the arc and the zip -- deleuze and lyotard on art

7/30/2019 The Arc and the Zip -- Deleuze and Lyotard on Art

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MARTY SLAUGHTER

THE ARC AND THE ZIP: DELEUZE AND LYOTARD ON ART

ABSTRACT. Lyotard and Deleuze made extensive use of modern art to mount a

critique of representation as part of their attack on the enlightenment subject. Art

breaks out of received rules, conventions, forms, and cliches and is an instance of

ethical if not revolutionary activity. Lyotard first developed these ideas through

the concept of the Figure, which Deleuze later adopted. Figure is the desire or

force that transgresses and deforms the good form of mimetic representation.

Using Cezanne and Francis Bacon as paradigmatic examples, they argue that art

creates new feelings and desires (Lyotard) or intensities and sensations (Deleuze).

For Deleuze this is the model of ethical behavior the creation of new, pro-

ductive forms of life free from the negativity of judgment. While Lyotard and

Deleuze started from a common point, Lyotard changed his position in his later

work on the sublime. Rather than positing a subject of purely affirmative desire

and ideally free of the limitations of judgment, he posited a subject seized by and

limited by the law. The subject is by nature divided: always already seized by and

hostage to an Other, an unrepresentable excess or remainder. He is under an

obligation to recollect and respond to the Other by bearing witness to it. The

sublime experience of seizure by the law is exemplified in the paintings of Barnett

Newman. While Deleuze would have done with judgment, Lyotard can neverhave done with it.

KEY WORDS: aesthetics, art, Deleuze, ethics, Figure, judgment, Lyotard,

representation, sublime

INTRODUCTION

For many theorists, critique begins with representation. Critical

lawyers are, or should be, no less concerned with it. This critique

consists of a rejection of the platonic, mimetic view of representation.

It implies that there is a world and a cosmic order that defines the

good, and that that world and good are isomorphically represented.

This theory has its analogue in the rational, autonomous subject of

the enlightenment. Representation is an instrument of reason and

under the control of it.

If you no longer believe that the subject is defined by reason; or

if you no longer believe that there is an isomorphic relation be-

tween reality, thought and image, then the whole enlightenment

Law and Critique (2004) 15: 231257 Springer 2005

DOI 10.1007/s10978-004-5434-8


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edifice falls. Representation and the autonomous enlightenment

subject have been challenged on a number of fronts phenome-

nological, existential, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, Deleuzian

and, to the extent that these critiques have come into critical legal

thought, it has been mainly in terms of language. The critical basis

of representation, however, is wider than this and can extend into

the visual. Two theorists who have done so are Lyotard and

Deleuze.For Lyotard and Deleuze the crucial distinction is not between

language and the visual but rather between the discursive and art.

It is art that discovers the creation, deformation and/or limits ofrepresentation and they both delineated a critical category called

Figure that is before, beneath or beyond representation. This

means therefore that they were not primarily concerned with the

content or meaning of images but rather with the way in which

material or formal properties are the critical, if not fundamental

element of art. Since visual art, particularly modern painting, keeps

signification and representation to a minimum, it provides a par-

ticularly fertile ground to explore these formal properties and both

Lyotard and Deleuze discuss it extensively. In order to extend the

critique of representation beyond its narrow focus on language, I

focus here on visual art.1

For Lyotard and Deleuze art is not just a weekend activity.

For both, it gives access to dimensions of life that enlightenment

theory ignored: the sensate (Deleuze) or the unconscious (Lyotard).

It is a means of transformation and achieving change and some

degree of liberation, not least from the illusion of the rational

and autonomous subject and its theories of justice. Without art we

are trapped in old and inadequate forms, like being trapped in old

photos. Art creates its own kind of thought. As it turns out,

however, although Lyotard and Deleuze started from positions

that were sympathetic if not similar, they came to radically op-

posed visions of what that thought was. For Deleuze art flees from

law, for Lyotard art inscribes it.

1 Note: Lyotard and Deleuze try to express what exists beyond the representa-

tional content of language through their writing styles. As a result, discursive sum-

mary or paraphrase is not entirely adequate. To the extent that is possible in a

translation, I let them speak in their own words. It is ultimately these that will or will

not move.

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LYOTARD I

In all his works both philosophical and psychoanalytic Lyotard was

interested in the remainder what escapes thought, knowledge and

representation. There is something more than the rational subject and

its productions, and in his early work this is the energy of drive and

desire. For Lyotard, there is energy, drive and desire on the one hand,

and rationality, structure and signification on the other hand. These are

not resolved in representation; rather there is something that remains

after (below, beyond) it. In discourse, signifiers do not fully re-present

objects, be they from the external or internal world. Rather there isalways an irrational force that circulates and remains in excess. In his

early book, Discourse, Figure, Lyotard called this excess Figure.2

Discourse be it linguistic or visual is infected with Figure.

First some definitions. Lyotard defined discourse narrowly as a

structure of signification, more broadly as the informational use of

language, but it has its analogue in painting. The discourse of

painting would be rules of perspective, figuration or the well-formed

image, and narration. For Lyotard, in painting and literature, mod-

ern art revealed a dimension of language and the visual beyond the

significative and discursive. This excess he called Figure.

Lyotard introduced the concept of Figure in Discourse, Figure, along, complex, still untranslated book, written in a style meant to

capture the excess in language. It analyzes the discursive and Figural

elements in language and in painting but I will focus on the latter. To

be precise, Lyotard identifies three kinds of figure. The first, Figure

image, is what we normally call the figure (as in the distinction

between figure and ground), the representation that we see in the

picture of an object.3 It is a contour (an outline) and belongs to the

visible order.4 The second, Figure-form, is present in the visible, is

2 J.F. Lyotard, Discours, Figure (Paris: Editions Klinckseick, 1974). Parts have

been translated in M. Lydon, The Dream-Work Does Not Think, in A. Benjamin,

ed., The Lyotard Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 1955 (Lyotard, ibid., 239270);

M. Lydon, Fiscourse Digure: The Utopia behind the Scenes of Phantasy, Theater

Journal 35/3, (October 1983), 333357 (Lyotard, ibid., 327355); M. Lydon, Veduta

on Discours, figure, Yale French Studies 99 (2001), 1026; V. Constantinopoulous,

Discourse, Figure: Digression on the Lack of Reality, Architectural Design (March

1998), 3233 (Lyotard, ibid., 284286); M. Smith, From Discours, Figure, in H.

Pietersma, ed., Merleau Ponty: Critical Essays (Lanham, MD: University Press of

America, 1989), 309322 (Lyotard, ibid., 1823; 5359).3 Lyotard, ibid., 71.4 Lydon, Fiscourse Digure, supra n. 2, at 333n.

