by Daniel Smith
1. Aesthetic comprehension. The first is the theme of “aesthetic comprehension” (measure). In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant tells us that the act of synthesis begins with the apprehension of successive parts. In the Critique of Judgment, however, he in effect starts over and asks a question that went unformulated in the first critique: What counts as a part? To determine what constitutes a part, the imagination must have at its disposal a constant, or at least common, unit of measure. To be sure, the understanding could intervene and provide a mathematical evaluation of magnitudes in the fixed form of a concept of number (this object is “10 meters high” or “4 inches wide”). But the imagination does not have recourse to concepts, and in the nature of objects there is no such constant measure. The imagination can thus begin to carry out its syntheses only by choosing a sensible or qualitative unit of measure. Kant notes, almost in passing, that initially such a unit of measure is found primarily in the human body: “A tree judged by the height of man gives, at all events, a standard for a mountain.”23 In other words, I can use the height of a human being as the unit of measure to apprehend the parts of a tree (“this tree is as tall as ten men …”); in turn, I can then use the height of the tree to measure the mountain behind it (“that mountain is as high as twenty trees …”). Even at the level of simple perception, apprehension already implies something like a “lived evaluation” or “aesthetic comprehension” of a unit of measure, and “this primary (subjective, sensory, immediate, living) measure proceeds from the body.”24 This is the moment of phenomenology in Kant: aesthetic comprehension presupposes the situatedness of our bodies in the world, our “being-in-the-world.” In the Phenomenology of Perception (1962), Merleau-Ponty analyzed in detail the manner in which our body provides us with such a “corporeal or postural schema” on the world.25
2. Rhythm. This leads to a second theme, that of rhythm. What Kant is saying in the Critique of Judgment (§26) is that even the most elementary act of the synthesis of perception presupposes a logical act (though Kant here gives the term logic a new meaning). Beneath the successive apprehension of parts, there is a kind of logical synthesis that requires a purely aesthetic comprehension of the unit of measure. “All estimation of the magnitude of objects of nature is in the last resort aesthetic (i.e., subjectively and not objectively determined).”26 Because the measure is subjectively determined, it is subject to constant evaluation and re-evaluation, and is therefore in constant variation. The unit of measure varies in each case depending on the thing to be perceived, just as the thing to be perceived depends on the chosen unit. I may evaluate a tree in relation to the human body, but at night I may evaluate the rising moon in terms of a coin held at close range. From the viewpoint of aesthetic comprehension, I am continually in the process of changing my unit of measure according to my perceptions. Following Maldiney, Deleuze describes this aesthetic comprehension of units of measure as the grasping of a rhythm (though Kant himself does not use this term), which takes place without a concept.27 Aesthetic comprehension is the grasping of a rhythm with regard to both the thing to be measured and the unit of measure. Beneath both the measure and the units, there is rhythm. In this sense, concepts are metrical: they give one the beat, but beneath the concept there is the rhythm. “Rhythms are always heterogeneous, we plunge into them in a sort of exploration,” an experimentation; even if you have a concept, “you do not yet have the rhythmicity of the things which are subordinated to it. A concept, at best, will give you the beat or the tempo” (28 Mar 1981, 4 Apr 1981). Beneath concepts, one always finds rhythmic blocks or complexes of space-time, spatio-temporal rhythms, ways of being in space and in time. The foundation of perceptual synthesis is aesthetic comprehension, but the ground on which this foundation rests is the evaluation of rhythm.
