Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, entry directory

 

by Corry Shores

 

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Gilles Deleuze

 

Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation

 

 

 

 

 

Particular References in the text

 

Deformed Heads. "Crosseyed and Painless" by the Talking Heads

 

Appearance & Indeterminacy: Wölfflin's Explanation of 'Malerisch', or 'Painterly'

Figural Studies: Lyotard's Distinction between the Figural and the Figurative (figural, figuratif)

 

The Glue of Chaos: Isomorphism, Diagram, and Analogy in the Semiology of Charles Sanders Peirce

 

Variations on a Line: Wilhelm Worringer's Northern Line (Gothic Line)

 

Difference and Sensation: Further Elaborations of Deleuze's Diagram, Aesthetic Analogy, and Modulation

 

 

 

Other Resources

 

Paintings Cited in Deleuze's Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation [shows the paintings]

 

Deleuze on Bacon Painting Series [index of paintings without display]

 

Francis Bacon (painter), entry directory

 

Bacon’s interviews with David Sylvester, entry directory

 

Difference & Sensation: Further Elaborations of Deleuze's Diagram, Aesthetic Analogy, and Modulation

 

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Crowther. Phenomenology of Modern Art, entry directory

 

by Corry Shores

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The Phenomenology of Modern Art:

Exploding Deleuze, Illuminating Style

 

 

Chapter 1

Releasing Style from Sensation:

Deleuze, Francis Bacon and Modern Painting

 

 

1.0 Introduction

 

 

 

Chapter 8

Deleuze and the Interpretation of Abstract Art

 

 

 

 

 

Crowther, Paul. The Phenomenology of Modern Art: Exploding Deleuze, Illuminating Style. London / New York: Continuum, 2012.

 

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Paul Crowther, entry directory

 

by Corry Shores

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Image from:

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The Phenomenology of Modern Art:

Exploding Deleuze, Illuminating Style

 

Crowther. Phenomenology of Modern Art, entry directory

 

 

 

Crowther, Paul. The Phenomenology of Modern Art: Exploding Deleuze, Illuminating Style. London / New York: Continuum, 2012.

 

 

Image credits:

 

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/VKJ7jm0Cx-U/maxresdefault.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKJ7jm0Cx-U

 

 

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Art and Aesthetics, Entry Directory

by Corry Shores

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Bacon. Francis Bacon

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Pt2.Ch4.Sb3 Somers-Hall’s Hegel, Deleuze, and the Critique of Representation. ‘Depth in Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty.’ summary

by Corry Shores  
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[Note: All boldface and underlining is my own. It is intended for skimming purposes. Bracketed comments are also my own explanations or interpretations.]

Henry Somers-Hall

Hegel, Deleuze, and the Critique of Representation.

Dialectics of Negation and Difference

Part 2: Responses to Representation

Chapter 4: The Virtual and the Actual

Subdivision 3: Depth in Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty

Very Brief Summary:

In his aesthetics, Merleau-Ponty creates an idea of depth that is like Bergson’s continuously integrated heterogeneous multiplicity and Deleuze’s difference as intensity. We see this depth in the way that variational lines and color in Klee and Cézanne generate the differential space of the painting. This differential generative aspect not visible in the work is like Deleuze’s virtual intensity, which explicates into extensity. Yet all objects are a mixture of virtual and actual.

Brief Summary:

In Merleau-Ponty’s later aesthetics, he articulates a concept of depth in painting that is like Bergson’s heterogeneous multiplicity. Before modern painting, special dimensions were something depicted, as if the objects filled a pregiven homogeneous Euclidean space. But with Cézanne and Klee, lines and color now generate space. On account of continuous variation, parts of the painting are continuously self-differentiating while remaining intrinsically related through these differential relations. It is like Bergson’s continuous heterogeneity. This for Merleau-Ponty is the real depth of the world that the painter depicts. It is the being of the world. and it is on the basis of this depth that spatial depth can be generated. For Cézanne and Klee, depth “is that which binds objects to one another, as the ground through which they interpenetrate”. (116) This fulfills Deleuze’s three criteria for the idea: this depth is not overtly sensible, it’s elements are reciprocally determined, and it is actualized in a multiplicity of spatio-temporal relations. This depth for Deleuze is the virtual intensive spatium, which is a multiplicity of continuous differential relations. The movement from virtual to actual produces the individual entities in extensity which may take on external relations (including opposition) and have an identity, but this was impossible while being intensities. This gives us a univocal rather than an equivocal sense of being. But all objects including artworks, which tend more toward the virtual, are composites of virtual and actual. For, if the object were completely actualized, it could be no further differentiated, and if it were purely virtual, there would be nothing actual to crystallize the system’s order. And when we bring into clarity the Idea, we confuse all the differential incompossible tendencies making it up.

 

Summary

Previously we saw how Deleuze’s Idea can be viewed in terms of topological phase space; for, it is multidimensional, non-sensible and non-conceptual, and it actualizes in various spatio-temporal relationships. Section two of this chapter was about the logic of multiplicities, and section three was about this new relation to science that the concept of heterogeneous multiplicity creates.

Now the third thing we will discuss in Bergson’s thought that Deleuze emphasizes is the method of intuition. It will allow us to see what happens between the two kinds of multiplicity. Deleuze’s concept of depth will show the how things happen in the middle ground between the two tendencies, and he draws from Merleau-Ponty’s later aesthetical writings.  Here Merleau-Ponty’s concept of depth allows him to create a Bergsonian space, where space is not something fixed and external to the bodies in it. It is a generative theory of space. “Merleau-Ponty wishes to show that space and the object are generated at the same time, characterizing depth as that which brings the other dimensions into being.” (111) Deleuze takes up this concept of depth, and he considers it an intensive space. We can divide extensive space into homogeneous parts, but an intensity cannot be divided like this.

