11
Art is thus confused with a cultural object and may give rise to any of the discourses to which anthropological data in general lend them- selves. One could do a history, sociology, or political economy of it, to mention just those few. One can easily show that its destination, anthropologically speaking, undergoes consid- erable modification depending on whether the artwork ÒbelongsÓ to a culture that is tribal, imperial, republican, monarchical, theocratic, mercantile, autocratic, capitalist, and so on, and that it is a determining feature of the contemporary work that it is obviously destined for the museum (collection, conserva- tion, exhibition) and for the museum audience. This approach is implied in any ÒtheoryÓ of art, for the theory is made only of objects, in order to determine them. But the work is not merely a cultural object, although it is that too. It harbours within it an excess, a rapture, a potential of associations that overflows all the determinations of its ÒreceptionÓ and Òproduc- tion.Ó Jean-Fran ois Lyotard, ÒCritical ReflectionsÓ 93 H ow could it happen that in thinking about art, in reading the art object, we missed what art does best? In fact we missed that which defines art: the aesthetic Ð because art is not an object amongst others, at least not an object of knowledge (or not only an object of knowledge). Rather, art does something else. Indeed, art is precisely antithetical to knowledge; it works against what Lyotard once called the Òfantasies of realismÓ (The Postmodern Condition 93). Which is to say that art might well be a part of the world (after all it is a made thing), but at the same time it is apart from the world. And this apartness, however it is theorised, is what constitutes artÕs importance. In this paper I want to think a little about this apartness; this ÒexcessÓ or ÒraptureÓ which, as Lyotard remarks above, constitutes artÕs effectiv- ity over and above its existence as a cultural object. I want to claim that this excess need not be theorised as transcendent; we can think the aesthetic power of art in an immanent sense Ð through recourse to the notion of affect. Before moving on, however, a backward glance. What happened? What caused this aesthetic blindness? In the discipline of art history there were, are (at least) two factors in play. First, Marxism (or ÒThe Social History of ArtÓ) and the propensity to explain art histori- cally, through recourse to its moment of produc- tion. Second, deconstruction (or ÒThe New Art HistoryÓ) and the propensity to stymie (histori- cal) interpretations, whilst still inhabiting their general explanatory framework. Marxism and deconstruction: understanding art as representa- tion, and then understanding art as being in the crisis in representation; appealing to origins as final explanation, and then putting the notion of 125 simon o’sullivan THE AESTHETICS OF AFFECT thinking art beyond representation ANGELAKI journal of the theoretical humanities volume 6 number 3 december 2001 ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/01/030125-11 © 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of Angelaki DOI: 10.1080/09697250120087987

THE AESTHETICS OF AFFECT: thinking art beyond …simonosullivan.net/articles/aesthetics-of-affect.pdfaesthetics of affect origin under erasure. First aesthetics fell foul of Marxism

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Page 1: THE AESTHETICS OF AFFECT: thinking art beyond …simonosullivan.net/articles/aesthetics-of-affect.pdfaesthetics of affect origin under erasure. First aesthetics fell foul of Marxism

Art is thus confused with a cultural object andmay give rise to any of the discourses to whichanthropological data in general lend them-selves One could do a history sociology orpolitical economy of it to mention just thosefew One can easily show that its destinationanthropologically speaking undergoes consid-erable modification depending on whether theartwork OgravebelongsOacute to a culture that is tribalimperial republican monarchical theocraticmercantile autocratic capitalist and so onand that it is a determining feature of thecontemporary work that it is obviouslydestined for the museum (collection conserva-tion exhibition) and for the museum audienceThis approach is implied in any OgravetheoryOacute ofart for the theory is made only of objects inorder to determine them But the work is notmerely a cultural object although it is that tooIt harbours within it an excess a rapture apotential of associations that overflows all thedeterminations of its OgravereceptionOacute and Ograveproduc-tionOacute

Jean-Franois LyotardOgraveCritical ReflectionsOacute 93

How could it happen that in thinking aboutart in reading the art object we missed

what art does best In fact we missed that whichdefines art the aesthetic ETH because art is not anobject amongst others at least not an object ofknowledge (or not only an object of knowledge)Rather art does something else Indeed art isprecisely antithetical to knowledge it worksagainst what Lyotard once called the Ogravefantasies ofrealismOacute (The Postmodern Condition 93) Whichis to say that art might well be a part of the world(after all it is a made thing) but at the same timeit is apart from the world And this apartnesshowever it is theorised is what constitutes artOtildesimportance

In this paper I want to think a little about thisapartness this OgraveexcessOacute or OgraveraptureOacute which asLyotard remarks above constitutes artOtildes effectiv-

ity over and above its existence as a culturalobject I want to claim that this excess need notbe theorised as transcendent we can think theaesthetic power of art in an immanent sense ETHthrough recourse to the notion of affect

Before moving on however a backwardglance What happened What caused thisaesthetic blindness In the discipline of arthistory there were are (at least) two factors inplay First Marxism (or OgraveThe Social History ofArtOacute) and the propensity to explain art histori-cally through recourse to its moment of produc-tion Second deconstruction (or OgraveThe New ArtHistoryOacute) and the propensity to stymie (histori-cal) interpretations whilst still inhabiting theirgeneral explanatory framework Marxism anddeconstruction understanding art as representa-tion and then understanding art as being in thecrisis in representation appealing to origins asfinal explanation and then putting the notion of

1 2 5

simon orsquosullivan

THE AESTHETICS OFAFFECTthinking art beyond representation

ANG ELAK Ijournal of the theoretical human itiesvolume 6 number 3 december 2001

ISSN 0969-725X printISSN 1469-2899 online01030125-11 copy 2001 Taylor amp Francis Ltd and the Editors of AngelakiDOI 10108009697250120087987

aesthetics of affect

origin under erasure First aesthetics fell foul ofMarxism A disinterested beauty A transcendentaesthetic Ideological1 Then it fell foul of decon-struction The apparatus of capture that is decon-struction Derrida neatly reconfiguring thediscourse of aesthetics as a discourse ofon repre-sentation Aesthetics is deconstructed and artbecomes a broken promise2 Both Marxism anddeconstruction were still are powerful critiquesHowever deconstruction especially is negativecritique par excellence indeed it is implicitly acritique of Marxism (so that Marx and Derridawill always be troublesome bed mates at least inthis sense)3

Deconstructive reading is not itself a badthing indeed it might be strategically importantto employ deconstruction precisely to counteractthe effects of to disable a certain kind ofaesthetic discourse (deconstruction as a kind ofexpanded ideological critique) However afterthe deconstructive reading the art objectremains Life goes on Art whether we will it ornot continues producing affects What is theOgravenatureOacute of affects and can they be decon-structed Affects can be described as extra-discursive and extra-textual4 Affects aremoments of intensity a reaction inon the bodyat the level of matter5 We might even say thataffects are immanent to matter They arecertainly immanent to experience (FollowingSpinoza we might define affect as the effectanother body for example an art object hasupon my own body and my bodyOtildes duration6) Assuch affects are not to do with knowledge ormeaning indeed they occur on a different asig-nifying register7 In fact this is what differenti-ates art from language ETH although language toocan and does have an affective register indeedsignification itself might be understood as just acomplex affective function (meaning would bethe effect of affects)

