5. The Assemblage of Art
5.2 The Assemblage and Diagram of Art
“Art treats illusion as illusion: therefore it does not wish to deceive; it is true”, to quote Nietzsche once again.379 Based on the notion of art as a simulacrum, one can agree with him. Art is apparition. This is a direct opposite to the conception of art as representation. To treat illusion as illusion is to affirm it and then end the sentence. Nothing to add to it.
If we oppose illusion to anything else, we bring in the relation of art’s representation of something: art versus its object, art versus expression, art versus truth. Illusion must not be understood in its evaluative meaning as a lack of something. Art as illusion does not
379 Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”, p. 84.
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lack essence or truth, since it does not promise them in the first place.
As Douglas Thomas notes, it is namely because art cannot provide the truth – understood as internal resemblance to a Form or an essence – it also cannot be judged according to representation and truth-value.
Art is, then, singular with no resemblance and equivalence.380
Art, as understood in Nietzschean way as singular, concerns sensation. This is what Deleuze and Guattari affirm: “Aesthetic figures, and the style that creates them, have nothing to do with rhetoric. They are sensations: percepts and affects, landscapes and faces, visions and becomings”.381 Art has a privileged position in the examination of the conditions of real experience, since art uses percepts and affects to create “a being of sensation”. By creating a material thing – a “monument” – the artist strives to express the nonsubjective elements of a pre-individual world that is understood as immanence. The sensations produced by art flow “beyond” the subjective sensations of the artist or the spectator; Deleuze and Guattari state: “Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent of a state of those who experience them. Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them. Sensations, percepts, and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived”. 382
There is, then, autonomy to sensation. In subjective experience the dimension of sensation is one that precedes cognition, bestowal of meaning and representation. Sensation is the domain of the affect, as described in chapter two. It is the “micro-perceptive”, vibratory realm of “silent” neural activity below the threshold of consciousness.
Deleuze and Guattari describe it as: “Sensation is excitation itself … Sensation contracts the vibrations of the stimulant on a nervous surface or in a cerebral volume: what comes before has not yet disappeared when what follows appears”.383 This description locates the birth of sensation in the contractive moment of habit, as discussed in chapter one. Sensation can thus be understood as formative in two senses: as normative in producing a habitual body, and as mutative in expressing the preindividual nature that is becoming. Sensation
380 Douglas Thomas, Reading Nietzsche Rhetorically (New York: The Guilford Press, 1999), p. 26.
381 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 177.
382 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 164.
383 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 211.
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operates in the virtual temporal dimension of the past and the future, making possible the actualised instances of present.
SENSATION AS MICROPERCEPTION
In considering sensation as the virtual form of perception, Deleuze utilises Leibniz’s theory of perceptivity, as mentioned in chapter one of the present work. Deleuze does this in order to give an account to the nature of the pre-individual or transcendental field. To distil Deleuze’s conception of perception into a single sentence: the conditions of real experience are obscure and virtual perceptions (sensations). The basis of this notion lies in Leibniz’s concept of the monad, according to which every individual expresses the totality of the world, yet in an obscure and confused manner: “Every monad … expresses the entire world, but obscurely and dimly because it is finite and the world is infinite”. 384 The individual is, in theory, affected by every other individual in the world. Obviously, most of the influence of this background noise or the “mass of dancing particles of dust” is minute and thus remains obscure. What is clear and distinct to us is but a narrow searchlight in the vast darkness of the night.
As was discussed in chapter one, according to Deleuze perception takes place at the limit of its becoming conscious. This limit is the condition for there to be an evolving consciousness at all, since if the “insistence” of accumulating microperceptions did not force the perception over the threshold of consciousness, there would be no need for a new perception of the world. Deleuze notes:
“minute, obscure, confused perceptions … make up our macroperceptions, our conscious, clear, and distinct apperceptions.
Had it failed to bring together an infinite sum of minute perceptions that destabilize the preceding macroperception while preparing the following one, a conscious perception would never happen”.385 Thus, perception amounts to a collapse – constantly tipping over the edge of a catastrophe of the faculties.
The minuscule “neural” perceptions constitute both conscious perception as well as the passage from one perception to another.
This is the assemblage-like nature of experience. The passage from
384 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 86.