Dividing it in half leads to two quantities of water that behave similarly to the original quantity. Dividing the temperature of the system can change the nature of the system itself, however, as the behavior of the system becomes radically | altered once it passes through the various phase transitions. (111-112)

Intensity then is like Bergson’s duration, and it is unlike Euclidean space; rather it is more like virtual non-Euclidean space. Intensity is what actualizes the virtual, because it “allows the structure inherent in the virtual idea of the system to become an actual geometrical structure”. (112) The egg has extensive dimensions, but its development undergoes phase transitions, which are [somehow] alterations in intensity. “In this section we will therefore turn to Merleau-Ponty's aesthetics to clarify the role of the intensive. In order to incorporate it into our reading of Deleuze, we will first deal with two points. First, we will need to show that Merleau-Ponty's analysis is an ontological analysis, and second, that this ontology is fundamentally compatible with Deleuze's.” (112)

We begin with Merleau-Ponty’s Eye and Mind. Here he sees the artist disclosing the world in a way unlike how science does. A theory of painting for him is a metaphysics. Like with Bergson, Merleau-Ponty sees two ways of relating to the world. The scientists approach is operationalism, so she avoids dealing with the world’s properties directly and instead defines “concepts purely through our operations of measuring them, making science in this sense autonomous, since it deals simply with the correlation and analysis of data. In this approach, according to Merleau-Ponty, there is no longer any contact with the 'opacity of being,' which was present even in the early moments of modem science.”  (112) Science is abstract. It renounces metaphysical questions | in order instead to characterize its success in terms of the manipulability of the object.” (112-113) The artist, however, has a nonmanipulative approach to the world. Yet the artist’s mind is not separate from the world. The essay explores how the artist opens the world, seeing how Renaissance geometrical perspective gives way to non-geometrical renditions in modern painting, beginning with Cézanne’s developments with depth. The essay does not want to renounce science but instead to give it the metaphysics it lacks. It also tries to give the transcendental grounds for perception, which is the invisible in the visible. (113)

We now consider parallels between the structures that Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze bring out.

[1] Painting’s action within space does not define what is painted.
The artist can actualize their Idea in various media, like painting, sculpture, drawing etc. This involves a move away from the spatio-temporal. [Each variation in a line is not just another point in a space but rather a new space for new self-relations, redefinitions.]

Within such a painting, each inflection of the line forms "another aspect of the line's relationship with itself, will form an adventure, a history, a meaning of the line" (EM, 183). Furthermore, when we ask what the nature of this line is, we find that it "is no longer the apparition of an entity upon a vacant background, as it was in classical geometry. It is, as in modem geometries, the restriction, segregation, or modulation of a pre-given spatiality" (EM, 1 84). [113]

This is like Deleuze’s Idea. “While the elements of the painting have sensible form, what is painted does not.” (114) Abstract art for Merleau-Ponty does not need to relate to some particular external state of affairs. It is only when the painter gives it a name that it takes on such a relation to a particular object or event. Like Deleuze’s Idea “its actualization is possible in a variety of contexts, depending on the relation the artist gives it to the visible.” (144) Also for Merleau-Ponty [and similar to Deleuze] the work itself convolutes space rather than occupies it, in that nonEuclidean, Riemannian, topological way. So Klee in Merleau-Ponty’s analysis meets Deleuze’s three criteria for Ideas. Klee’s lines do not tell us the sensible spatial dimensions of an object, but rather give us the lines continuous self-genesis. [It is like the development of an egg through intensive space rather than through extensive space.] Both the line and its space are reciprocally determined, meeting the second criteria. And because the painting with a different name would have different particular relations to objects and events, the painting can be actualized in many different contexts, meeting the third criteria.

For Descartes, we see the geometrical forms of things under deformation, in the way they hit our retinas. So squares take on the form of rectangles, for example [depending on the angle we view them. A cup saucer will be painted as an oval.] Paintings depict these deformations, and by doing so recreates a three-dimensional space. For Descartes, we perceive a third dimension merely from the two that are present in the painting. (114-115) Also note that we could imagine God’s eye located everywhere, thus there would be no visual depth, because depth is a relation between near and far. “In order for depth to be considered in this way, objects have to be conceived of as outside one another, with solid boundaries. The Cartesian approach therefore mirrors the approach of atomism in science that Bergson attacked”  (115) Such a space is homogenous, always in itself, everywhere equal to itself, and its dimensions are interchangeable. (115)

But note how for Descartes, depth is produced through the two other dimensions in the painting. This production of space is important for Klee. “The strands of Sartre's critique of Kant, Klee's reworking of the concept of depth, and the work of Gauss and Riemann all therefore represent a move away from the classical paradigm of a homogeneous space to that of a Bergsonian interpenetrative multiplicity.”  (115) Color for Klee is important, because it does not “give rise to the classical conception of space,” but rather “gives rise to an interpenetrative space  exemplified by the late works of Cezanne.”  (115) [Recall how Cézanne creates depth with color and not shading or modeling.'] “The idea of depth created by the color field differs from that of the brass etching in that the brass etching specifies depth as a third dimension, whereas for Cezanne | and Klee, depth is that which binds objects to one another, as the ground through which they interpenetrate”. (115-116) Depth then is “the first dimension that generates the others. Even the depth of the Cartesian geometry follows from this elementary depth.” (116) Merleau-Ponty sees Klee’s color in a way that is similar to Deleuze’s intensive qualities of the virtual. “That is, color cannot be divided without being changed in nature. Thus, the primordial dimension of depth for Merleau-Ponty is an intensive dimension. It is not color that is an intensity, but that which is more general than color, but can be captured by color's intensive nature.” (116)

Merleau-Ponty’s analyses of painting show us the actualization of intensive depth. [Depth is the movement of individuation, like the painted line that continually redefines itself and the space it generates through its movement. The creation of differentiation in general is the grounds for more specific sorts of differentiations, like the relations of different positions in extensive homogeneous space.]