Of course from a certain perspective affectsare only meaningful within language Indeed theaffect can be OgraveunderstoodOacute can be figured asalways already a representation of what we mightcall the Ur or originary affect ETH the latter posi-tioned as an unreachable (and unsayable) originagain so much for deconstruction And yetaffects are also and primarily affective There is

no denying or deferring affects They are whatmake up life and art8 For there is a sense inwhich art itself is made up of affects Affectsfrozen in time and space Affects are then to useDeleuzo-Guattarian terms ETH and to move theregister away from deconstruction and away fromrepresentation ETH the molecular OgravebeneathOacute themolar The molecular understood here as lifeOtildesand artOtildes intensive quality as the stuff that goeson beneath beyond even parallel to significa-tion9

But what can one say about affects Indeedwhat needs to be said about them Certainlyin a space such as art history where deconstruc-tive ETH let alone semiotic ETH approaches to art arebecoming indeed have become hegemonic theexistence of affects and their central role in artneeds asserting For this is what art is a bundleof affects or as Deleuze and Guattari would saya bloc of sensations waiting to be reactivated bya spectator or participant10 Indeed you cannotread affects you can only experience themWhich brings us to the crux of the matter expe-rience Paul de Man as a more or less typicalspokesperson for that melancholy science that isdeconstruction writes OgraveIt is a temporal experi-ence of human mutability historical in the deep-est sense of the term in that it implies thenecessary experience of any present as a passingexperience that makes the past irrevocable andunforgettable because it is inseparable from anypresent or futureOacute (148ETH49)

As with Derrida so with de Man present expe-rience ETH the moment the event ETH is inaccessibleto consciousness All we ever have is its trace (weexperience OgravepassingOacute moments) If the affect OgraveisOacuteprecisely present experience it could be saidfollowing de Man et al that all we ever have is akind of echo the representation of affect Nowthis is a clever and beguiling story giving theaffect a logocentric spin But I wonder is theaffect really of this type Is the affect transcen-dent in this sense (beyond experience) Orrather is it not the case as I have alreadysuggested that the affect is immanent to experi-ence11 and that all this writing about the affect isreally just that writing Writing which producesan effect of representation (Parodying Derrida alittle we might say that by asking the question

1 2 6

orsquosullivan

Ogravewhat is an affectOacute we are already presupposingthat there is an answer (an answer which must begiven in language) We have in fact placed theaffect in a conceptual opposition that always andeverywhere promises and then frustrates mean-ing)

So much for writing and for art as a kind ofwriting In fact the affect is something elseentirely precisely an event or happening Indeedthis is what defines the affect It is not that deMan (or Derrida for that matter) is wrong Assubjects we can certainly be positioned and posi-tion ourselves in de ManOtildes temporal predicament(a name for which is representation) This hasoften been the way in the West ETH in modernismand in postmodernism Indeed we might sayfollowing Michael Fried and his detractors thatthis oscillation between aesthetics and its decon-struction has animated the discourse of arthistory up to today12 But this deconstructivemechanism this way of thinking art (andourselves) inevitably closes down the possibilityof accessing the event that is art Indeed withinthis mechanism art is either positioned as tran-scendent or with deconstruction is alwaysalready positioned and predetermined by thediscourse that surrounds it ETH the event as alwaysalready captured by representation Art herebecomes a broken promise a fallen angel

But is this the end of the story Might therein fact be a way of rescuing art from this pre-dicament this double bind without necessarilyreturning to a traditional transcendentaesthetic Indeed how might we think art asevent This is a slippery area ETH and much recentphilosophy has been written on how to think theevent13 It is almost a question of faith Eitheryou side with deconstruction the event as alwaysalready constituted determined by the scene ofthe event Or you get a little more religious theevent as something genuinely unexpectedImportantly this need not involve a transcendentaesthetic (no return to Clement Greenberg noreturn to Kant) In fact there may be a way ofreconfiguring the event as immanent to thisworld as not arriving from any kind of transcen-dent plane (and as not transporting us there) butas emerging from the realm of the virtual In therealm of the virtual art ETH art work ETH is no longer

an object as such or not only an object butrather a space a zone14 or what Alain Badioumight call an Ograveevent siteOacute Ogravea point of exile whereit is possible that something finally mighthappenOacute (84 n 5) At any rate art is a placewhere one might encounter the affect

Such an accessing of the event might involvewhat Henri Bergson calls attention a suspensionof normal motor activity which in itself allowsother OgraveplanesOacute of reality to be perceivable (anopening up to the world beyond utilitarian inter-ests) (101ETH02) Following Bergson we might saythat as beings in the world we are caught on acertain spatio-temporal register we see only whatwe have already seen (we see only what we areinterested in) At stake with art then might bean altering a switching of this register New(prosthetic) technologies can do this Switchingtemporal registers time-lapse photographyproducing firework flowers and flows of trafficslow-motion film revealing intricate movementswhich otherwise are a blur And switching spatialregisters too microscopes and telescopes showingus the molecular and the super-molar Indeed atthis point the new media coincide with artindeed the new media take on an aesthetic func-tion (a deterritorialising function) However weneed not turn to new technologies The realm ofaffects is all around us and there are as manydifferent strategies for accessing it as there aresubjects For Deleuze and Guattari these twosorcerers it is a question of making yourself abody without organs in this context a strategyfor accessing that which is normally OgraveoutsideOacuteyourself your Ograveexperimental milieuOacute whicheverywhere accompanies your sense of self (AThousand Plateaus 149ETH66) For Deleuze andGuattari this is a pragmatic project you do notjust read about the body without organs ETH youmake yourself one

Georges Bataille talks about such a pragmaticproject in Lascaux his book on the Lascaux cavepaintings For Bataille such a project such aritual can be understood as the creation of asacred space Indeed art for Bataille is preciselya mechanism for accessing a kind of immanentbeyond to everyday experience art operates as akind of play which takes the participant out ofmundane consciousness (hence BatailleOtildes under-

1 2 7

aesthetics of affect

standing of the Lascaux cave paintings asprecisely performative) This might involve arepresentational function (after all we can recog-nise the animals at Lascaux) but representationis not these paintingsOtilde sole purpose and we misssomething essential about them if we attendmerely to their history (if we simply read them)Jean-Fran ois Lyotard is perhaps most attuned tothis experimental and rupturing quality of artLyotard calls for a practice of patience of listen-ing ETH a kind of meditative state that allows forproduces an opening for an experience of theevent precisely as the affect In PeregrinationsLyotard writes

[One must] become open to the OgraveIt happensthatOacute rather than the OgraveWhat happensOacute Eacute [andthis] requires at the very least a high degree ofrefinement in the perception of small differ-ences Eacute In order to take on this attitude youhave to impoverish your mind clean it out asmuch as possible so that you make it inca-pable of anticipating the meaning the OgraveWhatOacuteof the OgraveIt happensEacuteOacute The secret of such asce-sis lies in the power to be able to endure occur-rences as OgravedirectlyOacute as possible without themediation of a Ogravepre-textOacute Thus to encounterthe event is like bordering on nothingness(18)15

