Introduction, Art as Abstract Machine: Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari

| Introduction f . L Art as Abstract Machine i

: : And the question is still what it was then, how to view scholarship from the : vantage point of the artist and art from—Friedrich the vantageNietzsche, of life.The Birth ofTragedy, ’ but an“Art as abstractimperative. machine”It urges an(ATP,action, 496/619). Thisan undertaking, book’sa perpetualtitle is not adeparture, descriptionfor i . wherever we start, it remains to be done. A machine has to be constructed, and ; art as abstract machine will require an artist adequate to the task: a mechanic. t For each machine its mechanic: “The painting machine ofan artist-mechanic.”! : We are already—as always—in the middle of things, a swirling cacophony of iq questions: A mechanic? A machine? Who? What? When? And given all that, 7 what does this machine produce? And for what reasons? But these questions are ( ponentsthe necessary of new conditions machines forthat any will construction,themselves depart,for theirto answerstest out will new be directions, the comf The abstract machine is nothing but this unfolding of complexity, a fractal en3 gineeringBut inseparablelet’s step back fromfromlife,thisa bloomingcomplexity of multha t iplicity.will nevertheless remain the F condition of our investigation. We don't want to crash and burn, not yet. Let’s b try taking one question at a time. If our title is an imperative what does it bid F us do? To construct an abstract machine, obviously, but how? And to risk another question, already, what does it do? (We will see how these questions, to : immediately step into Deleuze and Guattari’s vocabulary, will become indisa cernible.) Deleuze and Guattari give what seems a straightforward answer: “The 4 diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent, even some: thing real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality” ’ (ATP, 142/177). Art as abstract machine’s first principle: it is real and not a representation. Deleuze and Guattari, whether discussing art, philosophy, or anyf thing else, will not stop coming back to this first principle.? And as such, it

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2 Art as Abstract Machine a Introduction 3 immediately implies another—its necessary compliment—that constructing an LnEe “probe-heads” (tétes chercheuses, ATP, 190/232)—steering the world on its abstract machine is to construct construction itself. The abstract machine is the ; “creative flight” (ATP, 190/233). The abstract machine is therefore both vital vital mechanism of a world always emerging anew, it is the mechanism ofcre& and material, it exists, Deleuze and Guattari write, as the “life proper to matation operating at the level of the real. Here, a new world opens up, a living 7 ter as such, a material vitalism that doubtless exists everywhere but is ordinarworld in which nothing is given except creation. To open a world, to construct . ily hidden or covered, rendered unrecognizable, dissociated by the a new type of reality, this is the ontological foundation of the world—of this eo hylomorphic model” (ATP, 411/512). Hylomorphism is an operation that world and of all the others—on an abstract machine guiding its becoming. 7 moulds matter into forms according to an ideal model, an operation by which but althoughThe abstractinseparable machine fromcreatesthis innovationa new reality,of constructsexistence, itnew has ways no being.ofbeing, The f| thethe worldabstractappearsmachineas obedientagainst representation.and predictable representations. Once more, abstract machine is the entirely immanent condition of the new, and thereby rei We have already sketched—at a speed that no doubt calls out for a subseceives its Nietzschean definition: its being is becoming. For now we will unfold b quent slowness—the underlying structure of this book’s diagram. First, not only the implications of this ontology rather rapidly, any beginning must involve a 7 the echo of Nietzsche in the abstract machine's against, but Deleuze and certain reckless plunge . . . The abstract machine doesn’t represent anything bei Guattari’s mobilization of his ontology of becoming. Second, the necessity of cause nothing exists outside of[its][ action,][it][is][ what][it][ does][ and][its][ immanence][is] ie Spinoza to any philosophy of immanence. Spinoza will be the permanent sigalways active. In the middle of things the abstract machine is never an end, it’s f nature of Deleuze and Guattari’s immanent machinery, of its expression and a means, a vector ofcreation. But[ despite][ the][ abstract] machine having no form, & construction. Third, a materialism inseparable froma vitalism; in other words, it is inseparable from what happens: it is the “non-outside” living vitality of matBergson. These are the abstract co-ordinates of Deleuze and Guattari’s philoter. (But is it an inside? As we shall see the question marks a certain limit to an § sophical machine, and