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itself visible if need be, but generally is not seen.5 It is the regulating

line, the Gestalt of a configuration, the architecture of a painting. 6 It

is an invisible scheme that organizes, as in the scheme of Euclidian

space as seen in Renaissance perspective.7 This kind of pictorial

representation is good form or a kind of plastic writing.8

The third kind, figure-matrix, is the most important, is what

others mean when they refer to Lyotards concept of the Figure,

and is what I shall be discussing.9 It is invisible in principle but itis not a structure, which is an intelligible order.10 It comes from

neither plastic nor textual space. Rather, the Figural comes from

the other space, beyond the intelligible or rational, which is tosay, the unconscious. The Figure is called the matrix because it is

the source of disruption to discourse. It is not a thing but an

energy or a force, like the wind, that works on the discursive

elements of language and art by disturbing or disrupting or com-

plicating linguistic and visual representation. It blocks or brings

together two discontinuous orders, e.g., signification and affectiv-

ity, to produce what is logically incompatible.11 Thus Figure cre-

ates a radical rupture with the rules of structural opposition that

control signification, representation and rational discourse. Figure

produces difference itself, which cannot be subsumed in the

structure of oppositions in language, or into an image or a form in

plastic art.12 In visual art, Figure disrupts the well formed image

and transgresses the law of good form. It creates and/or is bad

form or the formless. It is the working or movement of desire

and is seen for example in Jackson Pollacks action painting, which

is likened to drooling or dribbling.13

Lyotards model for the Figure is Freuds Interpretation of

Dreams: just as desire works on the figures in dreams and phantasies,

5 Lyotard, supra n. 2, at 271.6 Lydon ,Fiscourse Digure, supra n. 2, at 333n.7 Lyotard, supra n. 2, 277.

8Ibid., 271.9 A word of caution: terminology here is confusing. A figure is a shape or form, as

for example the figure of a man or umbrella. A Figure, on the other hand, is a

theoretical construct created by Lyotard and then used by Deleuze. I have tried to

maintain a clear distinction between these two by the use of small and capital letters.10 Lydon, Fiscourse Digure, supra n. 2, at 333n.11 Y. Bois and R. Krauss, Formless: A Users Guide (New York: Zone Books,

1997), 107.12 Lyotard, supra n. 2, 278.13 Ibid., at 277.

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so Figure works in linguistic and visual discourse.14 One of the rea-

sons Lyotard was interested in Freuds model was that presentations

in the unconscious are visual.15 There the word-presentations of

waking thought are worked over and disguised through processes

such as condensation and displacement. The dream pushes language

into visual images and makes it spatial, somewhat like a newspaper

text that has been crumpled.16 As it does this, it creates something

different from waking thought. For Lyotard, therefore, the dream issomething that works; it is the effect on language of the force ex-

erted by the figural (as image or as form).17 The dream molds the

force of desire, and just as that libidinal force is exerted on thingpresentations in the dream, it is also exerted on linguistic and visual

discourse to produce an excess.

Two qualities of dreams (and phantasies) are significant for Ly-

otards analysis of art. First, the unconscious is a-temporal: things

that are sequential appear simultaneously and this transgresses the

laws of rational thought. Second, since there is no negation in the

unconscious contradictory things can appear together. Thus dreams

and phantasies have the logic of but also or but and. Desire

transforms everything into its opposite, holding both of these things

together at once.18 This transgresses the laws of good (discursive)

form.

The capacity of something to be two different things is caused by

the alteration or pulsation of the drives, Eros and the death drive. 19

While Eros binds energy and conserves order, the death drive moves

toward the external, toward a total discharge of energy, to return life

to its original state; as such it unbinds energy and disrupts. Since the

14 See also Lyotards critique of (early) Lacan in Lydon, Dream-work, supra n. 2,

1955.15 Freud makes a distinction between word presentations and thing presenta-

tions (which are visual). In conscious thought, thing-presentations are bound to

word-presentations. In the unconscious, however, only thing-presentations are

found. In dreams, word-presentations are treated as thing-presentations and undergothe primary processes (condensation, displacement, etc.) just as thing-presentations

do. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London:

Karnac Books, 1973).16 Lyotard, supra n. 2, 247.17 Lydon, Dream-work, in supra n. 2, 51.18 R. Krauss, The Optical Unconsciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993),

221. Krauss provides an excellent analysis of Lyotards interpretation of Freuds

fantasy, A Child is Being Beaten.19 See the discussion in Lydon, Fiscourse Digure, supra n. 2, 352 ff.

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drives work independently of one another, they produce rhythms of

pulsation. The drives do not form a complementary system, however,

but rather are blocked together to occupy an identical position in

(libidinal) space simultaneously.20 This is the analogue (and the

source) for the Figure, as it both forms and de-forms.

The charge and discharge of pulsation of the pleasure principle

is an on/off throb, a recurrence, guaranteeing that an on will

always follow an off . This creates good form or rhythm. Thepulsation associated with the death drive, however, is experienced

as an interruption; existence followed by total extinction, as an

absolute break, that discontinuity without end that is death. Thisis the formlessness of the death drive operating below the pleasure

principle.21 Figure therefore expresses the pulsation of pleasure,

but it is the pulse as well of death and attempts to say what

cannot be said in discourse. It is not good form, rather it is the

bad form: the vehicle of undoing form.22

The Figure as both form and its transgression confines or ar-

rests difference on the very brink of absolute difference (the dif-

ference between life and death), on the razors edge in the

state of tension between tension and discharge, life and death, life-

death.23 Thus it repeats itself in the scansion of desire.24 What

particularly interests Lyotard is the edge of the fracture or gap. In

the same way that Freud hesitates between these two in the Fort/

Da, figurality as difference is the opening up of a spacing. 25 Thus

it is not an interval separating two terms that belong to the same

order, but an utter disruption of the equilibrium between order

and non-order. Figure de-constructs discourse: underneath the

figural: difference the principle of disorder, the incitement to

jouissance.26

20 Ibid., 343. See also the discussion in G. Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event,

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 98 ff.21 Krauss, supra n. 18, 222; Lydon, Fiscourse Digure, supra n. 2, 355.22 Bois, supra n. 12, 108.23 Lydon, Fiscourse Digure, supra n. 2, 355; Bennington, supra n. 21, 99.24 Lydon, Fiscourse Digure, supra n. 2, 355.25 This is not the spacing of opposition in a structure, the separating terms that

belong on the same plane. Rather it is a fracture, or chasm, with two sides of

widely differing altitudes. Lydon, Fiscourse Digure, supra n. 2, 354.26 Ibid., 334335. See J. Williams, Lyotard and the Political (London: Routledge,

2000), 6671.

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CEZANNE

According to Lyotard, all great art bears some degree of the form-less

qualities of the Figure and he was interested in modern painting

because it is primarily based on the Figure rather than on mimesis or

the representation of nature. For Lyotard, art following Cezanne and

Klee is the trace of an energy [affect] that condenses, displaces, fig-

ures forth, elaborates, without regard for the recognizable.27 Paint-

ing does not live by what it says or communicates, but by what

affects it conducts.28 The paradigmatic example is Cezanne.

We tend to forget a painting is simply colored paint on a flatcanvas. Instead we see a figure, a story, a meaning and read it like a

text. Lyotard and Deleuze, however, are not interested in the semi-

ology or iconology of paintings and are not interested in reading and

interpreting figures like texts. Rather, they are interested in what lies

outside of representation in the intensities, affects and sensations.