And so this event this affect as Bataille alsoteaches us is not really about self-conscious-ness ETH the representation of experience tooneself the self as constituted through represen-tation ETH at all In fact we might say that theaffect is a more brutal apersonal thing It is thatwhich connects us to the world It is the matterin us responding and resonating with the matteraround us The affect is in this sense transhu-man Indeed with the affect what we have is akind of transhuman aesthetic Paul de Manmight figure art as a shield from mortality areassuring mirror to a fearful subject (and thenof course demonstrate that the shield is alwaysalready broken) But in fact art is somethingmuch more dangerous a portal an access pointto another world (our world experienced differ-ently) a world of impermanence and interpene-tration a molecular world of becomingAccording to Deleuze and Guattari this ulti-mately is what makes painting abstract the

OgravesummoningOacute and making visible of forces(What is Philosophy 181ETH82)16

This world of affects this universe of forces isour own world seen without the spectacles ofsubjectivity But how to remove these spectacleswhich are not really spectacles at all but the verycondition of our subjectivity How indeed tosidestep our selves In fact we do it all thetime ETH we are involved in molecular processesthat go on OgravebeyondOacute our subjectivity Indeed weOgraveareOacute these processes17 We OgraveareOacute ETH as well assubjects (bound by strata) ETH bundles of eventsbundles of affects (in a constant process ofdestratification)18 At stake here then are prac-tices and strategies which reveal this Ograveother sideOacuteto ourselves practices which imaginatively andpragmatically switch the register After all whynot try something new As Deleuze remarks in aninterview OgraveWhat weOtildere interested in you see aremodes of individuation beyond those of thingspersons or subjects the individuation say of atime of day of a region a climate a river or awind of an event And maybe itOtildes a mistake tobelieve in the existence of things persons orsubjectsOacute (Negotiations 26)

This is artOtildes function to switch our intensiveregister to reconnect us with the world Artopens us up to the non-human universe that weare part of Indeed art might well have a repre-sentational function (after all art objects likeeverything else can be read) but art also operatesas a fissure in representation And we as specta-tors as representational creatures are involved ina dance with art a dance in which ETH through care-ful manoeuvres ETH the molecular is opened up theaesthetic is activated and art does what is itschief modus operandi it transforms if only for amoment our sense of our OgraveselvesOacute and ournotion of our world

This is of course to claim quite an impor-tance for art Certainly it is to move far awayfrom those postmodernists who assert that it istime for art to be included within the Ogravebroaderpicture of representational practices in contem-porary societyOacute (Burgin 147) Indeed it is toclaim a kind of autonomy for art But this auton-omy is not the same as for example AdornoOtildesalthough it might appear similar It is in fact areconfiguration of aesthetics away from Adorno

1 2 8

orsquosullivan

and the whole Kantian heritage In AestheticTheory Adorno writes OgraveArtOtildes utopia thecounter-factual yet-to-come is draped in Black itgoes on being a recollection of the possible witha critical edge against the real Eacute It is the possi-ble as promised by its impossibility Art is thepromise of happiness a promise that isconstantly being brokenOacute (196)

For Adorno art operates as a utopian blink itpresents the possible through its difference to theexistent Indeed art for Adorno is not really ofthis world at all ETH it prefigures and promises aworld yet-to-come Art if you like operateswithin Walter BenjaminOtildes messianic time Andyet art is inevitably doomed to frustration thepromise (of reconciliation) is constantly beingbroken Art operates within this melancholyfield In fact it is worth noting that philosophyfor Adorno operates on the same register OgraveTheonly philosophy which can be reasonably prac-tised in the face of despair is the attempt tocontemplate all things as they would presentthemselves from the standpoint of redemptionOacute(Minima Moralia 247) In a sense then Adornohas abandoned the existent (his is a forsakenworld) Indeed this is what gives his work itsmelancholy tenor

However we might want to turn from Adornoto Deleuze and to a more affirmative notion ofthe aesthetic impulse Here instead of the exis-tent and the possible as ontological categoriesand as coordinates for art we might utiliseDeleuzeOtildes categories of the actual and thevirtual In Difference and Repetition Deleuzeoutlines this shift and the difference between thetwo sets of categories as follows

The only danger in all this is that the virtualcould be confused with the possible The possi-ble is opposed to the real the process under-gone by the possible is therefore aOgraverealisationOacute By contrast the virtual is notopposed to the real it possesses a full realityby itself The process it undergoes is actualisa-tion It would be wrong to see only a verbaldispute here it is a question of existence itself(211)

At stake in art is not a utopian and in somesenses negative aesthetic but an affirmativeactualisation of the virtual ETH the latter being a

genuinely creative act (as opposed to the realisa-tion of the possible which ultimately alwaysalready resembles the real)19 The virtual herecan be understood as the realm of affects Artprecisely actualises these invisible universes20 orat least it opens up a portal onto these othervirtual worlds (we might say that art is situatedon the borderline between the actual and thevirtual)21 This gives art an ethical imperativebecause it involves a kind of moving beyond thealready familiar (the human) precisely a kind ofself-overcoming

For Guattari this new ethico-aesthetic para-digm pertains not just to art but to subjectivityas well (in fact notions of subject and objectbecome blurred here) Guattari argues that byallowing individuals access to Ogravenew materials ofexpressionOacute Ogravenew complexes of subjectivationOacutebecome possible new Ograveincorporeal universes ofreferenceOacute are opened up which allow for whatGuattari calls a process of resingularisation ETH aprocess of reordering our selves and our relationto the world (Chaosmosis 7) In such a prag-matic and aesthetic reconfiguration Ograveone createsnew modalities of subjectivity in the same way anartist creates new forms from a paletteOacute (ibid)(For Guattari the La Borde clinic where heworked understood as a machinic assemblagewas precisely a site of resingularisation But infact people resingularise themselves every dayacademics plant allotments manual labourersvisit the theatre Different activities take onaesthetic deterritorialising functions)

This is to take art away from the Frankfurtschool register For Adorno artOtildes importance layat least in one sense in its uselessness its irre-ducibility to conceptual thought Art did notpartake in and thus provided a critique ofinstrumental reason and its accompaniment theworld commodity system With Deleuze andGuattari and their allies we have a differentmapping of the world and of philosophyOtildes andartOtildes role within it Philosophy is no longer to beunderstood as a utopian pursuit22 but is ratherto do with pragmatics active concept creation inorder to solve problems (to get something done)Likewise with art Art is not useless but performsvery specific roles23 These roles or functionsdiffer depending on the kind of art and the

1 2 9

aesthetics of affect

milieu in which a work of art exists Indeedconceptual art might have more in common withwhat Deleuze and Guattari call philosophy (prob-lem solving) Installation art on the other handmight be a paradigmatic case of art as accesspoint to other worlds Julia Kristeva arrives atprecisely this conclusion (here she is writingabout contemporary installations at the VeniceBiennale)

