Essays on Deleuze

by Daniel Smith

  Deleuze insisted that he wrote on the arts, not as a critic, but as a philosopher, and that his works on the various arts must therefore be read as works of “philosophy, nothing but philosophy, in the traditional sense of the word.”4 In What is Philosophy? (1991), Deleuze famously defines philosophy as an activity that consists in the creation of concepts. “One can very easily think without concepts, but as soon as there is a concept, there is truly philosophy” (N 32). Art itself is an equally creative activity, of course, but it is an activity whose object is to create sensible aggregates rather than concepts. As a philosopher, then, Deleuze's aim in his analyses of the arts is to create the concepts that correspond to these sensible aggregates. In The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze will invent an entire series of philosophical concepts that relate to particular aspects of Bacon's paintings, but which also find a place in what Deleuze will call “a general logic of sensation” (FLB 3). The text is organized in quasi-musical fashion, divided into seventeen sequences that develop concepts as if they were melodic lines, which in turn enter into increasingly complex contrapuntal relations that, taken together, form a kind of conceptual composition that parallels Bacon's sensible compositions. Readers who approach the book expecting a work of art criticism will be disappointed. There is little discussion of the socio-cultural milieu in which Bacon lived and worked; nor of his artistic influences or contemporaries, such as Lucian Freud or Frank Auerbach; nor of his personal life (his homosexuality, his lovers and friends, his drinking and gambling, his nights at the Colony Room Club), which played such an evident role in Bacon's work and in his choice of subjects. Even the secondary sources are sparse. Apart from two short texts by the French writers Michel Leiris and Marc Le Bot, the only secondary book Deleuze refers to is John Russell's 1971 now-classic study, Francis Bacon.5 The links Deleuze establishes with Bacon's work are, as often as not, with writers (Conrad, Proust, Beckett, Kafka, Burroughs, Artaud) and musicians (Messiaen, Schumann, Berg) that figure prominently in Deleuze's other writings, but whom Bacon may or may not have been influenced by or even read / listened to. In this sense, The Logic of Sensation is a highly personal book, though it is hardly written in a personal style.

  Deleuze wrote his study of Bacon at the suggestion of Harry Jancovici, the editor of the series in which the book first appeared, which was entitled La Vue le texte. The aim of the series was to explore the resonances between the visual arts and domains such as philosophy and literature, and it would come to include texts by the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and the writer Michel Butor.6 Deleuze never explains why he chose to write on Bacon in particular, and he scarcely mentioned Bacon in the seminars on painting he gave shortly after writing the book. Bacon, however, had a strong presence in Paris during the 1970s and 1980s. He maintained a studio near the Place des Vosges and was close friends with Michel Leiris, whose portrait he painted several times and who in turn wrote several important texts on Bacon.7 It was the Grand Palais exhibition of 1971 in Paris that had cemented Bacon's international reputation, and the exhibition at the Galerie Claude Bernard in 1977 further solidified his position.8 Deleuze undoubtedly encountered Bacon's work at some point at an exhibition in Paris—in a later interview, Deleuze says that he frequently went to art exhibitions and films on weekends, on the lookout for precisely this kind of “encounter.”9 The book itself attests to the profound resonances Deleuze found between his own work and Bacon's paintings.

  The relationship between the two men, however, was not personal. Deleuze and Bacon met only once, some time after the book was published. Deleuze had sent the original manuscript to Bacon, who was intrigued by the book and delighted with the attention. The two arranged to spend an evening together, and Deleuze arrived with what Bacon described as a little “court” of admirers. Michael Peppiatt, in his biography Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, reports that, “although there was a perceptible sympathy and admiration between the two men, no friendship evolved.”10 Deleuze later recollected some of his impressions in an interview:

  You can sense in him a power and violence, but also a very great charm. After he is seated for an hour or so, he contorts himself in every direction, as if he were himself a Bacon painting … When I met Bacon, he said that he dreamed of painting a wave, but dared not believe such a venture could be successful. It is a lesson of the painter, a great painter who says to himself, “If only I could manage to catch a little wave …” It's very Proustian; or Cézannian: “Ah! If only I could manage to paint a little apple!”11

  According to Peppiatt, the two never met again.