Those are not found in the discourse of a painting but primarily in

its materiality, in particular in color. In several instances they deal

with painters who privileged color relations over form and contour.

Cezanne is one of the greatest of the colorists.

For Lyotard and Deleuze (and countless others) Cezanne is the

founder of modern art. Both see Cezanne as the artist who broke withthe regulative regime of good form, the resolved and closed forms of

representation. In painting, good form is found in the structure im-

posed by Albertian perspective, in the contours of figures (whether

ideal as in Leonardo or realistic as in Vermeer) and in narration

(whether it be the Nativity or Rape of the Sabine Women). In

painting, these elements are roughly the equivalent of words and

grammatical rules in language and each poses a problem for the artist

who would create something new. It is, for example, difficult to paint

more than a single figure without introducing a narrative between the

figures, a story indicated by the relation of the bodies or their ex-

change of gazes. Cezannes paintings of bathers were revolutionary

because there are a number of figures but they do not exchangeglances and this blocks any narrative relation. Or to take another

example, Cezannes paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire do not

27 Lydon, Veduta, supra n. 2, 21 (Lyotard, supra n. 2, 238).28 Williams, supra n. 26, 70. Lyotard is responding to M. Merleau-Ponty,

Cezannes Doubt, in Sense and Non-sense, H. Dreyfus and P. Dreyfus, trans.

(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 11.

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establish space through Albertian perspective but rather through his

use of color.

Lyotard returned to painting and to Cezanne throughout his

works but it is sufficient here to locate his elementary point. Like

Deleuze, he argues that the artists task is to break out of discourse

received rules, forms, representations, and structures. This is the way

to change and the artist is an exemplary revolutionary in experi-

menting and working against structures and representations to createnew dispositions, i.e., new feelings, desires, intensities, transferences

and combinations of affect.29 And the prime artist-revolutionary is

Cezanne, who broke with the perspective, figuration and narrationthat has dominated art since the Quattrocento.

Cezanne accomplished his revolution by abandoning contour in

favor of the intensities and affects of color, in juxtapositions of single

patches of color that work against representation and unified space.

For Lyotard, Cezanne achieved a revolution similar to Freuds. Both

rejected a principle of unity Freud, the unity of consciousness;

Cezanne, the unity of image and perspective in favor of an un-

suppressible principle of dispersion.30

What Cezanne particularly disperses is the Renaissance canon

of perspective (the syntax of painting). As Lyotard points out, the

eye sees not only what the viewer focuses on frontally, but also

what is on the periphery. Thus the eye and its percepts are not

fixed but mobile. In focusing on an object, we repress the

peripheral. Any attempt to analyze or grasp the periphery however

reduces and falsifies it. There is therefore an irreconcilable differ-

ence between focal and lateral vision. For Lyotard, the periphery

is not merely blurred, it is other, and any attempt to grasp it loses

it. Here is difference within the visible. What the artist needs to

portray is the unbalanced configuration of space before any con-

struction. 31 The truth of painting therefore is not signification or

the straight lines of Albertian perspective but is posed otherwise

as plasticity and desire, curved extension32

29 Williams, supra n. 70 ff. See Lyotard, La peinture comme dispositif libidinal

[1972] and Freud selon Ce zanne [1971], in Des Dispositifs Pulsionnels (Paris:

Christian Bernard, 1980).30 Ibid., 75.31 Bennington, supra n. 20, 74.32 Lyotard, supra n. 2, 13. See B. Readings, Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics

(London: Routledge, 1991), 2426.

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This truth is revealed in Cezannes late paintings of Mont

Sainte-Victoire. There space is no longer in any way representa-

tional, it embodies, on the contrary, the deconstruction of the focal

zone by the peripheral curved range of the field of vision The

paintings do not present an image of the mountain out there,

represented according to the rules of Euclidian space or good

form. Rather they show the mountain in the process of giving

itself to be seen, so to speak, the landscape as it might be seenbefore looking at it 33 They present the density or thickness of

the visible which is lost once viewing is understood in term of

vision, of the transparency of an object for a subject. For [Ce-zanne] the image is divided from itself by its simultaneous par-

ticipation in radically different spaces, and the effect of this is to

testify to something that cannot be represented.34 It testifies to the

Figure, the unrepresentable excess of the image.

Cezanne insisted that the unrepresentable could not be accessed

by a grasping rationality but only through an active stillness or

immobility, through waiting for the mountain to give itself up. He

described this as waiting until little sensations arose, which sen-

sations he then registered on canvas in multiple planes and layered

patches of color. For Lyotard this welling up of sensation is the

event, the irruption of the figural into good form or a field of

knowledge.35 It permits the bodys own density to well up into the

field of perception and carry along with it an unconscious that

is the object of repression. The paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire

record the irruption of the Figural, which is to say, the irruption

of Cezannes desire.36

DELEUZE

Although this was to change, Lyotards formations and deformations

of the image through the pulsations of libidinal energy are not dis-similar to Deleuzes flows of energy. And indeed that part of

33 Lydon, Veduta, supra n. 2, 22.34 Readings, supra n. 32, 23.35 Bennington, supra n., 75; cf. Discours Figure, supra n. 2, 21.36 Krauss, supra n., 218; cf. Discours Figure, supra n. 2, 21.

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Lyotards project was praised by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-

Oedipus.37 They are like flows that imply the breaks effected by

points, just as the points imply the fluxion of the material they cause

to flow or leak: the sole unity without identity is that of the break-

flow. The pure figural element the figure-matrix Lyotard cor-

rectly names desire38 This comports with Deleuze and Guattaris

ideal of a positive energetics of the body bodies as desiring ma-

chines or Bodies Without Organs before they have been disciplined,socialized and brought to judgment. For Deleuze and Guattari, such

judgment is a form of negativity. It restrains or prevents the linking of

desire (force) to a fundamental yes of affirmation. For Deleuze more the philosopher than Lyotard attacking negativity required a

complete rethinking of representation and this required a complete

rethinking of the Western philosophical tradition beginning with

Plato. Negativity for Deleuze is founded on illusion. It is not some-

thing etched in nature but is simply a socially-induced restriction to

the intensity and positivity of force. Negative desire and the ethics it

generates is one of the problems to which Deleuzes philosophy and

aesthetics respond.

From his earliest work, Deleuze argues that the entire edifice of

philosophical conceptualization the method of determining con-

cepts, the concepts themselves and the representation of concepts is

faulty. The metaphysical foundations are based on illusions, as are

conceptualizations of the subject, the moral law, and ethics. Deleuze

will replace this with a philosophy of immanence derived from a

minority tradition including inter alia the Stoics, Leibniz, Spinoza,

37 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, R.