3. Chaos. But once we have reached this point, we cannot stop. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant finally becomes aware of an impending catastrophe: the ground (rhythm) upon which the foundation of the synthesis rests starts to tremble, as if in an earthquake. Kant presents a disconcerting scenario: I look at something, but my imagination wavers, I become dizzy, vertiginous. First catastrophe: I seek an appropriate unit of measure, but I cannot find one; or I choose one, but it is destroyed. I choose another, but it too proves to be inadequate, as if what I am seeing is incommensurable with any unit of measure. Second catastrophe: in my panic, I can perhaps see parts, completely heterogeneous parts, but when I come to the next one, my dizzy spell only becomes worse; I forget the preceding part; I am pushed into going ever further, losing more and more. Third catastrophe: What is striking my senses is unrecognizable; it is something that goes beyond any possibility of aesthetic comprehension. My entire structure of perception, in other words, is in the process of collapsing: I can no longer apprehend the successive parts; I cannot reproduce the preceding parts as the following ones arrive; and finally I can no longer recognize what the thing is. I can no longer qualify the object in general. Why does this happen? Because my aesthetic comprehension—that is, the evaluation of a rhythm that would serve as a foundation of measure—has become compromised, threatened. This is what Kant calls the experience of the sublime. The sublime takes place when the edifice of synthesis collapses: I no longer apprehend parts, I no longer reproduce parts, I no longer recognize anything. Instead of rhythm, I find myself drowned in a chaos.
What Kant discovers in the Critique of Judgment is that the synthesis of the imagination (apprehension, reproduction, recognition), which constitutes the edifice of knowledge, rests on a base of a different nature—namely, an aesthetic comprehension of both the thing to be measured and the unit of measure. Aesthetic comprehension is not part of the synthesis; it is the foundation on which the synthesis rests. But at the same time that Kant discovers this foundation, he also discovers the extraordinary variability of its ground (rhythm) and its fundamental fragility (chaos). Between the synthesis and its foundation, there is the constant risk that something will emerge from beneath the ground and break the synthesis. Why this fundamental fragility? According to Kant, it is because there are infinite phenomena in space and time (such as the immense ocean or the starry heavens) that risk overturning the aesthetic comprehension of the unit of measure. The imagination finds itself overturned, blocked before its own limit; it discovers its own impotence. We here reach the point that Deleuze calls the “bend” in sufficient reason: it is at one and the same time that we discover both the ground of the synthesis (rhythm) and its ungrounded nature (chaos). Fortunately, we are not caught up in the sublime all the time, which would be a terrible experience; normally we manage to hold on to our perception, and to relate spatio-temporal diversities to the object-form. The sublime, however, rests on a suppression of perception, an experience of the formless or the deformed. And yet: chaos itself can also be a germ of order or rhythm, and it is this rhythm–chaos couplet that lies at the heart of The Logic of Sensation.
When Deleuze was asked if the aim of The Logic of Sensation was to make readers see Bacon's paintings better, he conceded that it would necessarily have that effect if it succeeded.
But [he continued] I believe that it has a higher aspiration, something everyone dreams of: to approach something that would be the common ground [fond] of words, lines, and colors, and even sounds. To write on painting, to write on music always implies this aspiration. (TRM 186)
This “common ground” is, precisely, rhythm:
Rhythm appears as music when it invests the auditory level and as painting when it invests the visual level. This is a “logic of the senses,” as Cézanne said, which is neither rational nor cerebral. What is ultimate is thus the relation between sensation and rhythm, which places in each sensation the levels and domains through which it passes. (FB 37)
In painting, it was Cézanne and Klee who best exemplified this complex relation between chaos and rhythm. Cézanne said that the painter must look beyond a landscape to its chaos; he spoke of the need to always paint at close range, to be so close t
o a wheat field that one loses oneself in the landscape, so that one no longer sees forms, or even matter, but only forces. Cézanne called this the “world before humanity,” a complete collapse of visual coordinates in a universal variation or interaction, out of which, in the act of painting, the earth could emerge with its “stubborn geometry.”28 Similarly, Paul Klee, in his text On Modern Art, wrote of how rhythm emerges from chaos, and how the “grey point” jumps over itself and organizes a rhythm, “the grey point having the double function of being both chaos and at the same time a rhythm insofar as it dynamically jumps over itself.”29 Translated into Kantian terms, both Cézanne and Klee mark the movement by which one moves from the synthesis of perception (apprehension, reproduction, recognition) to aesthetic comprehension (rhythm) to the catastrophe (chaos), and back again; the painter passes through a catastrophe (the diagram) and in the process produces a form of a completely different nature (the Figure).