  Deleuze said that he wrote this book primarily with two things in front of him: reproductions of Bacon's paintings and the texts of David Sylvester's interviews with Bacon, which had been published in 1975 under the title The Brutality of Fact.12 To some degree, this approach reflects the tension that exists between percepts and concepts: how does one talk in one medium (concepts) about the practices of another (percepts)? The dictum that one should heed what artists do, not what they say, is no less true for Bacon than for other artists. “I have often tried to talk about painting,” he cautioned, “but writing or talking about it is only an approximation, as painting is its own language and is not translatable into words.”13 None the less, Bacon's interviews contain penetrating discussions of the practice of painting, and have been favorably compared with Delacroix's journals and da Vinci's notebooks. Deleuze himself insists that we do not listen closely enough to what painters have to say.

  The texts of painters operate much differently than their paintings … In general, when artists talk about what they do, they have extraordinary modesty, self-imposed rigor, and great strength. They are the first to suggest the nature of the concepts and affects that are disengaged in their work.14

  Deleuze thus uses the interviews, not as definitive statements on Bacon's part, but rather as the starting point for his own conceptual inventions. Deleuze once wrote: “We sometimes dream of a history of philosophy that would list only the new concepts created by a great philosopher—his most essential and creative contribution” (TRM 55). The Logic of Sensation is best approached in exactly the same manner: as a book of philosophical concepts. The concepts Deleuze develops are sometimes drawn from everyday language, sometimes from specific scientific and art historical traditions, sometimes from Bacon's interviews, sometimes from Deleuze's own philosophical vocabulary. But the concepts themselves enter into multiple resonances and interactions, such that it is possible to trace numerous trajectories through the “rhizome” of the book. The remarks that follow attempt to isolate three such conceptual trajectories in The Logic of Sensation, which respectively concern Deleuze's formal analyses of Bacon's paintings, the general “logic of sensation” that underlies them, and the techniques through which painters can be said to participate in such a logic of sensation (the “coloring sensation”).

  The first trajectory concerns the concepts that Deleuze utilizes in his formal analyses of Bacon's work, which, he says, move “from the simplest to the most complex” aspects of Bacon's paintings. The question Deleuze poses to an artwork is not “What does it mean?” but rather “How does it function?” Deleuze thus treats Bacon's work as a multiplicity (although he does not use this term in the book) and attempts to isolate and identify the components of that multiplicity. Deleuze frequently returns to the three simplest aspects of Bacon's paintings—the Figure, the surrounding fields of color, and the outline or contour that separates the two—which taken together form a “highly precise system” that serves to isolate the Figure in Bacon's paintings (Chapter 1). But a first level of complexity immediately intervenes: the fields of color tend to curl around the contour and envelop the Figure, but at the same time the Figure itself tends to strain toward the fields, passing through wash-basins, umbrellas, and mirrors, subjected to the forces that contort it, that deform or contract it in a kind of “derisory athleticism,” revealing the intensive “body without organs” beneath the extensive organic body (Cha
pter 3). In some cases, the Figure is dissipated entirely, leaving behind nothing but a sand dune or a jet of water—a pure Force that replaces the Figure (Chapter 5). A second level of complexity appears in the works in which Bacon paints coupled Figures that none the less resonate together in a single “matter of fact” (Chapter 9). A third level of complexity emerges in the triptychs, where this “matter of fact” includes not only the distances that separate the distinct panels but also the forced movement or rhythms that constitute the true Figure of the triptychs: the steady or “attendant” rhythm; an active, rising, or diastolic rhythm; and a passive, descending, or systolic rhythm (FB 60–70). Deleuze not only identifies these three fundamental rhythms found in Bacon's triptychs, but he also shows that even the simple paintings already function like triptychs, with their complex movements and combinatorial variability. A final level of complexity arises with regard to Bacon's handling of color (Chapter 10), and his construction of a properly “haptic” space, since it is primarily through the use of color (relations of tonality) that he brings about all these effects in his works (isolation, deformation, coupling, rhythm …). Deleuze's book is marked throughout by specific and detailed analyses of individual paintings, as well as assessments of their position within the movement of Bacon's œuvre as a whole.