Hurley, et al. trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 243. There

is, however, another half to the story of Lyotards Freudianism (as there was for

Freud). Lyotard treats not only the deformation of images in the unconscious. He

also treats the way in which these are staged in scenarios that express the repressed

wish and it is clear that, implicitly at least, he adopted Freuds view of the law of

castration which means desire is grounded in lack. Thus the positive energy of the

Figure conflicts with the negative desire of the wish. In the second part of their review

of Discourse, Figure, Deleuze and Guattari criticize Lyotard precisely on this point

insofar as it prevented him from linking desire to a fundamental yes. Ibid. Lyotard

later claimed that Discourse, Figure was too bound up with Freud and too beholden

to the idea of the wish. Although he claimed that along with Levinas, Freud had been

his constant companion, he did not write anything overtly psychoanalytic until his

last and incomplete writings on the theme of infancy and nachtraglichkeit. He used

this, however, not as a psychoanalytic concept but rather as a philosophical one to

think a kind of knowledge that consciousness cannot access.38 Ibid., 244.

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Hume, Bergson and Nietzsche. His resultant logic of sensation finds

expression in modern art, beginning with Cezanne but seen most

explicitly in the work of Francis Bacon.

Deleuzes critique of representation is somewhat different from,

and more developed than Lyotards, in that it was tied to a more

general critique of the way in which concepts of the Western philo-

sophical tradition have come into being. His critique of philosophical

method can be seen in Bergsonism and then in Difference and Repe-

tition.39 He criticizes Platos abstraction of singularities into abstract

forms or essences, as well as Aristotelian method, which distributes

these into categories, i.e., a static structure of abstraction. In thistradition, concepts are copies of forms and representation follows the

concept; it is mimesis. For Deleuze, however, it is the other way

around. Representation determines and then reifies illusory concepts.

Representation therefore is not a vehicle for establishing truth or the

good. It is precisely the opposite representation simply embodies

and crystallizes illusory conceptions.

What holds for representations in philosophy holds for conven-

tions and cliches in every day life. In the Platonic tradition, actions

are measured by the transcendent criteria of a form (e.g., the Good),

as are the moral law and social conventions. But for Deleuze, these

criteria are representations and hence illusions. Furthermore, repre-

sentations have constituted various regimes of signs that have been

used to enforce social order (what kind of regime depends on the

social set-up of power).40 Regimes use representations to codify the

world in general and the body in particular and then regulate these

through the moral law as well as through social conventions and

orthodox beliefs. The point for Deleuze therefore is that it is not

enough to attack representation; it is just the tail of the dog. What is

necessary is to rethink the whole tradition of philosophical concepts

and this must start with a different method of thinking.

For Deleuze, the tradition of essences and their predications takes

an original multiplicity or heterogeneity of forces the infinite inter-

actions in which they occur and the infinite varieties they produce and suppresses their difference. Materials have their own singularities,

idiosyncrasies, and their own intensities or forces and traditional

39 G. Deleuze, Bergsonism, H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, trans. (New York:

Zone Books, 1988); G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, P. Patton, trans. (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1994).40 See R. Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts (London: Routledge,

2003), 83.

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philosophy denies the reality of pure difference a sensible existence of

its own. Reality is constituted by forces and these continuously

interact to produce difference, i.e., the differential resulting from the

confrontation of forces. Since all phenomenon is in the final analysis

the action and interaction of force, life is becoming rather than being,

natura naturans rather than natura naturata. Thus he replaces tradi-

tional theories of form and matter with the forces of becoming and of

creating. For Deleuze beyond prepared [formed] matter lies anenergetic materiality in continuous variation, and beyond fixed form

lie qualitative processes of deformation and transformation in con-

tinuous development.41

Life is the endless and dynamic occurrence ofevents of germination, deformation, and recreation. At the most

fundamental level, life is the collision and interaction of forces and

affects rather than a static array of bodies, beings, or forms.

For Deleuze traditional philosophical concepts have ultimately

produced a vision of the world constituted by organic bodies

organized and hierarchically ordered and hence regulated, forms.

While Deleuzes theory of force applies to all bodies, his observations

apply most especially to the body we call human. For Deleuze a body

is not an organism a coordinated, unified, regulated whole, with

senses that operate together in their reports of the outside world.42

Rather it should be understood as a body without organs (BWO),

an intensive body of sensation, sensation being an interaction of

forces. The BWO is a membrane across or through which forces flow,

a mediator between one body and the world of other bodies. Thus

whatever organization is attributed to the body is provisional, always

in the course of becoming or deforming.

For Deleuze, the forces of sensation are immanent in all interac-

tions of and with material. This is a world of invisible forces and

visible bodies, the body of sensation rendering visible the invisible

forces that play through bodies.43 In Discourse, Figure, Lyotard re-

gards these forces as the unconscious workings of desire. For Deleuze,

however, there is no distinction between mind and other phenomena.

Not only is desire energy and force but all phenomena are assemblagesof force. While these differences are substantial, for both Lyotard and

Deleuze, art or the Figure is what makes the invisible force appear.

41 D. Smith , Deleuzes Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality, in

P. Patton ed., Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 43.42 Supra n. 124.43 Ibid., 125.

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If for Deleuze the function of philosophy is to create new con-

cepts, the function of art is to create new sensations and this entails

releasing the sensation beneath and beyond representation. As for

Lyotard, the function of art is not to imitate but to appear. 44 Art

makes visible the invisible force for Lyotard the force of desire, for

Deleuze the force of sensation. For Deleuze, art creates the experi-

ence of sensation by bypassing the brain and showing on the nerves

the intensities and collisions of forces. Thus art is a matter ofexhibiting singularities and capturing intensities, just as for Lyotard it

is a matter of capturing the pulsations of drives. For both, this re-

quires artistic experimentation in order to break or loosen repressiveand oppressive structures. Deleuze, in particular, emphasizes the fact

that art is the creation of something new (although implicitly Lyotard

would agree). Art creates something that is not representation, cliche

or a conventional way of seeing things, nor is it the visual equivalent

of signification separated from bodies and their desires.

For Deleuze, the particular force of painting is that it shows the

reality of a body without organs, a body freed from organic represen-

tation. (Lyotards Figure, the formless or bad form produced by desire

is not dissimilar.) This is accomplished by forming and deforming

images through the use of color. For Deleuze, therefore, what Cezanne

paints is the body, not insofar as it is represented as an object, but

insofar as it is experienced as sustaining this sensation45 He shows

the sensation and the world of becoming, the folding force of moun-

tains, the germinative force of a seed, the thermic force of a landscape,

the applyness of apples.46 In Cezannes art, therefore, beyond figu-ration and representation there is sensation and that comes from a

power that exceeds every domain and traverses them all. This is a

power of rhythm, a power more profound than vision, hearing, etc..

As Cezanne said, this is a logic of the senses and is neither rational,

nor cerebral. 47

Deleuzes rhythm of sensation is somewhat similar to Lyotards

pulsations. It ultimately goes back to Klees theories of artistic

44 Ibid., 118, citing Henri Maldiney, Regard Parole Space (Lausanne: Editions

lAge dHomme, 1973).45 G. Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (London: Continuum, 2003),

35.46 Ibid., 57, 87. See D.H. Lawrence, Introduction to These Paintings, Phoenix:

The Posthumous Papers (New York, 1936), 578579.47 Supra n. 45, 42.