In an installation it is the body in its entiretywhich is asked to participate through its sensa-tions through vision obviously but also hear-ing touch on occasions smell As if theseartists in the place of an OgraveobjectOacute sought toplace us in a space at the limits of the sacredand asked us not to contemplate images but tocommunicate with beings I had the impres-sion that [the artists] were communicating thisthat the ultimate aim of art is perhaps whatwas formerly celebrated under the term ofincarnation I mean by that a wish to make usfeel through the abstractions the forms thecolours the volumes the sensations a realexperience (Quoted in Bann 69)

For Kristeva art (in this case installation) is abloc of sensations made up of abstractionsforms colours and volumes This art is also asacred space whose aim it is to give us a real (inthis case multi-sensory) experience Kristevatalks about these installations not in terms ofrepresentation but in terms of their function afunction of incarnation For Kristeva thisaesthetic function is the Ograveultimate aim of artOacuteThis is in a sense to move to a post-mediumnotion of art practice in that it is not so impor-tant what the specifics of a medium might be (noGreenbergian truth to materials no more askingOgravewhat is artOacute Ogravewhat is paintingOacute and thus nomore deconstructions) rather what becomesimportant is what a particular art object can doIn relation to aesthetics and affects this functionmight be summed up as the making visible of theinvisible of the making perceptible of the imper-ceptible or as Deleuze and Guattari would say asthe harnessing of forces24 Another way of sayingthis is that art is a deterritorialisation a creativedeterritorialisation into the realm of affects

Art then might be understood as the namefor a function a magical an aesthetic function

of transformation Art is less involved in makingsense of the world and more involved in explor-ing the possibilities of being of becoming in theworld Less involved in knowledge and moreinvolved in experience in pushing forward theboundaries of what can be experienced25 Finallyless involved in shielding us from death butindeed precisely involved in actualising the possi-bilities of life Paradoxically the notion of anOgraveaesthetic functionOacute might well return us to aproductive utilisation of the term OgravevisualcultureOacute But this will be a return marked by itspassage through aesthetics through Adorno andDeleuze especially In a sense this passage ETH thischampioning of art as an autonomous aestheticpractice ETH was only the first moment the secondbeing a detachment of the aesthetic from itsapparent location within (and transcendentattachment to) certain objects (the canonicalobjects of art history) This immanent aestheticas function can now be thought in relation to avariety of objects and practices So yes perhapswe can speak of a kind of visual culture after allnot through the notion of a general semiotics butrather through the notion of a general aesthetics

How might this effect the practice of arthistory A certain kind of art history mightdisappear that which attends only to artOtildes signi-fying character that which understands art posi-tions art work as representation Indeed theselatter functions might be placed alongside artOtildesother asignifying functions ETH artOtildes affective andintensive qualities (the molecular beneathwithin the molar) In this place art becomes amore complex and a more interesting objectAnd the business of art history changes from ahermeneutic to a heuristic activity art history asa kind of parallel to the work that art is alreadydoing rather than as an attempt to fix and inter-pret art indeed art history as precisely a kind ofcreative writing So I end this paper this skir-mish against representation with the outline of anew project the thinking of specific art worksthe writing on specific art works as explorationof artOtildes creative aesthetic and ethical function26

This will involve attending to the specificity of anart work and the specificity of the milieu inwhich the art object operates This is not a retreatfrom art history but a reconfiguration of its prac-

1 3 0

orsquosullivan

tice ETH a reconfiguration which might well involveas one of its strategies a return to those writerswho have always seen theaesthetic as the function of artand to those writers who mightnot be art historians but whoare nevertheless attuned to theaesthetics of affect

notes

My thanks to Angelakirsquos reviewers

1 Indeed there is a ldquotraditionrdquo of positioning crit-ical art history as a form of ideological critiqueand specifically as a critique of aesthetics See forexample Kurt Fosterrsquos polemical essay ldquoCriticalHistory of Art or a Transfiguration of Valuesrdquo

2 Jacques Derrida performs precisely this decon-struction of aesthetics in ldquoThe Parergonrdquo in hisThe Truth in Painting 37ndash82

3 For a more affirmative mapping of Derridarsquoscontribution towards thinking the art object seemy ldquoArt as Text Rethinking Representationrdquo

4 They can be described as extra-discursive in thesense that they are ldquooutsiderdquo discourse under-stood as structure (they are precisely what is irre-ducible to structure) They can be described asextra-textual in the sense that they do notproduce ndash or do not only produce ndash knowledgeAffects might however be understood as textualin that they are felt as differences in intensity

5 For Brian Massumi in ldquoThe Autonomy ofAffectrdquo affects are likewise understood asmoments of intensity ndash which might resonate withlinguistic expression but which strictly speakingare of a different and prior order For Massumi asfor myself ldquoapproaches to the image in its relationto language are incomplete if they operate only onthe semantic or semiotic level however that levelis defined (linguistically logically narratologicallyideologically or all of these combinations as aSymbolic) What they lose precisely is the event ndashin favour of structurerdquo (ibid 220)

Massumi identifies the realm of affect as one ofincreasing importance within ldquomedia literary andart theoryrdquo but points out the problem that thereis ldquono culturalndashtheoretical vocabulary specific toaffectrdquo indeed our ldquoentire vocabulary has derivedfrom theories of signification that are still weddedto structurerdquo (ibid 221) From one perspective

Massumi is right there is no vocabulary of affectHowever it is not so simple as inventing one Toinvent a language forof affect is to bring the latterinto representation ndash and hence to invite decon-struction In a sense there is no way out of thispredicament except to acknowledge it as a prob-lem ndash and move beyond it Which is what thispaper attempts to do

6 See Deleuzersquos ldquoSpinoza and the Three Ethicsrdquowhere ldquoaffectrdquo is defined as the effect affectionshave on the bodyrsquos duration the ldquopassagesbecomings rises and falls continuous variations ofpower (puissance) that pass from one state toanother We will call them affects strictly speak-ing and no longer affections They are signs ofincrease and decrease signs that are vectorial (ofthe joyndashsadness type) and no longer scalar like theaffections sensations or perceptionsrdquo (139)

7 As Feacutelix Guattari observes in an interview

The same semiotic material can be function-ing in different registers A material can beboth caught in paradigmatic chains of produc-tion chains of signification hellip but at the sametime can function in an a-signifying registerSo what determines the difference In onecase a signifier functions in what one mightcall a logic of discursive aggregates ie a logicof representation In the other case it func-tions in something that isnrsquot entirely a logicwhat Irsquove called an existential machinic a logicof bodies without organs a machinic ofbodies without organs (ldquoPragmaticMachinerdquo15)

8 For Guattari affects can be understood preciselyas what makes up life They establish a kind ofcentre or ldquoself-affirmationrdquo that occurs parallel tothe discursive (what Guattari terms ldquolinearrdquo)elements of subjectivity For Guattari this affec-tive element is present in Freudrsquos theory of thedrives but has been overlooked by ldquothe struc-turalistsrdquo (Guattari has Lacan in mind) (ldquoOnMachinesrdquo 10) Guattari writes