  The fundamental concept in all these analyses, however, is that of the Figure. Both modern art and modern philosophy can be said to have converged on a similar problem: both renounced the domain of representation and instead took the conditions of representation as their object. Deleuze suggests that twentieth-century art remained far ahead of philosophy in this regard, and that philosophers still have much to learn from painters. But he also suggests that there are two general routes through which modern painting escaped the clichés of representation and attempted to attain a “sensation” directly: either by moving toward abstraction, or by moving toward what Lyotard termed the figural. An abstract art like that of Mondrian or Kandinsky, though it rejected classical figuration, in effect reduced sensation to a purely optical code that addressed itself primarily to the eye. By contrast, abstract expressionism, like that of Pollock, went beyond representation, not by painting abstract forms, but by dissolving all forms in a fluid and chaotic texture of manual lines and colors (Chapter 14). Bacon in effect followed a “middle path” between these two extremes, the path of the Figure, which finds its precursor in Cézanne. Whereas “figuration” refers to a form that is related to an object it is supposed to represent, the “Figure” is the form that is connected to a sensation, and that conveys the violence of this sensation directly to the nervous system. In Bacon's paintings, it is primarily the human body that plays this role of the Figure; it functions as the material support or framework that sustains a precise sensation. This is Bacon's solution to the problem he shares with Cézanne: how to extract the Figure from its figurative, narrative, and illustrational links? How to “paint the sensation” or “record the fact”?

  This brings us to the second trajectory of concepts, which concerns the nature of the “logic of sensation” that constitutes the object of Deleuze's analyses in this book. The notion of “sensation” one finds in Deleuze is taken initially from the phenomenological tradition. Erwin Straus, in his classic book The Primary World of the Senses (1935), had established a fundamental distinction between perception and sensation.15 Perception, he argued, is a secondary rational organization of a primary, non-rational dimension of sensation (or “sense experience,” le sentir). Earlier in the century, Marius von Senden had recorded the experiences of congenitally blind people who were given sight after the operation to remove cataracts was developed. Initially such patients were afflicted by a painful chaos of forms and colors, a gaudy confusion of visual sensations within which they could distinguish neither shapes nor space. They would acquire a perception of the world only after an often-painful process of learning and apprenticeship, during which they developed the schemata and “Gestalten” capable of providing this pre-reflective sense experience with the coordinates familiar to ordinary perception.16 Studies of infants have revealed in them a similar sensory world populated by pure intensities (of sound, light, hunger) in which the baby cannot yet distinguish between itself and its world.17 “In sensory experience,” writes Straus, “there unfolds both the becoming of the subject and the happenings of the world. I become only insofar as something happened, and something happens (for me) only insofar as I become … In sensing, both self and world unfold simultaneously for the sensing subject.”18

  This pre-rational world of sensation is not prior to the world of perception or representation, but strictly speaking is coextensive with it. It is precisely this world, the world of “lived experience,” that phenomenologists have attempted to describe. Straus, for instance, proposed a related distinction between what he called geography and landscape. The geographical world, the world recorded on maps, is perceptual and conceptual; it is an abstract system of coordinates with an unspecified perspective. A landscape, by contrast, is sensory; it is a perspectival world, enclosed by a horizon that moves as our body moves. In a landscape, we do not so much move in space as space moves with us. Similarly, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, following Kurt Goldstein, distinguished between “touching” and “pointing”: a patient who is able to scratch his nose at the point where a mosquito is biting him is unable, a moment later, to point to his nose with his finger. The former takes place within the “intentional” system of bodily space (sensation), whereas the latter requires an abstract coordination of points in external space (perception); in certain pathological cases the transition from the first to the second is blocked.19 It is often difficult to separate sensation from perception, landscape from geography, since conceptual perception is such an integral part of our everyday experience of the world.