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creation, but Deleuzes immediate source is the phenomenologist

and art historian, Henri Maldiney, who identifies three movements

in the creation of painting.48 First, there is a chaotic world of

sensation (Cezannes abyss), then an opening toward creation, a

point that leaps into the realm of order and begins to move.49

Then comes a systolic condensation of elements in which self and

world are separated from chaos and definite shapes are formed.

That is followed by a diastolic eruption of forces that dissolvesthose shapes and establishes a pathic communication among the

components of the whole (Cezannes ecstasy, the blues!).50 Then

the chaos returns and it starts again. The systolic-diastolic patternis a rhythm of formation and deformation, appearing and disap-

pearing. For Maldiney this was the rhythm of the lived body. For

Lyotard it was the dissonant rhythm of the pulsations of the

drives, of binding and unbinding, of transformation and defor-

mation in dreams and Figure. For Deleuze however it is the

rhythm of the affective forces immanent within the real. 51

Along with Lyotard, Deleuze saw Cezannes revolution devel-

oping in two different ways in 20th century art: into pure

abstraction, as in Mondrians geometrical paintings, and into ab-

stract expressionism and action painting, as in Pollacks dribbles of

paint. For Deleuze, however, the problem with abstract art is that

it minimizes the force of chaos and is too dependent on line. It is

cerebral and had become a new code and form of representation

or signified. Abstract expressionism goes to the other extreme and

is immersed in the chaos of materiality. It cannot stand on its

own (literally: Pollack worked on a horizontal canvas). Deleuze

finds his ideal in Francis Bacons art of figuralism, a third way

between the figurative and the abstract.52

48 Maldiney, supra n. 44.49 Bogue, supra n. 40, 119 quoting Paul Klee, J. Spiller, ed., Notebooks, Vol. 1, R.

Manheim, trans. (New York: Wittenborn Art Books 1961), 4.50 Ibid., 120.51 R. Bogue, Gilles Deleuze: The Aesthetics of Force, in P. Patton, ed, Deleuze: A

Critical Reader (London: Blackwell, 1996), 264.52 Images of Bacons paintings, arranged by year, can readily be found at

www.francis-bacon.cx

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Bacons work is exemplary for Deleuze. It is figurative, indeed al-

most exclusively focused on the human body but these figures are

neither idealized nor naturalistic and in some ways they are analogous

to Cezannes mountains. Furthermore, throughout his work Bacon

was interested in the tensions or forces experienced by the body a

cough, hiccup, spasm, the desire to sleep, to vomit, turn over53

While these may be ordinary tensions, they show the body rousing itself

in minor movements from one state to another, which is to say, showthe movement and collision of energies. Although Bacon claimed he

was interested in the inertia of bodies, for Deleuze the dominant

characteristic of Bacons paintings is movement, large or small. On agrander scale, therefore, it can be said that Bacons paintings move

between inertia and arousal, figuration and deformation, contour and

chaos to create Figure the rhythms of force that stand on their own.54

Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation is a stunning combination

of the originality of Deleuze and the genius of Bacon, characteris-

tically including a minority tradition, in this case, of art historians.

It is a brilliant reading of Bacon (sometimes literally: it relies

heavily on Bacons interviews with David Sylvester).55 One can see

however the way in which Deleuze extends the idea of force and

with it Lyotards Figure (or the Figural). What Deleuze calls the

Figure emerges in Bacons paintings through the various combina-

tions and renditions of contour, form and structure (space). For

Deleuze the Figure in Bacon does not just show the forces that

operate under and destroy the figurative or representation. Rather it

goes beyond deformation to render sensation in itself. Where for

Lyotard the Figure is the energy and work of desire, for Deleuze it

is the rhythm of Life.

In approaching Bacons style, Deleuze first shows the various ways

in which Bacon presents sensation. He then deepens the analysis to

show how the forces of the sensations are composed through Bacons

material and techniques. Deleuze therefore identifies the three basic

elements of Bacons paintings: these are figure (bodies), contour

(rings, cubes, etc. which enclose bodies), and structure (the mono-chromatic ground of color). He further distinguishes the Figure or

53 Supra n. 45, 59.54 See J. Williams, Deleuze on J.M.W. Turner, in K. Ansell-Pearson, ed., Deleuze

and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer (London: Routledge, 1997), 233246.55 The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, 19621979, D. Sylvester,

ed., 3rd edn. (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987), 48.

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Figural from the figurative or representation. It implies the rela-

tionship of an image to an object that it is supposed to illustrate. 56

As had been the case with Cezanne, Bacons accomplishment was to

liberate the Figure from the figurative, i.e., from representation,

illustration and narrative.

Deleuze goes on to identify genres in Bacons paintings roughly

corresponding to periods in his work. In the first genre, Bacon iso-

lates single figures. In the second, he couples them. The third genre isrepresented by triptychs, which present multiple figures on separate

panels. Each of the genres combines the elements of figure, contour

and structure to produce three kinds of movements or collisions offorce. The three movements of isolation, deformation, and dissipa-

tion are analytic moments that illustrate more generally the logic of

sensation.

In the first movement of isolation, Bacon situates a single body in

a ring, box etc. The field (background color) envelops the contour

and presses in on the body to create vibrations between the two. This

is the systolic movement toward the condensation of a shape and the

vibration it creates characterizes simple sensation.

In the second and diastolic movement, the figure is deformed as

[a]n intense movement flows through the whole body, a deformed

and deforming movement57 Something inside it is happening and

exerting effort to free itself in order to become a Figure, become

being the operative word.58

For Deleuze the primary becoming of man is becoming-animal.

Roughly this means returning to un-organized and dis-organized

materiality, which for Deleuze is the common fact between man,

animal and nature. Bacon, for example, often treats the body or flesh

as meat.59 There is then a tension between the meat-flesh and the

more durable structure of bone, spine and teeth. For Deleuze [m]eat

is the state of the body in which flesh and bone confront each

other60 Flesh sinks into bone; it is drowsy, weighed down,

56 Supra n. 45, 2.57 Ibid., 19.58 Bogue, supra n. 40, 127.59 Bacon in supra n. 45, 24. (Bacon was fascinated by meat and carcasses in

butcher shops: Of course we are potential carcasses. Supra n. 55, 46). See e.g.,

Painting, 1946; Figure with Meat, 1954.60 Supra n. 45, 22.

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wounded, suffering. Bone on the other hand rises up through flesh as,

for example, the spine shows through a stretched back or teeth rise up

through the soft flesh of the mouth.61

One of Bacons most characteristic deformations is of the face.