385 Deleuze, The Fold, p. 86, my emphasis.
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one moment to another is due to the metastable or supersaturated condition of the microperceptions. Deleuze queries: “How could a feeling of hunger follow one of satisfaction if a thousand tiny, elementary forms of hunger (for salts, for sugar, butter, etc.) were not released at diverse and indiscernible rhythms? And inversely, if satisfaction follows hunger, it is through the sating of all these particular and imperceptible hungers”.386
From the point of view of consciousness, microperceptions are unthinkable. They are the invisible, inaudible, untouchable forces of the world. Yet, when considered from the point of view of individuation-as-assemblage, the microperceptive level of sensation provides component parts for the macroassemblage of a perceiving subject. Every perceived phenomenon is akin to the roar of the sea: a whole composed of minute parts, synthesised to an object-form by the consciousness. Another wording for this notion is to state it in terms of the actualisation of virtual singularities, manifested in the intensities accumulating and pressing themselves “into” perception.
Conscious perception is the actualisation of virtual microperceptions.
As was discussed earlier regarding the formation of an assemblage, the manifest properties displayed by the individual-as-assemblage do not accumulate from the “lower” level of components to the “higher” level of (relative) whole in a causal and determinate way. As was shown by Deleuze in his reading of Kant’s theory of the synthesis of consciousness and the eventual disharmony of the faculties, the genetic condition for experience resides in radical difference. Likewise, in his reading of Leibniz, Deleuze opposes the simple “from parts to whole” linearity in the formation of perception.
This would be a simple accumulation of sub-representative perceptions over time until the moment that the threshold of consciousness is crossed and perception is thus produced. Rather, the genetic process of a perception is differential, not causal. Subjectivity – or being-individual – is subtractive. We express the whole of the world, the plane of immanence, but only obscurely; the conscious perception, such as that of the sea, is in turn clear but confused. The conscious perception is a subtraction, and thus confusion, of the microperceptions which constitute it. We do not fathom the roar of the sea as an aggregate of individual waves, let alone of single drops of
386 Deleuze, The Fold, p. 87.
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water. Perception is given to us by the way of variations of intensities:
relational aggregates which point towards sensation rather that perception.
The work of art is “a bloc of sensations”, write Deleuze and Guattari.387 Art utilises the material dimension in order to draw expressive qualities out of it. Art addresses the problem of the genesis of perception, experience and meaning and, as such, functions as a destabilizing force in an assemblage. The actual work of art, understood as an assemblage, consists of variable components according to its type, genre, historical situation and cultural function.
As Deleuze and Guattari state, art takes place in heterogeneous forms:
“In no way do we believe in a fine-arts system; we believe in very diverse problems whose solutions are found in heterogeneous arts”.388 Each art, each genre and each work of art posits itself as an exploration of a particular problematic concerning the genesis of experience. If there are unifying factors in all the different works of art, they are that of the medium of sensation and the milieu of the plane of composition. As Elizabeth Grosz interprets it, by the plane of composition Deleuze and Guattari refer to the assemblage of art which includes all works of art, traditions, styles, methods, techniques and such as its component parts. They are heterogeneous parts, and thus the only thing they may share is their functioning as components in the actual assemblage of art.389
OUTSIDE THE LIVED: THE AUTONOMY OF ART
As art concerns sensation, there may be a tendency to see it in vitalist terms as life’s self-actualisation. The artist would stand in as the mouthpiece of this, recounting the “lived” through his or her works.390 This would, however, go against the grain of Deleuze’s Lucretian lesson which states that the diversity of the world does not produce a totality. The work of art as the expression of the lived would already presuppose the boundaries of life and bestow upon itself a kind of organicism or “fleshism”, as Deleuze’s critique of the
387 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 164, original emphasis.
388 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 300.
389 Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art, p. 70. However, Grosz does not formulate the plane of composition in terms of assemblage.
390 Claire Colebrook recognises this tendency in Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed, pp. 100–101.
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phenomenological focus on the lived body is phrased.391 To conceive art as addressing not the lived, but the undifferentiated life, one must attest to the autonomy of sensation. The affects and percepts of art
“belong” neither to the observer, nor to the artists but instead arise from the “unlived,” indeterminate life, a life.
This indeterminacy requires that the assemblage model of the work of art must be supplied with another axis, in addition to the dimensions of content-expression and territorialization-deterritorialization. This axis is of the line of flight (vanishing point, ligne de fuite) and it leads to the “diagrammatic” part of the assemblage. The work of art as assemblage can be fathomed to consist of both matters of content and expression: art happens when matter becomes expressive. Recall the territorial beginnings of art in animality: a bird arranging – composing – the elements of its milieu and effecting the emergence of expressive qualities out of the material components of its arrangement. As Deleuze and Guattari phrase it in musical terms, the composition of (material) milieu components forms (an expressive) territory as the refrain, as discussed in chapter two of this study. Even though the refrain is a musical concept, my view is that it can be utilised to approach the diagrammatic dimension of all kinds of art-assemblages.