Just as for Merleau-Ponty, depth generates the other dimensions, including Cartesian depth, for Deleuze, "extensity does not account for the individuations which occur within it" (DR, 229). That is, returning to Merleau-Ponty's analysis of the brass etchings of Descartes, extension itself both implies the already individuated in order to be generated, as Descartes sees the phenomenon of depth to be generated from the relations of bodies, and precludes the movement of individuation itself, since, from Bergson, the notion of a homogenous space renders an interpenetrative analysis impossible, as shown by the replacement of interpenetration with action at a distance in the work of Newton. Instead, Deleuze argues, "individuation and extensity must flow from a '"deeper' instance" (DR, 229). [116]

“Depth therefore forms the generative space from which extensive space | is generated.” (116-117) Deleuze calls this depth spatium. “Returning to Bergson, we can see that the spatium, as an interpenetrative multiplicity, functions for Deleuze like the multiplicity of duration.” (117) For Deleuze, “difference is that by which the given is given (DR, 222)” [117] The intensive field of depth is what gives the given. Difference is what is operating in this intensive field of depth. Intensity has a differential form [being made of a continuity of differential relations]. Actual diversity in the world is an explication of intensive difference.

For Deleuze, "difference is that by which the given is given" (DR, 222). That is, difference exists within the intensive field of depth, which is generative of extensity. In this sense, Deleuze calls it "the closest noumenon" (DR, 222). Thus, difference, as the differential form of intensity, gives rise to diversity by a process of explication. That is, as intensive force finds itself actualized within an extensive system, the unindividuated differential relations give way to relations between bodies external to one another. (117)

We will use differential calculus to understand the movement from virtual to actual. But for Deleuze and Bergson, there is not a logic of negation involved. [Negation and opposition are not a part of the intensive spatium, where multiplicities are intrinsically related differentially. They only come about in actualization into discrete entities. This is intrinsic differential relations inverted into extrinsic ones.]

Negation and opposition govern the state of the system as actualized and, therefore, for Deleuze, do indeed provide the limit case of the world in terms of the fully actual. "The negative is difference inverted, seen from below" (DR, 235). Likewise, the classical conception of identity, which requires individuation, is the result of the explication of differential relations into a spatiotemporal context. (117)

[Difference is a condition of possibility for actualization. (What is actualized are things we can understand.) So difference is transcendental. In Aristotle, being and beings were equivocal, because they had similar names but different meanings. Also note how each being is discrete from the others and externally differentiated from them. In the intensive spatium, there are no discrete beings. There is just difference, thoroughly expressed. So being is univocal, when being is difference. Also, Aristotle distinguished beings on account of oppositions between them. But since there is no opposition in the virtual, we can have a non-hierarchical understanding of being.]

In making difference the transcendental principle of his system, Deleuze has moved away from the principle of the equivocity of being put forward by Aristotle. The differential field of depth that forms the closest noumenon for Deleuze instead allows us to conceive of being as univocal. As the virtual is not defined in terms of opposition, it also allows the possibility of a nonhierarchical understanding of being, as the virtual is not to be understood in terms of opposition, which led to the theory of species and genera for Aristotle. (117)

But we need both the virtual and the actual to explain the givenness of the object [for, without the actualized object, nothing is being given, but without the virtual, nothing is giving the object.] For Merleau-Ponty, the work of art is between an actual thing and the intensive depth that generates things. Also for Deleuze, an artwork can be almost entirely virtual, displaying a “' ‘completely determined structure formed by its genetic differential elements"’ (DR, 209).” (108a) Yet for Deleuze all objects including artworks are double [expressing both virtual and actual] without the two halves resembling each other.  In Descartes, an object’s clarity and distinctness are proportional. In Deleuze’s analysis of Leibniz’s sea example, we can have a clear perception of the sea’s white noise as a whole, but all our tiny perceptions of the different small splashings of water are confused with each other. If we try to focus on one small wave, we obtain a distinct perceptions of the differential relations [between tiny waves] that make up the whole, but our perception of the whole becomes obscure. “Thus the understanding of one kind of order within the murmuring of the sea covers the other.” (118)

For Deleuze, it is the Apolline of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy that provides the best expression of the clear-confused, as that tied to representation, whereas the distinct-obscure is the Dionysian and properly philosophical order of the object. It is thus Apollo who gives the power of representation, of actuality, to the object, while Dionysus provides the obscure genetic and virtual conditions of the object, and of its representation. For Deleuze, "the two never unite in order to reconstitute a natural light. Rather, they compose two languages which are encoded in the language of philosophy and directed at the divergent exercises of the faculties: the disparity of style" (DR, 214) In spite of this, however, an object can never achieve pure actuality, as this would mean that it would no longer be capable of being further differentiated, nor can it be pure virtuality, as pure virtuality would be without the grain of actuality around which the order of the actualized system can crystallize. [118]

We saw also that for Bergson, pure space and pure duration are impossibilities, even though they are implied in the directions of expansion and contraction of matter/duration. So for Deleuze, everything happens somewhere between pure virtuality and pure actuality. [Recall Deleuze’s Idea. In the topographical example, instead of drawing all the vectors, we instead create a surface showing the tendencies toward equilibria in the dynamics of the systems. So all the incompossible lines of development become confused together, when the Idea as a whole comes into greater clarity. Thus] “An Idea ‘is confused in so far as it is clear’ (DR, 213).” [118] Virtuality and actuality are like two languages in philosophy that are different in kind, but everything is a matter of degree between them. (118)

Somers-Hall, Henry (2012) Hegel, Deleuze, and the Critique of Representation. Dialectics of Negation and Difference. Albany: SUNY.