For Deleuze the face is a structured, spatial organization that con-

ceals the head. The head is the more interesting organ since it is

dependent on the body and, as such, more integral to it.62 Rather

than the face being the locus of spirit (as in conventional portraits)the head is a spirit in bodily form It is the animal spirit of

man63 The head-meat is a becoming-animal of man.64 Bacon

captures this by undoing the face to reveal the head: in Bacons manyportraits, the face is rubbed out and distorted to reveal somewhat

animal-like features, like an animal we had been sheltering.65 In

these deformations, Bacon creates a zone of indiscernability or un-

decidability, which only art can penetrate.66 The zones of undecid-

ability here are between man and animal. Man becomes animal,

animal becomes spirit and most importantly, sensation is seen to pass

from one to another.

The third movement of force is dissipation, which completes the

diastolic. The body presses outward, trying to pass out of itself and its

contour to dissolve into the field of color. Bacon has several paintings

of a figure bending or vomiting over a washbasin, or sitting on a

toilet, or staring into a mirror. It is shown trying to escape or flow out

of itself, to disappear down or through a hole. The escape is into the

field of color and into materiality. The contour of the figure becomes

a membrane as the figure moves toward or into the field of color, the

material structure.67 In Figure at a Washbasin, 1976, for example, the

61 Ibid. See e.g., Head I, 1949; Three Figures and a Portrait, 1975. The difference

between meat/flesh and bone is evidenced in Bacons fascination with the crucifixion:

on the one hand, the sublime religiosity of the crucifixion shows an attempt to

redress the body upright toward the radiance of the heavens, but, on the other hand,

all transcendent uplift is countered by the weighty pulling of the flesh downward

toward its own animality. D. Polan, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, in C.Boundas and D. Olkowski, eds., Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy (London:

Routledge, 1994), 238. See Three Studies for Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion,

1944; Three Studies for a Crucifixion, 1962; Triptych Crucifixion, 1965.62 Supra n. 45, 20.63 Ibid.64 Ibid., 27.65 Ibid., 21. See e.g., Three Studies for Self Portrait, 1973.66 Ibid.67 Ibid., 15.

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body exerts an intense motionless effort upon itself to escape down

the blackness of the drain, to destiny.68 In escaping from itself, it

discovers the materiality of which it is composed.69

In a similar vein, the body can be shown in process of a full and

violent becoming, racked by spasms, wrenching cries, vibrant thrusts

of transmuting flesh.70 The most famous examples are Bacons

paintings after Velasquezs portrait of Pope Innocent X.71 Innocents

scream is the operation through which the entire body escapesthrough the mouth.72 It seems to flow into the field, as if the color

itself screams. This is what Deleuze means by painting the invisible

force, the sensation of the scream itself, not the horror beyond it,which would be a representation.73

Bacons final and most impressive genre is the triptych.74 These

are three panels with figures but without the traditional narrative

element. On each panel, single and/or double figures enter into

movements and produce sensations along the lines described above.

On top of those, however, further sensations are produced as the

sensations of the single panels interact. The sensations draw apart

from their individual panels and are released across the panels. This

produces multiple interactions and movements that explode across

the panels verticalhorizontal, descentrise, diastolesystole,

nakedclothed, augmentationdiminution.75 Sensations overlap. As

the figures move across the panels in all directions, they are sent into

accumulating and accelerating waves of transformation and undergo

endless change. The limits of sensation are broken, exceeded in all

directions.76 As color passes into the figure and the figure passes intocolor, the separation of force and material, sensation and body is

transcended. The intensive rhythm of force (systolicdiastolic) is no

longer dependent on figure but becomes the Figure.77

68 Ibid.69

Ibid., 5455.70 Polan, supra n. 61, 237.71 Among the many, see those painted in 1949 1951, 1953, 1960, 1961.72 Ibid., 16.73 Ibid., 60. See supra n. 55, 48.74 See e.g., Three Figures in a Room, 1964; Three Studies of the Human Body I &

II, 1970; Triptych In Memory of George Dyer, 1971; Triptych MayJune, 1973.75 Polan, supra n. 61, 244.76 Supra n. 45, 73.77 Ibid., 71, 73.

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If Deleuze describes what Bacon achieves, he is no less interested

in how he achieves it. The artist is someone who creates something

new, in this case sensation, but his manner of creation is no less a

lesson for all. According to Deleuze (and Bacon himself) there is no

blank canvas; one necessarily starts with representations, crystallized

images and cliches (Bacon often started his projects with reproduc-

tions, prints and photos). They form the initial image or plan that is

then disrupted by a catastrophe. This could be a line or patch ofcolor that goes off in a new direction, a random mark, a smudge, a

sponge thrown at the canvas; it becomes a manual diagram that

suggest new lines to develop. As the catastrophe scrambles or de-forms the initial image, the painting begins to take on a different

shape. It moves away from the original form and enters the world of

intuition and accident. (Deleuze quotes the Talking Heads: I am

changing my shape; I feel like an accident.)78

There is a zone of indiscernability between the catastrophe and the

new image. The one is no longer and the other is not yet. This is the

germinative chaos out of which the new form or rhythm emerges, the

self-forming, self-shaping activity of art. The essential point about

the diagram is that it is made in order for something [the Figure] to

emerge from it and if nothing emerges from it, it fails.79

The Figure emerges from the catastrophe through the force of

color. As Cezanne first demonstrated, you must pass through the

catastrophe for colors to arise80 Color provides a differential

relation of forces, the result of which is sensation. Thus the color

system itself is a system of direct action on the nervous system.81 It isthe differential relation upon which everything else depends. The

expansion of color generates Figural form but this is not represen-

tation, mimetic form or form imposed by contour. Rather it is a form

that is generated from within, that arises from within the field of

color, or the field of color forces. The formula of the colorists is: if

you push color to its pure internal relations then you have

everything.82 While structure, figure and contour can be thought in

78 See, e.g., Deleuzes discussion of Painting, 1946, supra n. 45, 156.79 Ibid., 159.80 Ibid., 111. See Conversations with Cezanne, M. Doran, ed., J. Cochran, trans.

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 114115.81 Ibid., 52. Deleuze liked Godards formula, its not blood, its red. See G.

Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, trans.

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 118.82 Supra n. 45, 139.

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terms of forces, they all converge in (the force of) color. They are

little more than pieces of a larger permutational or modulatory

assemblage governed by the vibratory powers of color83 It is color

that transforms reality.

In the section entitled Analogy, Deleuze discusses his problem

with structuralism, which is, as it was for Lyotard, the way in which it

is based on clear-cut units and rigorous oppositions. This he likens to

digital technology. Deleuzes model is more like the modulation andgradation of analogue technology.84 In painting color acts as the

modulatory assemblage. It is a force of permutation of the various

elements of structure and contour. It is an assemblage into whichfigurative forms are fed and out of which haptic color relations

emerge.85 Through the juxtapositions and modulations of hues there

is no longer an inside nor an outside, but only a continuous creation

of space, the spatializing energy of color.86 The interactions between

colors create continuous and variable movements oscillations,

perturbations, flows, twists, spasms, jolts and result in the forms of

the completed canvas, not as objects to be represented, but as

products of a self-forming process whereby color in its systolic and

diastolic unfolding spatializes space, spreads into monochrome

fields, fills out figures, communicates across contour membranes.87

The colors and the forms they create render visible the invisible forces

inherent in sensation working through the figure.88

In Bacons painting there is then first representation, crystallized

image and cliche. Subsequently, by virtue of the catastrophe and

diagram, it is deformed, reformed and subsumed within a field of

non-organic forces, i.e., color. At this point figures are hollowed out

and the Figure emerges from the catastrophe. Here we witness the

revelation of the body beneath the organism [the BWO], which makes

organisms and their elements crack or swell, imposes a spasm on

them, and puts them in relation with forces 89 The Figure here

takes on its particular Deleuzian twist: heterogeneous forms may be

caught up in the Figure. Bacon provides the final Deleuzian lesson in

83 Polan, supra n. 61, 251.84 See Bogue, supra n. 40, 132 ff.85 Ibid., 157.86 Supra n. 45, 134.87 Bogue, supra n. 40, 157.88 Supra n. 45, 151.89 Ibid., 160.