I consider that limiting ourselves to this coor-dinate [ie linearity] is precisely to lose theelement of the machinic centre of subjectiveautopoiesis and self-affirmation Whetherlocated at the level of the complete individualor partial subjectivity or even at the level ofsocial subjectivity this element undergoes apathic relationship by means of the affectWhat is it then that makes us state phenom-

1 3 1

aesthetics of affect

enologically that something is living It isprecisely this relation of affect This is not adescription nor a kind of propositional analy-sis resulting from a sense of hypotheses anddeductions ndash ie it is a living being thereforeit is a machine rather an immediate pathicand non-discursive apprehension occurs ofthe machinersquos ontological autocompositionrelationship (Ibid)

Interestingly in ldquoOn Machinesrdquo Guattari developsthe notion of a non-discursive affective foyerwhich has much in common with Bergsonrsquos notionof living beings as affective ldquocentres of indetermi-nationrdquo (28ndash34)

9 Lyotard addresses this double functioning of thesign in ldquoThe Tensorrdquo Like Guattari (see noteabove) Lyotardrsquos point of departure is Freudrsquostheory of the drives Lyotard merely points outthat the sign can operate within two (or presum-ably even more) economies metonymic andmetaphoric systems but also affective ones ldquoIt isat once a sign that creates meaning through diver-gence and opposition and a sign that createsintensity through strength and singularityrdquo (11)

10[T]he work of art is hellip a bloc of sensationsthat is to say a compound of percepts andaffects Percepts are no longer perceptionsthey are independent of a state of those whoexperience them Affects are no longer feel-ings or affections they go beyond thestrength of those who undergo themSensations percepts and affects are beingswhose validity lies in themselves and exceedsany lived (What is Philosophy 164)

In their chapter on art in What is PhilosophyDeleuze and Guattari map out a theory andlanguage of art outside of representation I want tonote here an interesting dovetailing of their theorywith a kind of aporia which ldquoThe Social History ofArtrdquo and in particular TJ Clark finds itselfhimselfin Suffice to say that Deleuze and Guattarirsquoslanguage ndash of movement materials and matter ndash isprecisely the object of art historyrsquos secret desireand fear a language of art which is no longer to dowith signifiers and signifieds (poached as Clarkhimself remarks from film theory) Unfortunatelyall materialist art historians (ldquoThe Social History ofArtrdquo) eventually and inevitably hit an aporiawhich very briefly goes like this how to attend tothe material object behind the ideological veils(the cultural readingsmeanings) whilst still attend-

ing to the objectrsquos history The problem arisesbecause ideology and history are here synony-mous In a sense ldquoThe Social History of Artrdquo andart history in general could not cannot put thislanguage together they are working within thehorizon of signification A language of material andmatter would for them be a fetishisation ndash anemptying out of meaning or of that trope of mean-ing history They would be guilty of the very ideo-logical mystification of which they are against It isonly within a different model or paradigm that alanguage of materials and matter makes sense

11 Massumi is useful in rethinking the relationshipbetween the event as intensity and experience

Although the realm of intensity thatDeleuzersquos philosophy strives to conceptualiseis transcendental in the sense that it is notdirectly accessible to experience it is nottranscendent it is not exactly outside experi-ence either It is immanent to it ndash always in itbut not of it Intensity and experience accom-pany one another like two mutually presup-posing dimensions or like two sides of a coinIntensity is immanent to matter and toevents to mind and to body and to everylevel of bifurcation composing them andwhich they compose (226)

Hence intensity for Massumi is indeed experi-enced ldquoin the proliferations of levels of organisa-tion it ceaselessly gives rise to generates andregenerates at every suspended momentrdquo (226)

12 For a tracking through of this oscillation seethe debates around allegory in the visual artscarried out in October in particular Craig OwensrsquoldquoThe Allegorical Impulse Towards a Theory ofPostmodernismrdquo and most impressive StephenMelvillersquos ldquoNotes on the Reemergence ofAllegory the Forgetting of Modernism theNecessity of Rhetoric and the Conditions ofPublicity in Art and Art Criticismrdquo

13 See for example Andrew Benjaminrsquos The PluralEvent For another interesting take on this prob-lematic especially in relation to Deleuzersquos projectof thinking multiplicity see Alain Badioursquos DeleuzeThe Clamor of Being

14 For Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophyart is a zone ldquoa zone of indetermination of indis-cernibility as if things beasts and persons hellipendlessly reach that point that immediatelyprecedes their natural differentiation This is what

1 3 2

orsquosullivan

is called an affect hellip Life alone creates such zoneswhere living beings whirl around and only art canreach and penetrate them in its enterprise of co-creationrdquo (173)

15 In general Lyotard tends to configure thisunknown event in Kantian terms specifically inrelation to the sublime As we shall see thereneed not be a recourse to the transcendent inorder to allow for the possibility of a beyond toeveryday experience

16 John Rajchman has also written on this notionof the abstract and on its difference to the moretypical one might say Greenbergian notion ofabstraction as reduction and purity For Rajchmanabstraction must be understood as a realm ofpossibilities of potentialities prior to figuration Inorder to paint ldquoone must come to see the surfacenot so much as empty or blank but rather asintense where lsquointensityrsquo means filled with theunseen virtuality of other strange possibilitiesrdquo(Rajchman 61) The question of how to ldquopaintoutside forcerdquo is according to Rajchmanrsquos readingof Deleuze ldquothe basic question of modernityrdquo (60)

17 This insight can be experienced Throughdrugs through meditation through anything thatif only for a moment dissolves the molar aggre-gate of our subjectivity

18 As Deleuze and Guattari remark in ldquo587BCndashAD 70 On Several Regimes of Signsrdquo theldquoprincipal strata binding human beings are theorganism signifiance and interpretation andsubjectification and subjectionrdquo (A ThousandPlateaus 134) It is the function of the next chapterldquoHow to Make Yourself a Body without Organsrdquoto offer strategies for destratification This chaptermight also be considered as a mapping through ofa series of experimental strategies for accessingthe realm of affect It is worth noting Deleuze andGuattarirsquos warning here against ldquowildly destratify-ingrdquo (A Thousand Plateaus 160) ndash this can endmerely in empty botched bodies without organs(or worse) In fact ldquoyou have to keep enough ofthe organism for it to reform each dawn and youhave to keep small supplies of signifiance andsubjectification if only to turn them against theirown systems when circumstances demand it hellipand you have to keep small rations of subjectivityin sufficient quantity to enable you to respond tothe dominant realityrdquo (ibid) See also my ldquoInViolence Three Case Studies Against theStratumrdquo

19 For a thorough working through of this logic ofthe real and the possible the virtual and the actualsee Deleuzersquos Bergsonism 96ndash98

20 As do philosophy science and as we have seenprosthetic technologies By altering our temporaland spatial registers new technology opens worldspreviously invisible to us but not worlds non-exis-tent We might say something similar about puremathematics abstract equations as a way of actu-alising events and processes which cannot berepresented (indeed this actualisation is a form ofproblem solving)

21 As Massumi remarks ldquoIt is the edge of thevirtual where it leaks into the actual that countsFor that seeping edge is where potential actuallyis foundrdquo (236)