Difference & Sensation: Deleuze's Spinozistic Affect

by Corry Shores
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The following is my presentation at the Nederlands Genootschap voor Esthetica (Dutch Association of Aesthetics) Utrecht Expertmeeting Kunstfilosofie in Utrecht, November 2011

Corry Shores

Difference & Sensation:
Deleuze's Spinozistic Affect

(Animation above is my own, made with GIMP and Unfreeze,
image from Spinoza, Opera vol. 2, archive.org, p.233)

Deleuze is commonly considered an anti-phenomenologist. However, I would like to explore the phenomenological value of his aesthetical ideas regarding affection and bodily sensation. The aim of this presentation is to offer a Spinozistic interpretation of certain concepts in Deleuze’s Francis Bacon book. For this aim, I draw primarily upon Deleuze’s writings on Spinoza’s affection. We will regard affection phenomenologically as involving a sort of affective awareness of bodily-given phenomena. We do this because Deleuze explains Spinoza’s kinds of knowledge in terms of the rhythm of affection.

Deleuze specifically refers to affective awareness as ‘the phenomenon of passage.’ It is the lived transition that we undergo when affections transfer us from one bodily state to another.


There are two primary dimensions, then, to such affective alterations.

One is the physical composition of bodies that becomes changed by the affection. The other is the dynamic of the alteration. Deleuze combines these two dimensions of affection, the compositional and the dynamic, by analyzing two sorts of infinities in Spinoza’s theory of affection, namely, extensive and intensive infinities. There is a cryptic diagram in Spinoza’s Twelfth Letter: the ‘letter on infinity.’ Deleuze’s novel interpretation of the diagram shows how it illustrates the two infinities.


Spinoza writes of the diagram that “all the inequalities of the space lying between the two circles ABCD in the diagram exceed any number, as do all the variations of the speed of matter moving through that area.”


We find similar diagrams in Spinoza’s Principles of Cartesian Philosophy. In the left diagram, both semi-circles share the same center. The space between their circumferences is everywhere the same. However, if the semi-circles do not share the same center, then the space between their circumferences will be everywhere unequal.


He also has us consider the circulation of water moving through the space between offset circles. And on account of the geometry of the non-concentric circles, every place along the circuit has a different width and hence “the fluid body that moves through the tube ABC receives an indefinite number of degrees of speed.”

The infinity diagram would then seem to be a hybrid of these two other figures.


Yet, Spinoza explains in his 81st letter that the infinity here is not obtained from the fact that there are more parts than can be counted. Instead, the diagram according to Deleuze, illustrates a mode’s infinite division into differential relations between infinitely small partitions.

Now, although Spinoza’s ‘letter on the infinite’ predates the inception of differential calculus, Deleuze locates in it what he considers to be seminal calculus notions. To explain the concept of infinitely small vanishing values, Deleuze guides us through the remarkably simple and illuminating visualization in one of Leibniz’ letters.


The diagonal line moves to the right, which diminishes the top triangle, all while increasing the bottom one; yet, because the triangles stay proportionally similar throughout the alteration, the ratio between the smaller one’s legs always remains proportional to the ratio between the larger one’s legs.

(Animation above is my own, made with OpenOffice Draw and Unfreeze)

The vanished triangle, Deleuze says, is not actually there, but is there “virtually,” because the vanishing lines have not yet entirely merged together at the corner. So the infinitely small legs of the smaller triangle are still distinct from each other and from the corner they are collapsing upon; and yet, they also do not extend beyond it. Thus, they do not bear extensive magnitudes but rather only intensive ones, which we will treat as degrees of variation. The philosophical idea here – difference without terms – is essential to Deleuze’s Spinozistic notion of affection. And it will allow us to see how Deleuze can use Spinoza’s diagram to illustrate both the intensive and extensive infinities that are involved in affection.

(Thanks en.wikipedia.org/ A.Greg)

Extensive bodies, for Spinoza, are divisible until reaching what he calls simplest bodies. Simplest bodies form compounds when ones moving at the same or at different speeds maintain a fixed relation in their mutual motions and when “the laws or nature of one part adapts itself to the laws or nature of another part in such wise that there is the least possible opposition between them.”

These infinitely small simplest bodies are never found alone, but rather only in infinite sets. These sets reciprocally unite with other infinite sets to compose a more complex body. These compound bodies are then combined with other bodies, and so on to higher orders until reaching the whole of Nature.

(Credits in order)
(colliding particles: Thanks A.Greg / en.wikipedia.org)
(blue molecule: Thanks M.L. Rahman / faculty.bracu.ac.bd)
(heart cell: Thanks Bluegrass Pundit / scinewsblog)
(heart beating: Thanks Sterile Barrier Solutions / sbsmed.net)
(circulatory system: Thanks John U / quietmoment.org)
(Egypt bridge protest: Thanks Freemanfilmsuk / youtube.com)
(Amazon river: Thanks BestofAttenborough /youtube.com)
(earth: Thanks UweTube / youtube.com)
(solar system: Thanks animated-sun.weebly.com)
(spiral galaxy: Thanks Kanal von beltoforion1 /youtube.com)
(galaxies: Thanks BrainMind.com / youtube.com)

In his letter on blood, Spinoza has his correspondent imagine a tiny worm so small that it can swim through the blood and observe how its tiniest particles collide and communicate their motion. The worm would see that the simple bodies of blood, the lymph and chyle, continually affect one another’s speeds. Yet, because they maintain their mutual affections without one destroying the other, they together make up the composite body that is our blood. The ratio of their speeds is a level of power that must stay within certain limits.