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the multiplicity, difference and possibility that comes before repre-

sentation. In this, the Figure is a matter of fact.

Not only the figures but also the painting itself must go from the

possibility of fact to fact itself where the whole is given at once.90 As

the hand executes the diagram the apparently arbitrary elements of

the painting coagulate in a single continuous flow that has its own

movement.91 This is where painting discovers how to pass from the

possibility of fact to the fact itself the pictorial fact.92 Themovement of force through the hand takes over from eye/mind to

achieve a new thing a new Figure arising through the material or

color. This is a way of seeing with the hand. With this the work of artquits the domain of representation to become experience.93

What we witness is an elaborate and continuous circulation of

force. It is not the imposition of form or concept seen by the eye and

the cognitive powers. Rather, as the painting takes on a life of its

own, the artist is as much led as leading. The painting develops, he

responds. He moves on a level of force that bypasses the brain and

works directly through the hand. For Deleuze this is where the

dichotomy between subject and object breaks down, where force and

formation in the artist and the Figure are one. For Deleuze, this

passage to haptic vision is the great moment in the act of painting.

This is where the artist seizes hold of life.94

If there is a definition of the ethical in Deleuze this is it: to effectuate

force and seize hold of life; to resist and liberate life from illusion,

opinion, dead ideas and representations. Art is and shows the way to

becoming-ethical, a process that necessarily defies law and judgment.

In an essay entitled To Have done with Judgment, Deleuze argues,

along with Nietzsche, that Christianity (including Kant) established a

new form of power: the power to judge.95 It organizes an organic

body, creates identifications and representations that constrain, and

judges any deviations. It puts man under an eternal debt or obligation

that can never be paid off. He is always before a judge (or the internal

judge of the superego) who applies the law of a transcendent good. This

90 Ibid., 159.91 Ibid., 160.92 Ibid.93 G.Deleuze Difference and Repetition, P. Patton, trans (London: Athlone, 1994),

56.94Supra n. 45, 161.95 G. Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, D.W. Smith and M.A. Greco, trans.

(London: Verso, 1998).

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prevents the emergence of any new mode of existence.96 To be ethical,

one must create the new and to do that one must have done with

judgment: what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying

judgment.97 By understanding the bodys intensities, its becomings,

and its will to power, one affirms ones forces and wrestles with

antagonistic forces. The ethical is therefore a process, of resisting, of

loosening up rigid molar structures so that they become more molec-

ular and permeable, of creating situations for de-territorialization andof pursuing lines of flight.98 In all these cases it is a question of

beginning with difference, with the heterogeneous, multiplicitous

energies and relations that constitute vital force, of seizing hold of life.One must harness forces and join them to create new ensembles, to

expand them and to paraphrase D.H. Lawrence, to make them whirl

until they harness the maximum force in all directions. 99 Thus the

ethical is what is creative creating new forms be they individual, social

or political in order to bring forth the difference that has until now

only been possible, just as Bacon did in his paintings. This is the way to

a justice that is opposed to all judgment.100

LYOTARD II

While Deleuze followed these Neitzschean paths of the positive desireof affirmation, in Libidinal Economy Lyotard intensified the positive

desire that had been implicit in Discourse, Figure.101 He reports,

however, that in the process, he came up against the terror of

injustice, and this could not be solved without consideration of

law.102 That led him to Kant and Levinas and an extended engage-

ment with the concept of the sublime.

The sublime is the experience of something so immense and

overpowering that the rational faculties are dismantled and the

powers of representation come to their limit. For Lyotard the sublime

is the experience of the event, the shock of the absolute Other (aka

96 Ibid., 135.97 Ibid.98 See Williams, supra n. 54.99 Supra n. 95, 134.100 Ibid., 127.101 J.-F. Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, I.H. Grant, trans. (London: Athlone Press,

1993) (1st published, 1974).102 J.-F. Lyotard, Just Gaming, W. Godzich, trans. (Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 1985).

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excess, lack, void, abyss). It is the experience of a differend that

reason cannot comprehend and it cannot be represented. It presents

the unpresentable.

For Lyotard, the essence of the sublime experience is its affects of

pleasure and pain (here he borrows from Burke). It is the threat of

privation (hunger, cold, dark and death) and the fear that nothing

more will take place followed by relief that, in the midst of the terror,

something is happening.103 (It is similar to the on/off pulsation ofdrives described in Discours, Figure and in his late works, he identified

it with primary affect which is only experienced later in apre`s coup.)104

Lyotard analogizes the experience of the sublime to Kants sei-zure by the moral law. (The content of that law is unknowable and

unrepresentable as are the criteria for judgments.) He combined this

with the Levinasian idea that the subject is always already hostage to

the Other. For Lyotard the sublime is the call or command of the

Other that places us under an obligation and judges us. We are taken

hostage by the sublime event and bound to an Other that cannot be

cognized or represented. The sublime event presents both the Other

as the excess of representation something that has no representa-

tion and the command that we bear witness to it. It is only through

the leveling of reason that we become receptive to this event. With

this turn to the law, against the unrestrained force of Bacon, Lyotard

juxtaposes the austerities of Barnett Newman.

NEWMAN

Barnett Newman was an abstract expressionist associated with

Rothko and Pollock and most known for his vast and rigorously

abstract color field paintings. They are distinguished by a flat, uni-

form field of color divided from top to bottom by two or three thin

lines of contrasting color called zips. Whos Afraid of Red, Yellowand Blue III for example is approximately one meter by two me-

ters.105 On the left edge there is a thin strip of bright yellow, on the

103 J.-F. Lyotard, Newman: The Instant, in The Lyotard Reader, supra n. 2, 240

49, 245. See also The Sublime and the Avant Garde, in The Lyotard Reader, supra

n. 2, 196211.104 See for example Heidegger and the jews, A. Michel and M. Roberts, trans.

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990) and Emma: Between Philoso-

phy and Psychoanalysis, in H.J. Silverman, ed., Lyotard: Philosophy, Politics, and

the Sublime (London: Routledge, 2002).105 Excellent reproductions of Newmans paintings can be found in A. Temkin,

Barnett Newman (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2002).