are mapped in the first three chapters of this book. These old and no longer useful topological vocabulary.) As a result, abstract machines chapters lay out the basic components of Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology, while are neither ideal identities nor categories of being, and remain entirely unafa seeking to show how they work, how they must be put to work in constructing fected by any transcendent ambitions. a an expression of the living materiality of the world, in constructing an abstract But before we get into the intricacies of[this][technical][philosophical][ter-] F. machine. Understanding this ontology will therefore confront us with the imminology we should remind ourselves that we are speaking of practical matL mediate necessity of understanding its appearance in and as life, an understandters, of machines and their constructions. Building an abstract machine is ia ing inseparable from an experience of the new realities that are forever being more DIY than techno-science, and requires a bit of the mad professor. a created. At this point it becomes obvious that the ontology of the abstract maDeleuze and Guattari, mad professors no doubt, adopt the language of the a chine implies an aesthetic, because its existence is indiscernible from its appearconstruction site, an earthy directness reflecting the pragmatism required by b. ance in and as experience. the job at hand. Machines eat and sleep, they remind us, they shit and fuck. Pe What then, to ask the question of[aesthetics,][are][the][conditions][ of][this] (AO, 1/7) We are, no mistake, machines. “Everything is a machine” (AO, 3 experience? This question calls to account another of Deleuze and Guattari’s 2/8). Our task—to be done with techno-paranoia—is to turn these machines a philosophical interlocutors: Kant. Unlike Nietzsche, Spinoza and Bergson creative, to liberate their parts in an explosion that remakes the world. The PS however, Kant is less a “fellow traveller” than an adversary, and the site of mechanic is, to use another of Deleuze and Guattari’s colorful phrases, “the iy combat will be the aesthetic. For Deleuze and Guattari aesthetics is not the cosmic artisan: a homemade atomic bomb” (ATP, 345/426). “There is a neca determination of the objective conditions of any possible experience, nor does essary joy in creation,” Deleuze says, “art is necessarily a liberation that exS it determine the subjective conditions of an actual experience gua beautiful. plodes everything.”* But the abstract machine is not an expression implying 3 Aesthetics instead involves the determination of real conditions that are no technophilia either, and is inseparable from a mechanics of the flesh, an exwider than the experience itself, that are, once more, indiscernible from this ample of Deleuze and Guattari’s avowed materialism: “The abstract machine 7 experience. Aesthetics then, is inseparable from ontology, because experience is pure Matter-Function” (ATP, 141/176). The world is a plane of matterb is, for Deleuze and Guattari, irreducibly real. To construct an abstract maforce, a material process of experimentation connecting and disconnecting be chine will mean constructing a new experience indissociable from a new realmachines. On this plane abstract machines act as guidance mechanisms— ity. The sensible, like the thinkable, is nothing but the temporary conditions

Introduction 5

| 4 Art as Abstract Machine | Introduction 5 from which an abstract machine departs, following Spinoza’s “war cry” (the bs Nietzsche’s statement serving as the epitaph above, to view scholarship from the phrase is Deleuze’s) “we don’t even know what a body can do” (EPS, c vantage of art—it means our investigations only begin when we start to create— 255/234). This introduces another of our constant concerns, how can we creand art from the vantage of[life—meaning][ our][ creations][must][ become][ alive.][Art] ate a new body, a new sensibility adequate to a life of ontological innovation? iS will be nothing (at least not for us) if it is not this ongoing expression oflife in Art emerges here as a privileged site of corporeal experimentation. Art as ab: the construction ofliving machines. stract machine gives a genetic definition of art, one that transforms both its E Expression and construction are the doubled dimensions of art as abstract ontological and aesthetic dimensions. “Everything changes once we deter: machine. The abstract machine expresses the autogenetic and infinite processumine the conditions ofreal experience,” Deleuze[ writes,] “which[ are] not[ larger] ia ality of its real conditions (the infinite, a cosmic world), which appear as the than the conditioned and which differ in kind from the categories: [Kant’s] a construction ofthis reality, this art-work. But, once more, doubled, the abstract two senses of the aesthetic become one, to the point where the being of the Fo machine expresses the infinite, but also constructs it, right here right now: “The sensible