For otherwise, the simple bodies could decompose and enter into other relations. This happens, for example, when arsenic enters the blood. They will not combine. Rather, on account of their incompatible levels of power, arsenic will decompose our blood.

This sends a chain reaction of affective shockwaves throughout the body, decomposing all the other higher orders of differentially related parts. If it decreases our whole body’s power below a certain threshold, we die. Our body no longer expresses our modal essence, but instead its rearranged parts express the essences of other modes, such as the worms and soil we recompose into.

Thus, Deleuze interprets the infinity diagram as showing how a finite body extending between the limits of its size is divisible into an infinity of simplest bodies.

(Animation above is my own, made with GIMP and Unfreeze,
image from Spinoza, Opera vol. 2, archive.org, p.233)

Now to understand intensive infinities, first consider a ball on a chain swung in a circle. There are competing forces acting on the ball: on the one hand, it wants to fly outward, but on the other hand, its chain pulls it inward. As a result, the ball is always tending to go some certain way at each moment in its circular motion. If we were to cut the ball loose, it would not fly-off in a spiral, but instead outward in a straight line. This would also be the tangent to a circle’s curve at that point.

(Animation above is my own, made with OpenOffice Draw and Unfreeze)

The tangent on curves is like a tendency in the line’s change of direction at that place that is only implied in the movement. Physicists use techniques to find the instantaneous velocity of a moving object; it is something like the speed it is tending to go at that moment.


But how can a velocity be instantaneous? Well, nonetheless, it is a real quantity in the physical world, although it exists only as a virtuality.

Now, for a curve moving in a somewhat more irregular path, finding its tendency-toward-change is more complex, and here is where we might use Leibniz’ method.

(Animation above is my own, made with OpenOffice Draw and Unfreeze)


(Thanks Dr. Siddique / faculty.uncfsu.edu)

Sometimes we can almost feel where a certain part of the curve is heading just by judging its pattern of change. We can also create a triangle showing how the curve’s dimensions extend in a certain region. Then, like with Leibniz’ triangles, we slowly diminish the two triangle legs, and the third diagonal side gives us the tangent, which also tells us which way the curve is tending at that place.

Now, when sets of simplest bodies affectively impact the parts of our own bodies, their shocking collision corresponds with the production of an idea of that object in our imagination. “I look at the sun,” says Deleuze, “and the sun little-by-little disappears and I find myself in the dark of night; it is thus a series of successions, of coexistences of ideas, successions of ideas.” These ideas also correspond to an increase or decrease in our power of acting, and the variations are continuous.

He has us imagine that we encounter on the street our enemy Peter who makes us afraid. Yet, we suddenly turn our glance toward our friend Paul, whose charm reassures us. While moving from the ideas of Peter to Paul, we underwent a continuous increase in our power of action. These variations, Deleuze explains, are ever-altering quantities: “In other words, there is a continuous variation in the form of an increase-diminution-increase-diminution of the power of acting or the force of existing of someone according to the ideas which she has,” and “this kind of melodic line of continuous variation will define affect.”

In the 22nd letter, we find “nothing else pertains to an essence than that which it possesses at the moment it is perceived.” Deleuze reinterprets this as, “there belongs to an essence only the present, instantaneous affection that it experiences.” Deleuze offers an example of this instantaneity of an affective alteration.


We are meditating in a dark room. Then without warning, someone enters the room and abruptly turns on the lights, which completely dazzles us and renders us no longer able to maintain mental focus.

We pass between two very different states in a “lightning fast” alteration: “Two successive affections, in cuts. The passage is the lived transition from one to the other.” Every passage between affections is then necessarily an increase of power or a decrease of power. So if instead we are looking for our glasses in the complete dark, and then someone turns on a dim light, we appreciate him, because then the light increased our power of action. What we note here especially is that the affection’s increase or decrease is seen as instantaneous, which means it does not extend in time. Rather, it is an intensity.

Hence Deleuze’s other illustrative use of the diagram. A body has a certain range of affective power, and when an affection takes it beyond its limits, the body’s parts decompose into other bodies, like when arsenic enters the blood. So consider how there is a largest and smallest limit in the diagram, and throughout it is a continuum of an infinity of differential variations. Deleuze has us conceive this range of variation as representing the range of affective power that we can sustain before we decompose. So this is the intensive infinity.

(Animation above is my own, made with GIMP and Unfreeze,
image from Spinoza, Opera vol. 2, archive.org, p.233)

Now, according to Deleuze, we obtain Spinoza’s second kind of knowledge through our interactive contact with affecting bodies. As we saw with arsenic, the affections of other bodies can decompose us. Yet, in many cases when we are threatened by certain affections, we might know how to modify our own bodies so that we may sustain ourselves.

Deleuze cites an example in Dante’s Inferno. A damned soul is pelted with rain. Yet, rather than let the rain destroy him, he continually modifies the relations of his own body’s parts by twisting around, so that he may co-sustain with the rain’s affections. By making changes in the relations of our body-parts, we send waves of affective alteration throughout us on the level of our simplest bodies.


These internal self-affective shock-waves are in a dance of sorts with the external waves of affection, and their perpetuated interaction is what Deleuze here calls “rhythm.” Another example he offers is swimming. While in the water, a wave draws near us. When it strikes, we and the wave affect each other’s simplest-body arrangements. In that very instant we might be learning how to adjust to the wave’s decompositional forces. By modifying our own body’s composition, we may stay afloat and swim in conjunction with the wave, causing our body and the wave to become a compound, a larger body.