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right edge a somewhat wider strip of darkish blue. A vast expanse of

bright orange-red stretches between them. There is no figure, no

depth, nothing beyond the smooth, flat field of color. Newman

painted the zips having first applied masking tape to outline them.

When the zips were dry he tore off the tape and this leaves the

impression that the strip is incised into the field of color.

For Lyotard, the experience of a Newman painting is the experience

of the now of the sublime. It presents the occurrence, the momentwhich has arrived, the visual event in itself. There is no message; the

painting announces nothing; it is in itself an annunciation and

Newman allows it to present itself. The only purpose of Newmanspaintings is to present the presentation.106

As Simon Malpas points out, Lyotards selection of Newman is not

entirely fortuitous. Newman himself wrote extensively on the meta-

physics of painting, as well as on the sublime, and he insisted that the

subject matter of his paintings is artistic creation itself, a symbol of

Creation itself .107 This is why he called his strips of color zips, from

the Hebrew word tzimtzum, meaning the moment at which Yahweh

created the world by separating himself from the cosmos. In Onement

I, for example, a dark brownish-red field is bisected by a lighter

brownish-red zip. For Newman, creation comes out of chaos, its

beginning re-enacted by a line on empty canvas. Like a flash of

lightningin thedarkness or a line on an empty surface,in Creation, the

Word separates, divides, institutes a difference and therefore inau-

gurates a sensible world a world of color, of the painting.108 Without

the flash there would only be chaos but the flash of the tzimtzum,thezip

breaks light into colors and arranges them across the surface like a

universe.109 Creation (including artistic creation) is like the sublime

event: it is what happens (this) in the midst of the indeterminate.110

What happens is the sublime event of the painting before us.

Newmans most ambitious work is a series of fourteen black

and white paintings of the Stations of the Cross entitled Lema

Sabachthani (why hast thou forsaken me?). For Lyotard, We are still

106 Newman, supra n. 103, 241, 244.107 Ibid., 243. See S. Malpas, Sublime Ascesis: Lyotard, Art and the Event,

Angelaki 7 (2002) 199211, 201 and T. Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Museum

of Modern Art, 1971).108 Newman, supra n., 243.109 Ibid., 246.110 Ibid., 243.

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waiting for the Messiah who will bring meaning to human suffering.111

Appended to the series is another painting, now entitled Be II. It is

white with a cadmium red zip on one side and ragged black one on the

other (perhaps signifying man and death, respectively). The painting

does not offer a resolution or solution to Christs question. Rather it

presents a command Be: the recurrence of a prescription emanating

from silence112 Be the relief that there is is the response to the

terror of forsaken man.113 This is the sublime event: in the instant, outof nothing, something is happening: light and color are happening.

This instant of Newmans paintings is the birth of the ethical. For

Lyotard Newmans paintings give colour, line or rhythm the force ofan obligation within a face-to-face relationship his model cannot

be Look at this (over there); it must be Look at me, or to be more

accurate, Listen to me.114 The painting (as otherness, difference)

creates an obligation to respond and we are judged accordingly. Thus

while Deleuze strips art down to find a self-originating, self-germi-

nating sensation in Figure, Lyotard strips art down to find the figure

incised and divided by law.

For Lyotard, just as Newmans zips divide his paintings, the law

divides man from himself. Lyotard comes down firmly on the side of

castration, lack and debt and there is no hope of moving into credit,

of force and the body being joined in affirmative desire. Force is

necessarily constrained; some things are not Neitzschean and cannot

be affirmed. Rather, Being announces itself in the imperative. 115 The

law and being are born in the same moment and we exist under a

constitutive obligation. Looking inward, we are wounded by a law

that constitutes our uncanny Other, obliges us to it, and excludes it

from representation. Looking outward, there are the silent and

invisible Others to whom we are hostage and obliged, those who call

but who are not and cannot be represented.

For Lyotard, art is an event that presents the unpresentable. In so

doing it bears witness to the remainder, what remains in excess of

representation, and commands us to do likewise. The virtue of art is

not that it unleashes unrestrained energy; the virtue of art is that itimposes an obligation: to respond, to recollect, to open ourselves to

see/hear the trace/voice of the unrepresentable, to bear witness. And

111 Ibid., 248.112 Ibid.; Malpas, supra n. 107, 208.113 Ibid.114 Ibid., 242.115 Ibid., 248.

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we are judged in terms of that obligation. Unlike, Deleuze, Lyotard

can never have done with judgment.

CONCLUSION: THE ARC AND THE ZIP

Neither Deleuze nor Lyotard happened to write about Bacon or

Newman. They chose their art carefully for its defining characteristics

in Bacon, the arc of the figure; in Newman, the zip through the field.

The arc and the zip are two paradigms for ethics and for justice. One

shows the confrontation, then expansion of forces until they leap

beyond the canvas into a rhythm of the future. The other sets force in

motion but also limits it with a kind of Kantian Achtung! If I were to

continue this study, it would be to interrogate the dynamics of these

two lines.

Deleuze (and Bacons) arcs are rhythmic. Each individual moment

is taken up into the whole. While they are energetic, they are also

recurrent and for all their deformation, the figures and paintings are

curiously whole and graceful. Even as sensation resonates and is

separated from bodies (as Deleuze would have it) it is reabsorbed into

the Figure. If this is an analogue for ethical action, it suggests a kind

of parthenogenesis. It would seem that the ethical actor never gets

beyond himself. To be sure, he absorbs what is external and then,transformed, projects his new energy back into the standardizations

of every day life. This is the spiral of the eternal return. But what he

takes back is himself. It is questionable how productive this is. For

Lyotard, on the other hand, the zip presents the law, the event that

interrupts just as for Newman, creation is the event in which God

separates from himself. It stands outside of and disrupts the arc of

self-generation. The shattering of unity guarantees there will be no

reabsorption. The division recognizes something other than self; the

ethical is produced by two rather than one.

For now, I offer no resolution: between Bacons movement and

Newmans austerity; Deleuzes affirmation, Lyotards reality princi-

ple; Deleuzes optimism, Lyotards responsibility; Deleuzes long,

detached horizon of revolution, Lyotards more urgent view of the

least intolerable. The Deleuzian subject hovers on the edge of

romantic heroism and risks solipsism,116 Lyotards subject teeters on

116 His examples do not always inspire confidence, cf. General Cipriano as the god

of war, Huitzilopochtli, in D.H. Lawrences ed., The Plumed Serpent: Quetzalcoatl

(London: Martin Secker, 1926).

MARTY SLAUGHTER

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the brink of cynicism and risks paralysis. Each has its force as well

as its shadow.

If there is no resolution, there is a modest observation. Art (in

both senses of the word) gives the lie to an illusory and oppressive

idea of representation. Law and its order are based on representation

and as such might be considered beautiful. Behind representation

however is art, just as behind the beauty of the law is the sublimity of

justice.

Kent Law School

University of KentCanterbury, Kent CT2 7NZ

UK

E-mail: [email protected]

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the arc and the zip -- deleuze and lyotard on art

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