22 For Deleuze and Guattari philosophy is not autopian pursuit in the sense of positing transcen-dent (and thus authoritarian) utopias Howeverphilosophy might be figured as utopian if weunderstand by this term immanent revolutionaryutopias Indeed for Deleuze and Guattari politicalphilosophy is this kind of utopian practice whichinvolves a ldquoresistance to the presentrdquo and acreation of concepts which in itself ldquocalls for afuture form for a new people that do not yetexistrdquo (What is Philosophy 108) Although notwithin the scope of this paper a reading ofFrankfurt school utopias via Deleuze andGuattarirsquos notion of immanence would be an inter-esting and productive project Deleuze andGuattari themselves seem to have this in mindwhen they footnote the writings of Ernst Bloch inWhat is Philosophy (224)

23 A good example of rethinking art away fromthe horizon of instrumental reason (and of thelatterrsquos critique) is Ronald Boguersquos ldquoArt andTerritoryrdquo Bogue taking his lead from Deleuzersquosnotion of the refrain argues that bird song as akind of art practice involves processes and move-ments of territorialisation deterritorialisationand reterritorialisation Which is to say that art isnot here involved in a logic of the possible but isto do with function a function of deterritorialisa-tion

24 Ronald Bogue has outlined this ldquoaesthetics offorcerdquo as he calls it in relation to painting andmore interestingly in relation to music (seeldquoGilles Deleuze The Aesthetics of Forcerdquo) Boguereads Deleuze as offering an ldquoopen systemrdquo of the

1 3 3

aesthetics of affect

arts where at stake is less a definition of art or anydemarcation between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic but rather a general function of art aswhat ldquoharnesses forcesrdquo (ibid 268) This is partic-ularly the case with painting and of courseDeleuze outlines this theory in relation to thepaintings of Francis Bacon However the functionof music is also involved in forces As Bogueremarks ldquoThe basic function of the refrain is toterritorialise forces to regularise control andencode the unpredictable world in regularpatterns But the refrain never remains purelyclosed and stable Its emergence from the chaoticflux is only provisional and its rhythms always issueforth to the cosmos at largerdquo (ibid 265)

This larger function of deterritorialisation isprecisely a ldquoline of flightrdquo into the molecular It isthis ndash an affective line (and I would argue anaesthetic one) ndash that defines art

25 This is precisely Lyotardrsquos point in ldquoPhilosophyand Painting in the Age of Their ExperimentationContribution to an Idea of PostmodernityrdquoldquoTodayrsquos art consists in exploring things unsayableand things invisible Strange machines are assem-bled where what we didnrsquot have the idea of sayingor the matter to feel can make itself heard andexperiencedrdquo (190)

26 I attempt such a project albeit briefly in thispaperrsquos companion piece ldquoWriting on Art (CaseStudy The Buddhist Puja)rdquo

bibliography

Adorno A Minima Moralia Trans EFN JephcottLondon Verso 1978

Adorno A Aesthetic Theory Trans C LenhardtLondon Routledge 1984

Badiou A Deleuze The Clamor of Being TransLouise Burchill Minneapolis U of Minnesota P1999

Bann S ldquoThree Images for Kristeva From Bellinito Proustrdquo Parallax 8 (autumn 1998) 65ndash79

Bataille G Prehistoric Painting Lascaux or the Birth ofArt Trans Austryn Wainhouse LondonMacmillan 1980

Benjamin A The Plural Event London Routledge1993

Bergson H Matter and Memory Trans NM Pauland WS Palmer New York Zone 1991

Bogue R ldquoGilles Deleuze The Aesthetics ofForcerdquo Deleuze A Critical Reader Ed Paul PattonOxford Blackwell 1996

Bogue R ldquoArt and Territoryrdquo A Deleuzian CenturyEd Ian Buchanan Durham Duke UP 1999

Burgin V ldquoThe End of Art Theoryrdquo The End of ArtTheory London Macmillan 1986

de Man P ldquoLiterary History and LiteraryModernityrdquo Blindness and Insight LondonRoutledge 1989

Derrida J The Truth in Painting Trans GeoffBennington and Ian McCleod Chicago U ofChicago P 1987

Deleuze G Bergsonism Trans Hugh Tomlinsonand Barbara Habberjam New York Zone 1991

Deleuze G Negotiations 1972ndash90 Trans MartinJoughin New York Columbia UP 1992

Deleuze G Difference and Repetition Trans PaulPatton London Athlone 1994

Deleuze G ldquoSpinoza and the Three Ethicsrdquo EssaysCritical and Clinical Trans Daniel W Smith andMichael Greco London Verso 1998

Deleuze G and F Guattari A Thousand PlateausTrans Brian Massumi London Athlone 1988

Deleuze G and F Guattari What is PhilosophyTrans Graham Burchell and Hugh TomlinsonLondon Verso 1994

Foster K ldquoCritical History of Art or aTransfiguration of Valuesrdquo New Literary History(spring 1972) 459ndash70

Guattari F ldquoPragmaticMachinerdquo Interview withCharles J Stivale lthttpwwwdcpeacnetedu~mnuesguattarihtmgt (1985)

Guattari F ldquoOn Machinesrdquo ComplexityArchitectureArtPhilosophy Trans VivianConstantinopoulos Ed Andrew BenjaminLondon Academy 1989

Guattari F Chaosmosis An Ethico-AestheticParadigm Trans Julian Pefanis and Paul BainsSydney Power Institute 1995

Lyotard J-F The Postmodern Condition A Report onKnowledge Trans Geoff Bennington and BrianMassumi Manchester Manchester UP 1984

Lyotard J-F Peregrinations Law Form Event NewYork Columbia UP 1988

1 3 4

orsquosullivan

Lyotard J-F ldquoThe Tensorrdquo Trans Sean Hand TheLyotard Reader Ed Andrew Benjamin OxfordBlackwell 1989

Lyotard J-F ldquoPhilosophy and Painting in the Ageof Their Experimentation Contribution to an Ideaof Postmodernityrdquo Trans Maria Minich Brewerand Daniel Brewer The Lyotard Reader EdAndrew Benjamin Oxford Blackwell 1989

Lyotard J-F ldquoCritical Reflectionsrdquo Trans WGJNiesluchawski Artforum 248 (1991) 92ndash93

Massumi B ldquoThe Autonomy of Affectrdquo Deleuze ACritical Reader Ed P Patton Oxford Blackwell1996

Melville S ldquoNotes on the Reemergence ofAllegory the Forgetting of Modernism theNecessity of Rhetoric and the Conditions ofPublicity in Art and Art Criticismrdquo October 19(1981) 55ndash92

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoIn Violence Three Case StudiesAgainst the Stratumrdquo Parallax 15 (summer 2000)104ndash09

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoWriting on Art (Case Study TheBuddhist Puja)rdquo Parallax 21 (forthcoming)

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoArt as Text RethinkingRepresentationrdquo Art History (forthcoming)

Owens C ldquoThe Allegorical Impulse Towards aTheory of Postmodernismrdquo October 12 (1980)67ndash86