Another illustration better expresses how the rhythm of affection is a matter of differential relations. Deleuze explains that a violin and a piano playing independently do not really produce affective rhythm. However, they may achieve a rhythmic relationship during a joint performance if the violin plays in response to the piano all while simultaneously the piano performs in response to the violin. In this way, they each affectively modify one another while at the same time they modify themselves, which sustains their dual improvisation. And according to Deleuze, Cézanne also describes this rhythmic interaction when he wrote about “how to compose the canvas-easel relation with the relation of wind, and how to compose the relation of the easel with the sinking sun, and how to end up in such a way that I might paint on the ground, that I might paint lying on the ground.”

This portrayal of Spinoza’s affection will now serve to interpret some difficult terminology in Deleuze’s Francis Bacon book. Deleuze writes here that in simple sensations, rhythm “appears as the vibration that flows through the body without organs, it is the vector of the sensation, it is what makes the sensation pass from one level to another.”


The vector here is like the intensity of the affective variation to change its quantitative value. We could then conceive the body without organs as the Spinozistic body composed of continually altering differential relations. Hence, Deleuze writes that the body without organs is “an intense and intensive body. It is traversed by a wave that traces levels or thresholds in the body according to the variations of its amplitude. Thus the body does not have organs, but thresholds or levels.” As the damned soul in Dante’s Inferno twists his once protected side toward the pelting rain, waves of affective variation now impact the newly exposed part directly. It then becomes the site of sensation, where the internal waves of self-affection meet the external waves of affective variation. Yet this status is temporary, because he continually twists in the rain, making instead other parts of his body the new sites of affective reception.

Deleuze continues: “When the [internal] wave encounters external forces at a particular level, a sensation appears. An organ will be determined by this encounter, but it is a provisional organ that endures only as long as the passage of the wave and the action of the force, and which will be displaced in order to be posited elsewhere.” Sensational rhythm, Deleuze explains, can be the unpredictable variance of intensity waves that continually alters our bodily composition.

Thus Deleuze’s body without organs and its waves of sensational intensity can be viewed in light of his conception of the Spinozistic body and its continuous variations of affection, with the concept of ‘rhythm’ playing a similar role in both cases.

This provides us with a more substantial explanation for one of Deleuze’s few attacks on traditional phenomenology, in this case regarding the body without organs in contrast to the phenomenological lived body.

He writes: "this rhythmic unity of the senses can be discovered only by going beyond the organism. The phenomenological hypothesis is perhaps insufficient because it merely invokes the lived body. But the lived body is still a paltry thing in. We can seek the unity of rhythm only at the point where rhythm itself plunges into chaos, into the night, at the point where the differences of level are perpetually and violently mixed. Beyond the organism, but also at the limit of the lived body, there lies […] the body without organs."


Thus, Deleuze breaks from traditional phenomenology’s manner of conceiving the composition of the body as being made of harmoniously integrated parts that work organically with each other and with the world around them during phenomenal experiences. Nothing in its environment would stand out and appear to such a body that is completely accustomed to all the affective influences around it. Rather, for phenomena to appear to us, our bodies would need to sense things that stand out; we would need to detect differences.

A Deleuze-inspired phenomenology would explain bodily-given phenomena that appear to our affective awareness as being based on differential relations within us, throughout the phenomenal world around us, and between our bodies and the world.


Image credits:

Blue and red particles in motion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Translational_motion.gif
Thanks A.Greg

Blue molecule in motion
http://faculty.bracu.ac.bd/~mlrahman/Research.html
Thanks M.L. Rahman

Heart cell
http://scinewsblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/scientists-turn-blood-cells-into.html
Thanks Bluegrass Pundit

Heart beating
http://sbsmed.net/
Thanks Sterile Barrier Solutions

Circulatory system animated gif
http://www.quietmoment.org/my_weblog/2011/03/mysteries-of-the-human-body.html
Thanks John U.

Egypt protestors on a bridge
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXbRdumboZ0
Thanks Freemanfilmsuk

Amazon river
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dn53PtW0AnA
Thanks BestofAttenborough

Earth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hALtHnu4WEo
Thanks UweTube

Solar system
http://animated-sun.weebly.com/animated-solar-system.html
Thanks animated-sun.weebly

Spiral Galaxy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD9OV1Zrs4I
Thanks Kanal von beltoforion1

Galaxies
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5zVlEywGZg
Thanks BrainMind.com

Spinoza. Opera, vol. 2. Edited by Carl Gebhardt. Heidelberg: Winter, 1972.
http://archive.org/details/operaquotquotre00landgoog

Geometrical Derivative animation:
http://faculty.uncfsu.edu/msiddiqu/Maple_Animations.htm
http://faculty.uncfsu.edu/msiddiqu/images/images/Gif_Folder/Definition%20of%20Derivative18.gif
Thanks Dr. Siddique of Fayetteville State University

Variations on a Line: Wilhelm Worringer's Northern Line (Gothic Line)

by Corry Shores
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[Deleuze on Bacon Entry Directory]

Variations on a Line:
Wilhelm Worringer's Northern Line (Gothic Line)

What does Gothic got to do with you?

