives’ something completely different from the forces that condition it.” So that the essential question of the artist becomes: “How will the sensation be able to turn in upon itself, extend or contract itself sufficiently, in order to capture, in what is given to us, forces that are not given, in order to make us sense these insensible forces, and elevate itself to its own conditions?” (FB 48). This, then, is the task faced by the artist: How can the material used by the artist (paint, words, stone) attain this level of forces? How can it become capable of “bearing” the sensation?
Deleuze suggests that there are two general routes through which modern painting escaped the clichés of figuration and attempted to attain the sensation directly: either by moving towards abstraction, or else by moving towards the figural. The first movement, towards abstraction, developed in several directions, but was perhaps marked by two extremes. At one pole, an abstract art like that of Mondrian or Kandinsky, though it rejected classical figuration, still retained an arsenal of abstract forms that tried to refine sensation, to dematerialize it, to reduce it to a purely optical code. It tended towards a plane of architectonic composition in which the painting became a kind of spiritual being, a radiant material that was primarily thought rather than felt, and called the spectator to a kind of “intellectual asceticism.” At the other pole, abstract expressionism, like that of Jackson Pollock, went beyond representation not by painting abstract forms, but by dissolving all forms in a fluid and chaotic texture of lines and colors. It attempted to give matter its maximal extension, reversing its subordination to the eye, exhibiting forces by a purely manual line that no longer outlined or delimited anything, but was spread out over the entire surface.
Now in breaking with representation, both these poles of abstraction also broke with the ancient hylomorphic model, which conceived of the artistic task as the imposition of form upon matter; the abstractionists wanted to free up the form in an optical code, while the expressionists wanted to free up matter in a manual chaos. What the hylomorphic schema ignores in defining form and matter as two separate terms, as Gilbert Simondon showed, is the process of “continuous modulation” at work behind them.33 Matter is never a simple or homogenous substance capable of receiving forms, but is made up of intensive and energetic traits that not only make that operation possible but continuously alter it (clay is more or less porous, wood is more or less resistant); and forms are never fixed molds, but are determined by the singularities of the material that impose implicit processes of deformation and transformation (iron melts at high temperatures; marble and wood split along their veins and fibers). This is the importance of Deleuze's notion of intensity: beyond prepared matter lies an energetic materiality in continuous variation, and beyond fixed forms lie qualitative processes of deformation and transformation in continuous development. What becomes essential in modern art, in other words, is no longer the matter–form relation, but the material–force relation. The artist takes a given energetic material composed of intensive traits and singularities, and synthesizes its disparate elements in such a way that it can harness or capture these intensities, what Paul Klee called “the forces of the cosmos.”
This task is not without ambiguity, technical and otherwise. The synthesis of the disparate elements of a material requires a certain degree of consistency, without which it would be impossible to distinguish the elements that constitute the sensation. Klee, for example, said that in order to produce a complex sensation, in order to harness the forces of the cosmos and render them visible, one must proceed with a sober gesture that simplifies the material, selects it, limits it. All one needs is a pure and simple line, an inflexion, and he was infuriated when people complained about the “childishness” of his drawings.34 If one multiplies the lines, if one elaborates too rich and complex a material, the claim is that one is opening oneself up to all events, to all irruptions of force, but in fact one can merely wind up producing nothing but a scribble that effaces all lines, a “sloppiness” that in fact effaces the sensation.