reveals itselfin the work ofart, while at the same time the work ofart f field of immanence or plane of consistency must be constructed.” Deleuze and appears as experimentation” (DR, 68/94). An abstract machine determines - Guattari write: “It is constructed piece by piece, and the places, conditions, and the real conditions of experience, conditions neither subjective nor objective bs techniques are irreducible to one another. The question, rather, is whether the (they have become abstract), and that can only be experienced in the work of F pieces fit together, and at what price. Inevitably there will be monstrous crossart (in a machine). A work entirely experimental, inasmuch as art is a permai breeds” (ATT, 157/195). To express an infinite world in constructing a finite artnent research on its own conditions, and is always constructing new ma: work, to make art in other words, is a process by which the becoming of the chines. Feedback loop. Once more, this will be an overarching concern of this a world is expressed in a construction which works upon its own conditions, book, to understand the necessary and active immanence ofabstract and aca which operates at the level of its constitutive mechanism. Any construction of tual, infinite and finite in the machine of art. The work of art understood in 4 art then, any sensation, emerges through an abstract machine to express an inthis way will give a real experience, an experience of its real conditions, an exF finite plane by way of an actual becoming whose very specificity and precision perience of and as its immanent abstract machine in the process of (re)conBe involves or infolds a change in its real conditions.The world is this genetic plane structing reality. Which is to say—or what can be said before we say L . of immanence, a Bergsonian multiplicity, which in being expressed in a finite everything else—art is an experience of becoming, an experiential body ofbe' construction, an art-work, a sensation, changes in nature. At this point it is not coming, an experimentation producing new realities. The implications are F a question ofdistinguishing expression and construction as two dimensions or obvious: there is neither an ontology ofart nor an aesthetics ofart, each[in][its] f moments of sensation, because they have become indiscernible on the single own realm of competency, each with its own all too serious professors. There b multiplied plane of onto-aesthetics. All that remains is to affirm their identity, are artists constructing abstract machines, mechanics engaged in the prag£ construction=expression. ” matic practice of onto-aesthetics. Cosmic artisans everywhere setting off their a This affirmation will be another theme of[this][book,][echoing][in][its][differ-] atom bombs. ent terminologies. It appears as Nietzsche's interpretation and evaluation of[will] Our diagram has already grown quite complex. The co-implication of onL to power, as Spinoza’s affects of joy and beatitude in God/Nature, as the actual tology and aesthetics in art as abstract machine—the onto-aesthetics of art—in; and the virtual dimensions of[duration][in][a][Bergsonian][cinema,][as][traits][of][ con-] volves a redefinition of experience by which its objective and subjective be tent and expression in the abstract machine, and finally as the affect and the perconditions are dissolved in the real, the reality of the world as it becomes nothP cept in sensation itself. In all these cases it is the affirmation of becoming that ing else than itself. Art in these terms is an autogenesis expressing the world (its [I puts immanence to work in a feedback loop of construction and expression, real conditions) by constructing experience (its real experience). And what is b making becoming the being of[a][work][of][art][that,][as][Deleuze][and][Guattari][put] this experience? A simple question that it will take a whole book (and no doubt \ a it, “wants to create the finite that restores the infinite” (WP, 197/186). not just this one) to answer. Art is, before all else, and as Deleuze and Guattari re We could well ask, as some already have, whether Deleuze and Guattari put it, a sensation. A sensation of this work, but this work, this sensation, it does are offering us a modern version of Romanticism here, whether onto-aesthetics nothing if it does not restore us to our constitutive infinity by creating the world [ Is simply art expressing nature. Certainly Deleuze and Guattari pass through anew. Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of art as sensation will set off from a Romanticism, and although they find a stopping place in the inhuman rupture