By looking within ourselves, we might discover a force of freedom thriving within us. It is not exactly that part of us which is like self-defiance, an element in our personalities that causes us to act in a self-sabotaging way against our best interests, or to recklessly act without thinking. However, it is very similar, and might best be described by considering first certain elements of this more readily conceivable careless freedom. For, unlike the reckless freedom, the other more freer freedom is not a reaction. It does not react against ourselves or against things, people and events in our lives. So consider for example that force in us that might drive us to spontaneously go on a drinking binge after just losing a job. It cannot be this other freer freedom, because it reacts against an unfavorable event, an unfair boss, or a self-pitying and self-despising self. Yet it is a sort of defiance. And maybe the freer freedom is defiance without there first being something that we are defying against. Of course we are born into power structures, but our actions can have the spirit of pure, non-reactive defiance. Perhaps this is what we see in the moments of great artistic creation, a sort of joyful defiance, a continual denying that there ever was a restriction in the first place. Now imagine we try to express this force in the act of drawing a line. But also consider if we first drew a curve with supreme control over our hand, to make it as perfect as possible. And also imagine that we at another time were violently impulsive, and drew an erratic line. But the third case is a line inspired by the freer freedom. Like the nicely-drawn curve, the free line would not be a messy chaos. But also, the free line will not be as regularized. And like the erratic impulsive line, the free line will be liberated from the expectations set by how the line was being previously rendered. In a sense it lives at the tiny infinitely small point of the absolute present moment, never fully bound to the immediate or passing past. But unlike the erratic line, the free line will not be defiant in an artificial or reactive way.

So in one sense the free line is drawn in the infinitely small present moment. But in every such infinitely small moment, the line is tending toward extending into infinity. That is because at no moment does it suggest or move toward an organic completion. How is this so? Consider lines that make a labyrinthine pattern.

Such labyrinthine patterns make us think that there is no beginning or end. Another example is a Gothic cathedral.

Only the vertical lines are emphasized, which gives us an impression of going up to infinity.

Worringer calls the free line the "Northern line." If we drew our lives as a northern line, we would not be bound to our pasts, or adjust our actions so that they properly react to something else. We would live in the present not in a thoughtless or careless way, but in the sense of making this moment the seed of an infinite future of continued freedom. Such a 'northern life' is powerfully creative.

Brief Summary:

Worringer discusses certain styles that cultures have developed throughout history. There is a trend, called the Gothic, which ornaments its works with a liberated line, termed the "Northern Line". This line is continually undetermined and it strives for infinity.

Points relative to Deleuze
[Under continual revision]:

One of the places Deleuze refers to the northern line is in his Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation book. One element that is central to his notion of sensation is continual variation. So consider a part of a painting that we might characterize as being northern or Gothic; it would have lines that are in continuous variation. Visually speaking, this line will act on the other elements of the painting. But because it is in continual variation, then it expresses either explicitly or implicitly self-difference at every point. Thus there is an infinity of different influences it has on the rest of the painting. This prevents our eyes from ever satisfying their effort to make visual sense of what they see. There will never be an organic coherence, because the artwork will be infinitely fertile in the ways its parts can re-relate. This continual defiance to our efforts of recognizing or mentally representing what we see causes our impressions to be in continual variation. We have a sensation when we are confronted with an irreducible difference that forces itself upon us. Thus the northern or Gothic line can be an element of a painting which allows the artwork to continually affect us with its constant variation.

Selective Summary, from:

Wilhelm Worringer

Form Problems of the Gothic

Latent Gothic of Early Northern Ornament

Worringer will speak of "three principal stages in the process of adjustment of man to outer world" (43). He will focus on the Gothic stage, which he says does not correspond with the Gothic historical age. Rather, he examines the Gothic in terms of a "psychology of style" (43b). All the Western World is Gothic in this sense, so long as it is not immediately influenced by the antique Mediterranean culture. Thus Gothic refers to present times as well (44a).

Worringer begins by describing the art of the Northern European peoples at the fall of the Roman Empire. (45d) The art does not represent nature. It is purely ornamental. There is a "purely geometrical play of line" (although he will later clarify this sort of playfulness). (46ab)

They begin to develop their own language of the line, their own "linear fantasy called intertwining band ornament or braid ornament" (46bc).

The lines form various fantastic and intriguing arrangements. Early primitive lines are abstract and geometrical, without any organic interpretation. (47a) Nevertheless, they express an extreme liveliness. (47b) He says that this line style we see above is a clash between "the abstract character of primitive geometric ornament" and "the living character of Classical organically tinged ornament" (47b.d) These two other styles shown respectively.

So, classical ornament has organic clearness and moderation, and it seems to spring "without restraint from our sense of vitality." And also, "It has no expression beyond that which we give it" (48b). But by contrast, northern ornament seems to take on a life all its own, and in fact seems to act upon us ourselves.

The expression of northern ornament, on the other hand, is not immediately dependent upon us; here we face, rather, a life that seems to be independent of us, that makes exactions upon us and forces upon us an activity that we submit to only against our will. In short, the northern line is not alive because of an impression that we voluntarily impute to it, but it seems to have an inherent expression which is stronger than our life. (48bc, boldface mine)

The elaborate his idea of the northern line, he illustrates with common experience. We are to pick up a pencil and draw a line.

What do we notice? Worringer suggests we sense two things. One is "the expression dependent upon us" and the other is the "expression of the line seemingly not dependent upon us" (48d). Perhaps in one way, we see that we drew it; we see that it is a line from our hand not that that of someone else. But perhaps in another way, we see a geometrical form that we were trying to render. The line, as a line, expresses something that is geometrically real even without such an attempted instantiation.

He also has us draw the line in "fine round curves". When we do so, we feel the movement of our wrist. But to that motion we also accompany to it our "inner feeling". We sense that the line grows spontaneously from the play of our wrist, and this gives us a pleasant sensation. "The movement we make is of an unobstructed facility; the impulse once given, movement goes on without effort." (48d). This pleasant feeling is a "freedom of creation," and we transfer it

involuntarily to the line itself, and what we have felt in executing it we ascribe to it as expression. In this case, then, we see in the line the expression of organic beauty just because the execution corresponded with our organic sense. (48-49)

But consider if we see a line made by someone else. We will still involuntarily feel inside us the impressions one has if drawing such a line. (49a)

Gothic lines may have this "organic expressive power", like we see in Classical ornament. But it has another such expressive power. Worringer has us imagine drawing a line more excitedly.