Rajchman J ldquoAbstractionrdquo ConstructionsCambridge MA MIT P 1988

Simon OOtildeSullivanDepartment of Historical and Critical StudiesGoldsmiths CollegeNew CrossLondonSE14 6NWUKE-mail soOtildesullivangoldacuk

Page 2: THE AESTHETICS OF AFFECT: thinking art beyond …simonosullivan.net/articles/aesthetics-of-affect.pdfaesthetics of affect origin under erasure. First aesthetics fell foul of Marxism

aesthetics of affect

origin under erasure First aesthetics fell foul ofMarxism A disinterested beauty A transcendentaesthetic Ideological1 Then it fell foul of decon-struction The apparatus of capture that is decon-struction Derrida neatly reconfiguring thediscourse of aesthetics as a discourse ofon repre-sentation Aesthetics is deconstructed and artbecomes a broken promise2 Both Marxism anddeconstruction were still are powerful critiquesHowever deconstruction especially is negativecritique par excellence indeed it is implicitly acritique of Marxism (so that Marx and Derridawill always be troublesome bed mates at least inthis sense)3

Deconstructive reading is not itself a badthing indeed it might be strategically importantto employ deconstruction precisely to counteractthe effects of to disable a certain kind ofaesthetic discourse (deconstruction as a kind ofexpanded ideological critique) However afterthe deconstructive reading the art objectremains Life goes on Art whether we will it ornot continues producing affects What is theOgravenatureOacute of affects and can they be decon-structed Affects can be described as extra-discursive and extra-textual4 Affects aremoments of intensity a reaction inon the bodyat the level of matter5 We might even say thataffects are immanent to matter They arecertainly immanent to experience (FollowingSpinoza we might define affect as the effectanother body for example an art object hasupon my own body and my bodyOtildes duration6) Assuch affects are not to do with knowledge ormeaning indeed they occur on a different asig-nifying register7 In fact this is what differenti-ates art from language ETH although language toocan and does have an affective register indeedsignification itself might be understood as just acomplex affective function (meaning would bethe effect of affects)

Of course from a certain perspective affectsare only meaningful within language Indeed theaffect can be OgraveunderstoodOacute can be figured asalways already a representation of what we mightcall the Ur or originary affect ETH the latter posi-tioned as an unreachable (and unsayable) originagain so much for deconstruction And yetaffects are also and primarily affective There is

no denying or deferring affects They are whatmake up life and art8 For there is a sense inwhich art itself is made up of affects Affectsfrozen in time and space Affects are then to useDeleuzo-Guattarian terms ETH and to move theregister away from deconstruction and away fromrepresentation ETH the molecular OgravebeneathOacute themolar The molecular understood here as lifeOtildesand artOtildes intensive quality as the stuff that goeson beneath beyond even parallel to significa-tion9

But what can one say about affects Indeedwhat needs to be said about them Certainlyin a space such as art history where deconstruc-tive ETH let alone semiotic ETH approaches to art arebecoming indeed have become hegemonic theexistence of affects and their central role in artneeds asserting For this is what art is a bundleof affects or as Deleuze and Guattari would saya bloc of sensations waiting to be reactivated bya spectator or participant10 Indeed you cannotread affects you can only experience themWhich brings us to the crux of the matter expe-rience Paul de Man as a more or less typicalspokesperson for that melancholy science that isdeconstruction writes OgraveIt is a temporal experi-ence of human mutability historical in the deep-est sense of the term in that it implies thenecessary experience of any present as a passingexperience that makes the past irrevocable andunforgettable because it is inseparable from anypresent or futureOacute (148ETH49)

As with Derrida so with de Man present expe-rience ETH the moment the event ETH is inaccessibleto consciousness All we ever have is its trace (weexperience OgravepassingOacute moments) If the affect OgraveisOacuteprecisely present experience it could be saidfollowing de Man et al that all we ever have is akind of echo the representation of affect Nowthis is a clever and beguiling story giving theaffect a logocentric spin But I wonder is theaffect really of this type Is the affect transcen-dent in this sense (beyond experience) Orrather is it not the case as I have alreadysuggested that the affect is immanent to experi-ence11 and that all this writing about the affect isreally just that writing Writing which producesan effect of representation (Parodying Derrida alittle we might say that by asking the question

1 2 6

orsquosullivan

Ogravewhat is an affectOacute we are already presupposingthat there is an answer (an answer which must begiven in language) We have in fact placed theaffect in a conceptual opposition that always andeverywhere promises and then frustrates mean-ing)

So much for writing and for art as a kind ofwriting In fact the affect is something elseentirely precisely an event or happening Indeedthis is what defines the affect It is not that deMan (or Derrida for that matter) is wrong Assubjects we can certainly be positioned and posi-tion ourselves in de ManOtildes temporal predicament(a name for which is representation) This hasoften been the way in the West ETH in modernismand in postmodernism Indeed we might sayfollowing Michael Fried and his detractors thatthis oscillation between aesthetics and its decon-struction has animated the discourse of arthistory up to today12 But this deconstructivemechanism this way of thinking art (andourselves) inevitably closes down the possibilityof accessing the event that is art Indeed withinthis mechanism art is either positioned as tran-scendent or with deconstruction is alwaysalready positioned and predetermined by thediscourse that surrounds it ETH the event as alwaysalready captured by representation Art herebecomes a broken promise a fallen angel

But is this the end of the story Might therein fact be a way of rescuing art from this pre-dicament this double bind without necessarilyreturning to a traditional transcendentaesthetic Indeed how might we think art asevent This is a slippery area ETH and much recentphilosophy has been written on how to think theevent13 It is almost a question of faith Eitheryou side with deconstruction the event as alwaysalready constituted determined by the scene ofthe event Or you get a little more religious theevent as something genuinely unexpectedImportantly this need not involve a transcendentaesthetic (no return to Clement Greenberg noreturn to Kant) In fact there may be a way ofreconfiguring the event as immanent to thisworld as not arriving from any kind of transcen-dent plane (and as not transporting us there) butas emerging from the realm of the virtual In therealm of the virtual art ETH art work ETH is no longer

an object as such or not only an object butrather a space a zone14 or what Alain Badioumight call an Ograveevent siteOacute Ogravea point of exile whereit is possible that something finally mighthappenOacute (84 n 5) At any rate art is a placewhere one might encounter the affect

Such an accessing of the event might involvewhat Henri Bergson calls attention a suspensionof normal motor activity which in itself allowsother OgraveplanesOacute of reality to be perceivable (anopening up to the world beyond utilitarian inter-ests) (101ETH02) Following Bergson we might saythat as beings in the world we are caught on acertain spatio-temporal register we see only whatwe have already seen (we see only what we areinterested in) At stake with art then might bean altering a switching of this register New(prosthetic) technologies can do this Switchingtemporal registers time-lapse photographyproducing firework flowers and flows of trafficslow-motion film revealing intricate movementswhich otherwise are a blur And switching spatialregisters too microscopes and telescopes showingus the molecular and the super-molar Indeed atthis point the new media coincide with artindeed the new media take on an aesthetic func-tion (a deterritorialising function) However weneed not turn to new technologies The realm ofaffects is all around us and there are as manydifferent strategies for accessing it as there aresubjects For Deleuze and Guattari these twosorcerers it is a question of making yourself abody without organs in this context a strategyfor accessing that which is normally OgraveoutsideOacuteyourself your Ograveexperimental milieuOacute whicheverywhere accompanies your sense of self (AThousand Plateaus 149ETH66) For Deleuze andGuattari this is a pragmatic project you do notjust read about the body without organs ETH youmake yourself one