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6 Art as Abstract Machine e Lntroduction 7 of the sublime—a rupture and rapture—they do so only by changing its a pression of the at once infinite and finite material plane on which everything Nature. A change that rejects the sublime’s Kantian conditions, removing art te happens. Thus, mysticism as an experience of immanence is necessarily atheist, from any romantic analogy with the divine, and placing it back among the anre because it cannot involve transcendence of any kind (where to?). Atheist mystiimals, All chis will be developed later of course, but I mention it here as the first cism replaces transcendence with construction/expression, first of all as a conqualification of what is the necessary correlate of the construction=expression struction of the body—atheism against asceticism. Mysticism is a physical equation, an “atheistic mysticism.” This is a phrase employed by Deleuze to de: practice: how do you make yourself'a body without organs? Furthermore, mysscribe Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence, and is the only way to understand Fe ticism is a Creative process that, whether in the realm of philosophy, art, or Deleuze and Guattari’s ironic deification of Spinoza as the “Christ of philosohe somewhere else, is inseparable from affirmation. Deleuze and Guattari identify phers” (WP, 60/59). Spinoza is the philosopher who thought the “best” plane ; the same philosophers as philosophers of affirmation as they did the philosoof immanence, the “best” God, because through the attributes the plane’s eS phers of immanence, the holy trinity: Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Bergson. It’s no (God/Nature) expression in the joy of affectual assemblages is nothing but the 7 accident of course, as in each case it is by affirming the immanence of a fundaongoing construction ofan infinite and divine here and now: God yes, but Deus t mentally creative life that the joy proper to mysticism will explode on its lines sive natura. Spinoza’s revolutionary formula introduces an atheist God to phi3 offlight, all the way to infinity. Deleuze reads Nietzsche’s affirmation of will to losophy—an atheism inseparable from a true philosophy of immanence—bei: power, the affirmation of affirmation as he puts it, as the practical mechanism cause reason is the way to express God/Nature constructing itself, and 7 of overcoming, the door through which we eternally return. Similarly, it is the immanence achieves nothing without this identity of expression and construc3 Spinozian affect of joy that constructs the rhizomatic compositions of power tion. To put it simply, Spinoza overcomes transcendence because, as Deleuze £ constituting the ever increasing All, and culminating in the mystical affect of puts it, “expression is not simply manifestation, but is also the constitution of fb beatitude, the love by which God/Nature loves itself. In Bergson Deleuze finds God himself. Life, that is, expressivity, is carried into the absolute” (EPS, bo -in the intuition of the én vital, an intuition Bergson associates with artists and 80—1/70). P mystics, an affirmation capable of entering into the creative process itself. “If This strange atheism that in Spinoza never stops speaking of God, and in a man accedes to the open creative totality,” Deleuze writes of Bergson, “it is Deleuze and Guattari never stops seeking to become adequate to becoming it_ therefore by acting, by creating rather than by contemplating” (B, 111/118). self, will be the consistent aim of a practicalphilosophy. Philosophy, like art, is a a Deleuze suggests as a slogan, and it’s a joke, but perhaps only half a joke, “Ir’s all construction site, a workshop producing abstract machines with cosmic ambi: good, but really.”* tion. Deleuze and Guattari are continually coming back to this mystical prace Affirmation is the mechanism of immanence, the means by which to contice, the production of what Michel de Certeau has called, “the infinity of a local i , struct a joyful expression. No doubt Deleuze’s affirmation of affirmation also singularity.”° From the Nietzschean simulacrum as the superior form of everya has a serious philosophical function as the antidote to that other notable philothing that is to the seed/universe of the cinematic crystal image, from the visions F sophical double-banger, the negation of negation (just as overcoming in this of cinema’ seer to Bacon’s BwO, from Goethe's differential color theory to [. context is the overcoming of Aufhebung). But it is also the guiding thread of Leibniz’s imperceptible waves infolding perception in the ocean of experience, iv Deleuze and Guattari’s work in a practical sense, for they very rarely discuss artDeleuze and Guartari describe the atheistic mysticism ofa philosophy of immaE work, at least, which they do not /ike. (And in a wider sense this would be the nence, the construction and expression by an abstract machine of a “local aba rational behind Deleuze’s refusal to specifically deal with the philosophy of solute” (ATP, 382/474). This vision of a mystical Deleuze and Guattari is, | am [ Hegel.) But behind this seemingly banal observation lies an important new elwell aware, regarded with suspicion by many commentators.’ Nevertheless, a ement to Deleuze and Guattari’s abstract machine, and that is its ethical dimenwith the important addition of its atheist condition, this seems to me the best 4 sion. Affirmation is an ethical choice, a choice for the creative energies of life, way to approach the profusion of mystical formulations in Deleuze and a first of all our own. This will be an ethics that will immediately appear in our Guattari’s work, and their consistent attempts to find our real conditions on a E first chapter on Nietzsche, where affirmation returns will to power eternally, a cosmic plane of production. . return that will be our own overcoming. Here affirmation takes on a critical Mystical atheism is the real condition ofDeleuze and Guattari’s pragmatic function, because a true affirmation of immanence will involve the destruction philosophy. Mysticism is the experience of immanence, of the construction/ex( of nihilism, ofall the resentful negations defining the human, all too human, As

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8 Art as AbstractMachine | Tntroduction 9 Nietzsche said, and it is a slogan that will accompany us through the course of |. here, absolutely deterritorialised, the machine begins to work, “flush with the this book: no creation without destruction. A motto for the artist first of all. a real” as Deleuze and Guattari put it, constructing flows of matter-force into exAffirmation, and the mystical onto-aesthetics it enables, is nothing if not critia pressive sensations. This is the bacchanaal of art, immersed in the real, affirming cal. It is, in fact, the creative process of critique, and involves violence and cruee its own creative ecstacies. Deleuze is a laughing Dionysus: “Yes, the essence of art elty, and their correlate: pain. Just like nature. Any creation worth its name will r is a kind of[joy,”][he][affirms,][“and][this][is][the][ very][point][of][ art.”°] therefore encompass the destructions necessary to set it free, an explosion that a _ Here art will become a politics of lived experience, a realm of experimendestroys negation and propels its liberated matter into the new. Affirmation is : tation that opens life up to alternative modes of being, affirming new realities, therefore like a leap of faith, a leap into the chaos of the world in order to bring j new communities, and new methods of self-organisation. Art becomes a kind something back, in order to construct something that expresses life beyond its i of bio-politics, an experimentation with life as it is lived, a contestation in the sad negation. And how could it be anything else? Because from our subjective t realm of experience with everything that seeks to prevent us from affirming our perspective, from within its narrow and blinkered vision, the life of matter, the : : power of composition. Art is a mechanism to increase our power, to liberate cosmic infinity ofour here and now is what cannot be experienced or thought, t ourselves from the limits of representation (and the political operation of these at least not without some recourse to mollifying images of a transcendent be: limits is a constant subtext of Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion). Art is the freeyond. This unthought of thought, the insensible in sensation, this is the imposee dom to experiment on our conditions of[existence,][and][is][the][ethical][condition] sible aim of Deleuze and Guattari’s project. Not, once more, to transcend the . of any revolution. Art as ethics, and as bio-politics, serves to emphasise the fact world, but to discover it as it is, to create a thought, a sensation, a life that par. that art is always concerned with very practical problems. In this sense Deleuze ticipates in the world’s joyful birth of itself: a dancing star. This, Deleuze writes, - and Guattari offer a philosophy of art-work, and it only begins—/or rea/—when “is the impossible which can only be restored within a faith. [.. . ] Only belief if we put it to work for and against ourselves. in the world can reconnect man to what he sees and hears” (C2, 172/223). 7 Finally we have arrived at what has no doubt been a puzzling absence to To reconnect man to what he sees and hears, this is nothing less than the 7 : this introduction. Art, I mean art as it is normally understood, pictures and project of art. A critical project for sure, because art has been overcoded with so d things. Of course it was never absent, because the path so far taken was necesmany merely human ambitions, so many representational limitations. Let us 7 sary in order to open the question of what art means for Deleuze and Guattari, not forget: “No art and no sensation have ever been representational” (WP, : ontologically, aesthetically and ethically. It is the question to which this book 193/182). First, we need a machine to clear the canvas (or the screen, the page, : will try to provide some answers. But nevertheless, and following Deleuze and the compact disc) of all the clichés which prevent a creation. Second, we need t Guattari, much of this book will talk very specifically