4. Force. But there is a final moment to this Kantian trajectory. Kant himself presents us with a kind of consolation: at the very moment the imagination discovers its impotence, it makes us discover within ourselves a higher faculty that is stronger than the imagination: the faculty of Ideas, which is like a faculty of the infinite, of the supersensible. What is this faculty of Ideas? Kant famously identified two types of the sublime: the mathematical sublime and the dynamical sublime. For Deleuze, the latter is more profound than the former because the dynamical sublime finds its figure in the “unformed” or the “deformed” (the undoing of the object-form). The forces of Nature are unleashed: a flood, a fire, an avalanche, a hurricane at sea. What do I experience? The fact that I am nothing. It is all too much for me, too strong, too overwhelming, and I experience a kind of terror. As a mere human, I am nothing compared to Nature; faced with the unformed or deformed power of Nature, my own intensive power is reduced to close to zero. But at the same time, what is thereby awakened in me is a new power, a spiritual power, a faculty of Ideas that Kant identifies as the faculty of Reason, and by which humanity is revealed to be superior to Nature, pointing beyond Nature toward our spiritual destiny as moral beings (the noumenal as transcendent).30
But this is where Deleuze breaks with Kant and inverts the critical philosophy. For Deleuze, the faculty of ideas is no longer identified with Reason; rather, Deleuze posits Ideas within sensibility itself and defines them, not by their transcendence to Nature, but rather in terms of their immanence to experience itself (the noumenal as immanent). Ideas remain supra-sensible, but they now reveal the forces or intensities that lie behind sensations, and which draw us into non-human or inhuman becomings. In Deleuze, in other words, the power of Nature in the unformed or the deformed appears in the form of the non-organic life of things:
The non-organic life of things, a frightful life, which is oblivious to the wisdom and limits of the organism … It is the vital as potent pre-organic germinality, common to the animate and the inanimate, to a matter which raises itself to the point of life, and to a life which spreads itself through all matter. (MI 50–5)
Bacon's primary subject matter is the “body without organs” that lies beneath the organism, the body in so far as it is deformed by a plurality of invisible forces: the violent force of a hiccup, of copulation, a scream, the need to vomit or defecate, the flattening force of sleep. In Cézanne, similarly, mountains are made to exist uniquely through the geological forces of folding they harness, landscapes through their thermal and magnetic forces, apples through their forces of germination. Van Gogh even harnessed as yet unknown forces, such as the extraordinary force of a sunflower. Klee's famous formula echoes through Deleuze's writings like a kind of leitmotif: not to render the visible, but to render visible. Sensations are given, but it is force that constitutes the condition of sensation. The artistic question then becomes: How to render sensible forces that are not themselves sensible? How to render the non-visible visible in painting, or the non-sonorous sonorous in music?
This leads us, finally, to the third line of concepts in Deleuze's book, which concerns the way in which painters—and Bacon in particular—produce this “logic of sensation.” The aim of his book, Deleuze tells us, is not only to build a “general” logic of sensation, but to show how, in Bacon's work, its summit is found in the sensation of color. In arriving at this conclusion, Deleuze once again takes us through a kind of deduction of concepts. The first is the concept of the cliché. Clichés, Deleuze writes, are anonymous and floating images
which circulate in the external world, but which also penetrate each of us and constitute our internal world, so that everyone possesses only psychic clichés by which we think and feel, are thought and felt, being ourselves one cliché among others in the world that surrounds us. (MI 208–9)
If Deleuze's philosophy is a genetic philosophy, the cliché is precisely what prevents the genesis of an image, just as opinion and convention prevent the genesis of thought. In this sense, one of the fundamental questions of Deleuze's philosophy is, What are the conditions for the production of the new (an image, a thought …)? Hence the essential role of the catastrophe: the condition for the genesis of the image (or the sensation) is at one and the same time the condition for the destruction of the cliché.