  Yet for all his indebtedness to thinkers such as Straus, Merleau-Ponty, and Henri Maldiney, Deleuze is not a phenomenologist. Phenomenology is insufficient because it merely invokes the “lived body.” But the lived body, says Deleuze, is still a “paltry thing in comparison with a more profound and almost unlivable Power,” which is precisely the power of rhythm in its confrontation with chaos (FB 39). Sensation is itself constituted by the “vital power” of rhythm, and it is in rhythm that Deleuze locates the “logic of sensation” indicated in his subtitle, a logic that is neither cerebral nor rational. This linkage between sensation and rhythm can perhaps best be illustrated by means of a somewhat lengthy detour through Deleuze's reading of Kant's theory of perception, which forms a kind of complementary text to The Logic of Sensation.20

  In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argues that perception requires a synthesis of what appears in space and time. In the first version of the transcendental deduction, Kant identifies three operations that make up a synthesis: apprehension, reproduction, and recognition. Since everything is a multiplicity and has a multiplicity of parts, perception begins when I synthesize these parts successively in an act of apprehension. I must also reproduce or “contract” the preceding parts when the following ones occur if a synthesis is to take place. These two aspects of spatiotemporal synthesis—the apprehension and reproduction of parts—are activities of the productive imagination and no longer sensibility.21 But a third moment is required for a perceptual synthesis to be complete: this sensible complex of space and time must now be related to the form of an object (recognition). To be sure, one can imagine numerous sensations in which the diversity of space and time is not related to the object-form, such as hallucinations. It is rather perception as such that is constituted in such a manner that a sensible diversity is related to the form of an object. In other words, it is not so much that I perceive objects; it is rather my perception that presupposes the object-form as one of its conditions. Kant invented a famous formula for this object-form: the object = x. The object = x is a pure form of perception, just as space-time is the pure form of sensation. The object = x will receive a concrete determination (e.g., as a lion-objec
t) only when it is related to the synthesized parts of a spatiotemporal diversity (a long mane, a loud roar, a heavy step …), such that I can say, “So it's a lion!” But the multiplicity of sensations that appear to us in the manifold of experience would never be referred to an object if we did not have at our disposal the empty form of the object = x, since there is nothing within sense experience itself that accounts for the operation by which I go beyond sensible diversity toward something I call an object. Where does this form come from? The object in general, Kant tells us, is the correlate of the “I think” or the unity of consciousness; it is the expression of the cogito, its formal objectivation. “Therefore the real (synthetic) formula of the cogito is: I think myself, and in thinking myself, I think the object in general to which I relate a represented diversity” (KCP 15–16). The predicates that are attributed to the object = x are what Kant calls the categories or the pure a priori concepts of the understanding; and the subsumption of a sensible diversity under a concept is what Kant calls an act of judgment.22

  The Critique of Pure Reason thus presents us with an analysis of the edifice of perception: the apprehension of successive parts, the reproduction of preceding parts, recognition by means of the form of the object in general. Kant's analysis in effect moves from the form of space and time (the pure form of sensation) to a determined spatio-temporal form (apprehension and reproduction as syntheses of the imagination) to the form of the object = x (the pure form of perception). The philosophical adventure Deleuze explores in The Logic of Sensation begins at this point. While the post-Kantians such as Hegel took as their starting point Kant's theory of the “transcendental unity of apperception,” Deleuze in effect moves in the opposite direction, breaking with the form of recognition that grounds that unity. There are neither categories (in Kant's sense) nor mediation (in Hegel's sense) in Deleuze, and one of his most insistent themes is “to have done with judgment” (Artaud). In The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze pushes to its limit a trajectory inaugurated in the Critique of Judgment, in which Kant explored the role of the imagination freed from the legislation of the understanding. Four elements of his analyses are particularly relevant to the themes of The Logic of Sensation.