about art, about artists, an affirmation that is strong enough to actually create something, because a conq their work, and about how art works. Each chapter—with the exception of the stant risk of destruction is that nothing new will emerge from it. Nothing is sad3 second on Spinoza, where the introduction of art examples to a discussion ofa der than a void, nothing so ugly as a black hole. And art can just as easily be E thinker who barely mentions art at all seems a little far-fetched—contains a these things, a soporific or worse, a poison. Art as abstract machine therefore inq more or less lengthy discussion of an art-work, an artist’s work, or an art movevolves an ethical choice, a selection and conjugation of those matter-flows q ment. In each case the general philosophical argument of the chapter is taken which are in the process of escaping from themselves, it must affirm only what ] up inan example appropriate to it: Andy Warhol’s “Death and Disaster” series is the most deterritorialised. Art must be critical enough to divert its contents : in relation to the Nietzschean simulacrum (Chapter One); cinema in terms of and expressions back to the plane of[consistency,][to][achieve][ an][absolute][ deterri-] a Bergson ontology of time (Chapter Three); Venetian Renaissance painting as torialisation. But then, something must happen, something must emerge, the FE an abstract machine (Chapter Four); Jackson Pollock’s “middle” period as a dicreative life of this plane must be expressed in a sensation. And sensations must _ agram for Abstraction opposed to his American modernist champions (Chapter be created, as any artist knows, for the machine to work. Four); the readymades of Marcel Duchamp as machines of chaosmosis In this way the abstract machine operates at the interstice between finite (Chapter Five); and the work of Francis Bacon (Chapter Six). In each case the and infinite, it deterritorialises the concrete world, breaking matter out of its I aim is to show how it is meaningless to isolate Deleuze and Guattari’s discusovercoded forms, to put it back into contact with its vitality, with its living flows, sions of art from their wider philosophical concerns, and further that their disits inhuman and inorganic nature. This is art’s infinite material dimension, and cussion of art can only be fully understood within this wider context. This is to

10 Art as Abstract Machine i ba say that Deleuze and Guattari offer us an onto-aesthetics, but more importantly ke Chapter One it is to show it in action, to get close to the explosions it ignites, its destruction a The Artist-Philosopher: Deleuze, of inherited opinions about aesthetics and art, and the joyful affirmations it ofb . -_ fers in their place. E Nietzsche, and the Critical Art of This is finally simply to follow what I have outlined above, a Deleuzeob Affi . Guattarian practice, a practice in which life is both expressed and constructed, & Irmation and by which art restores the finite to its infinite dimension. It means that in b attempting to understand art as abstract machine we will have to understand : its onto-aesthetics, its mystical and yet utterly actual processes of creation. E. This, as Guattari put it, will be our, and art’s “dance of chaos and complexity” re (Chaos, 88/123). .

e The notion ofa “beyond” is the death of life. a —-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist. i Ic is not without profound sorrow that one admits to oneself that in their f highest flights the artists of all ages have raised to heavenly transfiguraP tion precisely those conceptions which we now recognise as false: they are a the glorifiers of the religious and philosophical errors of mankind. Bs —Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human. r Our religion, morality and philosophy are decadent forms of man. The 3 " countermovement: art. Be —Nietzsche, Will to Power. P NIETZSCHE, DELEUZE AND THE NEW u Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche is in the spirit of Zarathustra’s words to his dist ciples: “One repays a teacher badly ifone always remains nothing but a pupil.”! , 7 Nietzsche does not want followers, he wants those capable of creating someig thing new. He wants to produce, in other words, artists. Deleuze’s reading of ie Nietzsche is therefore artistic; in the spirit of Nietzsche he creates a new i Nietzsche. This practice of creative interpretation affirms an important element ia of Nietzsche's aesthetics, that art is not representational, but is an experimental bo process by which the form of representation is overcome, and through which ia something new emerges. The emergence of the new is, for Nietzsche as for Pe Deleuze, nothing less than the movement of life, the genetic process of life ex7 pressing itself. Consequently, Nietzsche's aesthetic is inseparable from the ontolE ogy that animates it. The creative movement of life is “entirely different,” a Deleuze writes, “from the imaginary movement of representation or the abstract