How, then, does the painter pass through the catastrophe and destroy the cliché? This is the role of what Deleuze calls the diagram or graph (Chapter 12), a term he derives from the semiotic theory of C. S. Peirce. Peirce had noted the important and often-overlooked role that diagrams play in mathematical thought. Although mathematics is often presented as a purely deductive or axiomatic science, theorematic reasoning usually involves the construction of diagrams and a kind of “ideal experimentation” with schemata consisting of points, lines, surfaces, and relations: “points are made and stretched … pins are stuck in maps … pages are covered in scribbles.”31 Mathematics, Peirce insisted, is as experimental as physics or chemistry, except that its experiments necessarily take on an ideal or “diagrammatic” form. In his semiological theory, Peirce had classified the diagram as a special case of the icon, “an icon of intelligible relations.”32 Although Deleuze admits his indebtedness to Peirce, he rejects the iconic status that Peirce assigned to the diagram, since it tends to conceive the diagram simply as a “copy” or graphic representation of intelligible relations or coordinates.33 Deleuze, rather, prefers to assign to the diagram a much more strongly creative or genetic role: “the diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality” (TP 142). As Deleuze explains in Chapter 13, the diagram acts as an analogical modulator, a conjunction of matter and. function.
Painters, Deleuze argues, have their own type of diagrammatism. What he terms a painterly diagram (an operative set of non-representational and non-signifying lines and colors) is the means by which painters, in their own way, pass through the experience of catastrophe. The painter's diagram undoes the optical organization of the synthesis of perception (clichés), but also functions as the “genetic” element of the pictorial order to come. Every painter, Deleuze suggests, will pass through this process in a different manner. “The diagram is indeed a chaos, a catastrophe,” he writes, “but it is also a germ of order or rhythm” (FB 83). Using Wittgensteinian language, Deleuze says that the diagram constitutes a “possibility of fact,” out of which the Fact itself will emerge. Plateau 11 of A Thousand Plateaus analyzes, in a more general manner, this complex emergence, out of chaos, of the elements of rhythm, with its territories and milieus (TP 310–50). The struggle against chaos in art, philosophy, and science is also one of the central themes of What is Philosophy?, notably in its final chapter, “From Chaos to the Brain.”34
If the summit of Bacon's own logic of sensation is found in the “coloring sensation,” it is because it is primarily (though not exclusively) through the use of color that Bacon effects his diagrammatic procedures. In this regard, Deleuze identifies two fundamen
tal uses of color in the history of painting. The first, more traditionally, emphasizes relations of value between colors: that is, the contrast of shadow and light (chiaroscuro). It has as its correlate the construction of what Deleuze calls a tactile-optical space: that is, the representational space that was inaugurated by Greek art and refined in the Renaissance. Figuration is itself a consequence of this tactile-optical space. In such a space, bodies are not merely perceived optically but take on a sculptural or tactile quality (depth, contour, relief), producing the illusion of a three-dimensional space behind the frame. In Chapter 14, Deleuze shows how, in the history of art, this tactile-optical world would subsequently be broken and develop in two different directions: toward the exposition of a purely optical space, in which space is freed from its references to even a subordinate tactility (Byzantine art); and toward the imposition of a violent manual space, in which the hand begins to express itself in an independent way, producing a line that delineates nothing, and which the eye can barely follow (Gothic art). Deleuze's analyses of these developments draw heavily on the German art historical tradition of Aloïs Riegl, Heinrich Wölfflin, and Wilhelm Worringer, though without the last's appeal to a “will to art” (Kunstwollen).35 These developments, in turn, would be recapitulated in their own way in modern art: abstraction would develop a purely optical code (Mondrian), whereas expressionism would move toward the extraction of a purely manual line (Pollock).