It was in order to avoid this danger, as well as the danger of formalism, that Bacon followed a second path, which finds its precursor in Cézanne, and for which Lyotard coined the term “figural.” Whereas “figuration” refers to a form that is related to an object it is supposed to represent (recognition), the figure is the form that is connected to a sensation, and that conveys the violence of this sensation directly to the nervous system (the sign). In Bacon's paintings, it is the human body that plays this role of the Figure; it functions as the material support or framework that sustains a precise sensation. Bacon frequently begins by isolating the human body inside a contour, by putting it inside a circle, a cube, a parallelepiped; balancing it on a rail; placin
g it on an armchair or bed. The isolated Figure is then subjected to a series of deformations through a series of manual techniques: making random marks, throwing the paint at the canvas, scrubbing or brushing the painting. These techniques have a double effect: on the one hand, they undo the organic and extensive unity of the body, and instead reveal what Deleuze calls its intensive and non-organic reality; on the other hand, these marks also undo the optical organization of the painting itself, since this force is rendered in a precise sensation that does violence to the eye. The marks reveal the precise point of application of the intensive force contorting the body, a cramp or a spasm twisting the figure from within, making the body shudder or vibrate violently. Bacon's primary subject matter is the body deformed by a plurality of forces: the violent force of a hiccup, a scream, the need to vomit or defecate, of copulation, the flattening force of sleep. Despite those who find Bacon's paintings horrific, Bacon's figures are not tortured bodies, but ordinary bodies in ordinary situations of discomfort just as a person forced to sit for hours would inevitably assume contorted postures.
In Bacon, the Figure is the support for a precise sensation; without this support, the sensation would remain diffuse and ephemeral, lacking clarity and duration. In many ways, Bacon's criticisms of expressionism had already been anticipated in Cézanne's criticisms of impressionism. Sensation is not in the “free” or disincarnate play of light and color; it is in the body, and not in the air, whether this body is the human body (Bacon) or the body of an apple (Cézanne). “Sensation is what is being painted,” writes Deleuze, “what is painted on the canvas is the body, not in so far as it is represented as an object, but in so far as it is experienced as sustaining this sensation” (FB 32). This, then, is the via media followed by Bacon: without a material framework, the sensation remains chaotic, but on its own the framework remains abstract.
3. The Asymmetrical Synthesis of the Sensible. How does the Figure attain the “sensation” in Bacon's painting? We have seen that every sensation is intensive, that it implicates within itself a difference in quantity between unequal forces; it is thus necessarily synthetic, effecting a passive and asymmetrical synthesis between forces. “Every sensation is already an ‘accumulated’ or ‘coagulated’ sensation” (FB 33). A sensation cannot capture the “forces of the cosmos,” in other words, unless the artist is capable of effecting such syntheses in the material. If we left the nature of these syntheses unexplored until now, it is because it is in the work of art that they are most clearly revealed. On this score, Deleuze has analyzed three fundamental types of asymmetrical syntheses of the forces that Bacon effects in his work.35
“Vibration,” or the Connective Synthesis: the construction of a single series. The first type of synthesis is vibration, which characterizes a simple sensation. Even this simple type of sensation, however, is already composite, since it is defined by a difference in intensity that rises or falls, increases or decreases, an invisible pulsation that is more nervous than cerebral. Like every great painter, Bacon will attain this vibratory state primarily through a complex use of color. The Impressionists had already discovered the role of complementary colors in painting; if one is painting grass, there must not only be a green on the canvas, but also the complementary red, which will make the tone vibrate, and achieve a sunlit sensation that is produced by the “flash” between these two complementary colors. Cézanne, after having reproached Impressionists for submerging the object and depicting the atmosphere, refused to separate the tones according to the visual spectrum (the Newtonian conception of color) and instead mixed his complementary colors in critical proportions (in a manner closer to Goethe's theory of color than Newton's), thereby attempting to restore to the object a “Figure” through a progressive modulation of chromatic nuances.36 Bacon will do much the same when he constitutes the flesh of his Figures through a flow of polychromatic colors, which are frequently dominated by blue and red, the colors of meat. “Each broken tone indicates the immediate exercise of a force upon the corresponding zone of the body or the head, it immediately renders a force visible” (FB 121). When Deleuze writes, in the preface to Francis Bacon, that the summit of the logic of sensation lies in the “coloring sensation,” it is because, for the painter, everything is “rendered” through pure relations of color, color is discovered as the differential relation upon which everything else depends. Even a simple sensation is a relation between colors, a vibration. Jean-Luc Godard is one of the great colorists of the cinema, and his statement about Weekend—“It's not blood, it's red”—constitutes one of the great formulas of colorism.37