Deleuze and Guattari provide a three-part exposition of the formation of the refrain in A Thousand Plateaus. First, we encounter a child afraid in the dark, singing to himself under his breath to keep the fear at bay. This act gives the surrounding darkness a human face, organises a point of stability into the unknown terrain. It is the first step of the refrain: a leap from chaos to the beginnings of order.
Secondly, the refrain constitutes a dimension as it organises not only a point, but also a space: the space of home. This can be observed in the comforting sounds of the radio or television while we are at home or the rhythms of an animal patrolling its territory. Thirdly, the territory is opened to other territories: someone goes outside his or her usual patterns, honks the horn of the car when leaving for a road trip or hollers greetings while entering someone else’s yard. Thus, the refrain – a rhythmic pattern which delineates a territory – possesses three aspects: a point of stability, a space of property and an opening to the outside. Correspondingly, three types of assemblages can be
391 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 178.
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categorised: infra-assemblage with directional components, going from chaos to the threshold of territority; intra-assemblage with dimensional components, organising the emergent territorial assemblage, and interassemblage with components of passage, opening the territorial assemblage to outside.392
The territory is an expression of a certain set of spatio-temporal coordinates possessed, or rather expressed, by a given individual. However, the refrain (movement from content to expression) is, in turn, nothing but the “material” content of music or other form of art. There must be another assemblage able to deterritorialize the refrain and make it the content of a “higher” level of expression. This second-tier assemblage Deleuze and Guattari call a diagram or the abstract machine.393 In terms of the ontological planes, the refrain still occupies the plane of organisation of Forms and Substances, as it is composed of the spatio-temporal rhythms of an individual being and functions as the maintaining dynamic of this being. The territory holds on to the rhythm of the refrain. The deterritorialization of the refrain-assemblage is only relative, since it introduces a reterritorialization, a re-settlement, of the assemblage.
The refrain is the voice, producing meaning, recognition and identity.
The diagrammatic line of flight traversing the refrain-assemblage is the noise, a scrambling of the familiar code and an introduction of the heterogeneous element. We move from the Kantian aesthetic comprehension of rhythm into the sublime catastrophe of the disjunction of the faculties. To make art out of the refrain is to confront this catastrophe.
I propose that Elizabeth Grosz’s fine example of the difference between natural and sexual selection illustrates the difference between relative and absolute deterritorialization in the refrain. According to her, the rhythmic patterns of interacting animal milieus form the refrain as the dimensionality proper to a certain individual. These homely terrains are constituted of, and in turn constitute, the relations a certain animal enters into and likewise make up the animal’s functioning in natural selection. In short, the territory functions as the graph of the possible. It is only when we enter the properly aesthetic domain of the expressive that we break up the
392 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 311–312.
393 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 141.
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boundaries of the natural and gain access to the “excessive”
dimension of the sexual. Art is excess, in a sense that reminds one of Georges Bataille. Excess as the force that traverses life, but does not reduce life into self-realisation: the force that exceeds the boundaries of life, puts it at risk, creates something for its own sake.394
The abstract machine can be understood as, literally, the diagram of a given assemblage. It lays out the space of possibility for a given assemblage and, as a virtual process, is not reducible to the content-expression axis of assemblages. Deleuze and Guattari state:
An abstract machine in itself [in contrast to assemblages] is not physical or corporeal, any more than it is semiotic; it is diagrammatic (it knows nothing of the distinction between the artificial and natural either). It operates by matter, not by substance; by function, not by form. Substances and forms are of expression ‘or’ of content.
But functions are not yet ‘semiotically’ formed, and matters are not yet ‘physically’ formed. The abstract matter is pure Matter-Function – a diagram independent of the forms and substances, expressions and contents it will distribute.395
Diagram thus denotes the construction of the real “yet to come”, the virtual potentiality for the qualitative change of a certain assemblage.
As the quotation above suggests the diagram does not conform to identity bestowed by substance or form, but instead addresses the dynamics of matter. In art this “diagrammatism” appears as the problematisation of the work of art’s own medium or “support”. The diagram is the movement from accepting a certain arrangement of elements as it usually is perceived to seeing the assemblage in an entirely new perspective. A major part of Deleuze’s work has been the analysis of different types of artistic practises and the location of their respective diagrams. Cinema, images and the dismantling of the sensory-motor schema; music, refrain and its deterritorialization;
painting, figures and nonrepresentative diagrams; literature, language and its stuttering… All these diagrammatic functions open up the perception of the work of art into a sensation and offer glimpses of the world outside the lived existence of a subject. In what follows I
394 Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art, pp. 54–55, 63.
395 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 141.
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wish to address one instance of diagrammatism in the practice of music – and especially in the field of music I term phonographic.