If we are filled with a strong inward excitement that we may express only on paper, the line scrawls will take an entirely different turn. The will of our wrist will not be consulted at all, but the pencil will travel wildly and impetuously over the paper, and instead of the beautiful, round, organically tempered curves, there will result a stiff, angular, repeatedly interrupted, jagged line of strongest expressive force. It is not the wrist that spontaneously creates the line; but it is our impetuous desire for expression which imperiously prescribes the wrist's movement. The impulse once given, the movement is not allowed to run its course along its natural direction, but it is again and again over whelmed by new impulses. When we become conscious of such an excited line, we inwardly follow out involuntarily the process of its execution, too. (49b.d, boldface mine)

But when we follow someone else's wild line, we do not feel pleasure. It seems more like "an outside dominant will coerced us" (49cd). What we feel seems like the forces of the ruptures in the line's incoherent discontinuity.

We are made aware of all the suppressions of natural movement. We feel at every point of rupture, at every change in direction, how the forces, suddenly checked in their natural course, are blocked, how after this moment of blockade they go over into a new direction of movement with a momentum augmented by the obstruction. The more frequent the breaks and the more obstructions thrown in, the more powerful becomes the seething at the individual interruptions, the more forceful becomes each time the surging in the new direction, the more mighty and irresistible becomes, in other words, the expression of the line. (49-50, boldface mine)

The line forces its expression upon us. Thus we feel it as something autonomous and independent of us. (50a)

So consider when we were drawing the curved line. We felt physically a pleasure on account of there being no obstructions breaking the flow of our hand's movements. The parts of our wrist worked together to create a line that is self-consistent in its curving motion. With the erratic line, however, there seems to be unpredictable forces which break the flow, in fact prevent one from starting, and prevent any possibility of there being coherence in the motions or the line. Our hands drawing calmly seem to do so merely by means of our bodies acting automatically and with coordination among its parts. So when it is erratic, that suggests to us the forces causing the unpredictabilities do not come from the body, but rather from some psychic or spiritual source.

The essence of this inherent expression of the line is that it does not stand for sensuous and organic values, but for values of an unsensuous, that is, spiritual sort. No activity of organic will is expressed by it, but activity of psychical and spiritual will, which is still far from all union and agreement with the complexes of organic feeling. (50b, boldface mine)

Worringer clarifies that Gothic ornament and such a scrambled line made by an emotionally or mentally excited person are not at all the same things. However, Worringer will compare them to clarify what he means by the northern line. He says for example that the lines of northern cultures tell us that they were

longing to be absorbed in an unnatural intensified activity of a non-sensuous, spiritual sort one should remember in this connection the labyrinthic scholastic thinking in order to get free, in this exaltation, from the pressing sense of the constraint of actuality. (50d, boldface mine)

Worringer sees this supersensuous longing expressed in "fervent sublimity of the Gothic cathedral, that transcendentalism in stone" (51a). Such architecture exhibits "a complete degeometrization of the line for the sake of the same exigencies of spiritual expression" (51ab).

Pointing us to the left item in the image below, Worringer tells us that "primitive ornament is geometric, is dead and expressionless [Pl. III, C]. Its artistic significance rests simply and solely upon this absence of all life, rests simply and solely upon its thoroughly abstract character" (51b).

Worringer then says that the original dualism between man and world weakened the geometrical character of the line. This degrading of the geometrical line can take two courses. One is toward "an organic vitality agreeable to the senses," as with classical ornament. (51bc)

Or instead it can develop toward a "spiritual vitality, far transcending the senses," which we see in northern ornament (51c). Here we find the Gothic character.

He continues to claim that the Gothic has more expressive power.

And it is evident that the organically determined line contains beauty of expression, while power of expression is reserved for the Gothic line. This distinction between beauty of expression and power of expression is immediately applicable to the whole character of the two stylistic phenomena of Classic and Gothic art. (51cd, boldface mine)

The Infinite Melody of Northern Line

Worringer will further elaborate the distinction between Classical ornament and Gothic/northern ornament.

Classical ornament exhibits symmetry.

However Gothic does not. But instead of symmetry repetition is predominant. (52ab) Classical has repetition too, but like a mirroring. The repetitions have the "calm character of addition that never mars the symmetry" (52bc).

Gothic repetition, however, is more like a repetition of difference striving to rise to the nth power.

In the case of northern ornament, on the other hand, the repetition does not have this quiet character of addition, but has, so to speak, the character of multiplication. No desire for organic moderation and rest intervenes here. A constantly increasing activity without pauses and accents arises, and the repetition has only the one intention of raising the given motive to the power of infinity. The infinite melody of line hovers before the vision of northern man in his ornament, that infinite line which does not delight but stupefies and compels us to yield to it without resistance. If we close our eyes after looking at northern ornament, there remains only the echoing impression of incorporeal endless activity. (52-53, boldface mine)

Worringer then cites work from Lamprecht where he describes the laberinthine nature of the Gothic lines.

Lamprecht speaks of the enigma of this northern intertwining band ornament, which one likes to puzzle over [PI. VIII]. But it is more than enigmatic; it is labyrinthic. It seems to have no beginning and no end, and especially no center; all those possibilities of orientation for organically adjusted feeling are lacking. We find no point where we can start in, no point where we can pause. Within this infinite activity every point is equivalent and all together are insignificant compared with the agitation reproduced by them. (53a.b, boldface mine)

In Gothic architecture, "the impression of endless movement results from the exclusive accentuation of the vertical." (53c)

From:
Wilhelm Worringer. Form Problems of the Gothic. New York: G.E. Stechert, 1920.
PDF available online at:
http://www.archive.org/details/formproblemsofth00worruoft