“Resonance,” or the Conjunctive Synthesis: the convergence of (at least) two series. The second type of synthesis, more complex, is that of resonance. In this case, two simple Figures or sensations, rather than simply being isolated and deformed, confront each other, like two wrestlers, in a “hand-to-hand combat,” and are thereby made to resonate. Bacon, for instance, frequently puts two bodies in a single painting, bodies that are copulating or sleeping entangled, in such a way that the bodies themselves are rendered indiscernible and made to resonate together in a single “matter of fact,” in order to make something appear that is irreducible to the two: this sensation, this Figure. Deleuze argues that the great example of resonance in literature can be found in Proust's involuntary memory, in which two sensations (for instance, the present flavor of the madeleine and the past memory of Combray) are coupled together in order to make a pure Figure appear that internalizes the difference between the two sensations: Combray-in-itself. What is important in resonance is that (at least) two sensations are coupled together, and from them is extracted an ineffable “essence” (Proust) or “figure” (Bacon) that is irreducible to either of them: something new is produced.38
“Forced Movement,” or the Disjunctive Synthesis: the affirmation of divergent series. Finally, there is the most complicated of these syntheses, what Deleuze calls a forced movement. This is no longer a coupling of sensations, but on the contrary their distention or deviation. In Bacon, this appears most clearly in the triptychs, in which the Figures, rather than being isolated or coupled, are set apart from each other in separate panels. How can the separated Figures of the triptychs be said to present a single “matter of fact”? It is because in them the separated Figures achieve such an extraordinary amplitude between them that the limits of sensation are broken; sensation is no longer dependent upon a Figure per se, but rather the intensive rhythm of force itself becomes the Figure of the triptychs. The Figures loosen their grip on each other, and are no longer united by anything but the distance that separates them, and the light, the air, or the void which inserts itself between them like a wedge. It is because of this amplitude that Deleuze assigns a privileged place to the triptychs in Bacon's work.39
Vibration, resonance, and forced movement are the concepts Deleuze creates to describe the three types of syntheses that Bacon utilizes to “paint the sensation.” In general, these constitute the intensive conditions of sensation, the three “varieties” of compositions of sensation, the three modalities of a “being of sensation.” To be sure, each of these syntheses coexists in Bacon's paintings, which are concrete assemblages of differences, mixed states. In the individual paintings, for example, the large fields of uniform color already effect a distancing function similar to that of the triptychs (disjunction), but are likewise themselves composed of subtle variations of intensity or saturation (connection); and vibrations in turn are already effects of resonance, since they couple together diverse levels of sensation (conjunction).40 The important point is that the artist utilizes these intensive syntheses in order to produce “a pure being of sensation”; the work of art is a functional “machine” that produces effects of vibration, resonance, and forced movement. The question that must therefore be posed to a work of art is not “What does it mean?” (interpretation) but rather “How does it work?” (experimentation): “What are the connections, what are the disjunctions, the conjunction
s, what use is made of the syntheses?” (AO 109).
The sensation itself, however, must not be confused with the material in which these syntheses are affected. Art is composition, but the technical composition of the material is not the same as the aesthetic composition of the sensation. It is true that in fact (quid facti?) the sensation lasts no longer than its support or materials (stone, canvas, chemical color, etc.). But in principle at least (quid juris?), the sensation is of a different order than the material, and exists in itself for as long as the material lasts. Oil painting, Deleuze suggests, provides a useful example of this distinction, since it can be approached in two manners. In a first case, the sensation is realized in the material and projected on to it; an outline is sketched on a white background, and color, light and shade are added afterwards. In a second case, which modern art has increasingly tended to adopt, it is the material that passes into sensation; rather than beginning with a sketch, the painter gradually “thickens” the background, adding color alongside color, piling up or folding the material in such a way that the architecture of the sensation emerges from the medium itself, and the material becomes indiscernible from the sensation. In either case, however, it is matter itself that becomes expressive, so that one can say of the sensation itself that it is metallic, crystalline, stony, coloring, and so on. The material constitutes the de facto condition of the sensation, and in so far as this condition is satisfied, even if only for a few seconds (as in Tinguely's self-destructing creations), it gives the compound of created sensations the power to exist and to be preserved in and of itself: a “monument.”41