Georges Bataille talks about such a pragmaticproject in Lascaux his book on the Lascaux cavepaintings For Bataille such a project such aritual can be understood as the creation of asacred space Indeed art for Bataille is preciselya mechanism for accessing a kind of immanentbeyond to everyday experience art operates as akind of play which takes the participant out ofmundane consciousness (hence BatailleOtildes under-

1 2 7

aesthetics of affect

standing of the Lascaux cave paintings asprecisely performative) This might involve arepresentational function (after all we can recog-nise the animals at Lascaux) but representationis not these paintingsOtilde sole purpose and we misssomething essential about them if we attendmerely to their history (if we simply read them)Jean-Fran ois Lyotard is perhaps most attuned tothis experimental and rupturing quality of artLyotard calls for a practice of patience of listen-ing ETH a kind of meditative state that allows forproduces an opening for an experience of theevent precisely as the affect In PeregrinationsLyotard writes

[One must] become open to the OgraveIt happensthatOacute rather than the OgraveWhat happensOacute Eacute [andthis] requires at the very least a high degree ofrefinement in the perception of small differ-ences Eacute In order to take on this attitude youhave to impoverish your mind clean it out asmuch as possible so that you make it inca-pable of anticipating the meaning the OgraveWhatOacuteof the OgraveIt happensEacuteOacute The secret of such asce-sis lies in the power to be able to endure occur-rences as OgravedirectlyOacute as possible without themediation of a Ogravepre-textOacute Thus to encounterthe event is like bordering on nothingness(18)15

And so this event this affect as Bataille alsoteaches us is not really about self-conscious-ness ETH the representation of experience tooneself the self as constituted through represen-tation ETH at all In fact we might say that theaffect is a more brutal apersonal thing It is thatwhich connects us to the world It is the matterin us responding and resonating with the matteraround us The affect is in this sense transhu-man Indeed with the affect what we have is akind of transhuman aesthetic Paul de Manmight figure art as a shield from mortality areassuring mirror to a fearful subject (and thenof course demonstrate that the shield is alwaysalready broken) But in fact art is somethingmuch more dangerous a portal an access pointto another world (our world experienced differ-ently) a world of impermanence and interpene-tration a molecular world of becomingAccording to Deleuze and Guattari this ulti-mately is what makes painting abstract the

OgravesummoningOacute and making visible of forces(What is Philosophy 181ETH82)16

This world of affects this universe of forces isour own world seen without the spectacles ofsubjectivity But how to remove these spectacleswhich are not really spectacles at all but the verycondition of our subjectivity How indeed tosidestep our selves In fact we do it all thetime ETH we are involved in molecular processesthat go on OgravebeyondOacute our subjectivity Indeed weOgraveareOacute these processes17 We OgraveareOacute ETH as well assubjects (bound by strata) ETH bundles of eventsbundles of affects (in a constant process ofdestratification)18 At stake here then are prac-tices and strategies which reveal this Ograveother sideOacuteto ourselves practices which imaginatively andpragmatically switch the register After all whynot try something new As Deleuze remarks in aninterview OgraveWhat weOtildere interested in you see aremodes of individuation beyond those of thingspersons or subjects the individuation say of atime of day of a region a climate a river or awind of an event And maybe itOtildes a mistake tobelieve in the existence of things persons orsubjectsOacute (Negotiations 26)

This is artOtildes function to switch our intensiveregister to reconnect us with the world Artopens us up to the non-human universe that weare part of Indeed art might well have a repre-sentational function (after all art objects likeeverything else can be read) but art also operatesas a fissure in representation And we as specta-tors as representational creatures are involved ina dance with art a dance in which ETH through care-ful manoeuvres ETH the molecular is opened up theaesthetic is activated and art does what is itschief modus operandi it transforms if only for amoment our sense of our OgraveselvesOacute and ournotion of our world

This is of course to claim quite an impor-tance for art Certainly it is to move far awayfrom those postmodernists who assert that it istime for art to be included within the Ogravebroaderpicture of representational practices in contem-porary societyOacute (Burgin 147) Indeed it is toclaim a kind of autonomy for art But this auton-omy is not the same as for example AdornoOtildesalthough it might appear similar It is in fact areconfiguration of aesthetics away from Adorno

1 2 8

orsquosullivan

and the whole Kantian heritage In AestheticTheory Adorno writes OgraveArtOtildes utopia thecounter-factual yet-to-come is draped in Black itgoes on being a recollection of the possible witha critical edge against the real Eacute It is the possi-ble as promised by its impossibility Art is thepromise of happiness a promise that isconstantly being brokenOacute (196)

For Adorno art operates as a utopian blink itpresents the possible through its difference to theexistent Indeed art for Adorno is not really ofthis world at all ETH it prefigures and promises aworld yet-to-come Art if you like operateswithin Walter BenjaminOtildes messianic time Andyet art is inevitably doomed to frustration thepromise (of reconciliation) is constantly beingbroken Art operates within this melancholyfield In fact it is worth noting that philosophyfor Adorno operates on the same register OgraveTheonly philosophy which can be reasonably prac-tised in the face of despair is the attempt tocontemplate all things as they would presentthemselves from the standpoint of redemptionOacute(Minima Moralia 247) In a sense then Adornohas abandoned the existent (his is a forsakenworld) Indeed this is what gives his work itsmelancholy tenor

However we might want to turn from Adornoto Deleuze and to a more affirmative notion ofthe aesthetic impulse Here instead of the exis-tent and the possible as ontological categoriesand as coordinates for art we might utiliseDeleuzeOtildes categories of the actual and thevirtual In Difference and Repetition Deleuzeoutlines this shift and the difference between thetwo sets of categories as follows

The only danger in all this is that the virtualcould be confused with the possible The possi-ble is opposed to the real the process under-gone by the possible is therefore aOgraverealisationOacute By contrast the virtual is notopposed to the real it possesses a full realityby itself The process it undergoes is actualisa-tion It would be wrong to see only a verbaldispute here it is a question of existence itself(211)

At stake in art is not a utopian and in somesenses negative aesthetic but an affirmativeactualisation of the virtual ETH the latter being a

genuinely creative act (as opposed to the realisa-tion of the possible which ultimately alwaysalready resembles the real)19 The virtual herecan be understood as the realm of affects Artprecisely actualises these invisible universes20 orat least it opens up a portal onto these othervirtual worlds (we might say that art is situatedon the borderline between the actual and thevirtual)21 This gives art an ethical imperativebecause it involves a kind of moving beyond thealready familiar (the human) precisely a kind ofself-overcoming

For Guattari this new ethico-aesthetic para-digm pertains not just to art but to subjectivityas well (in fact notions of subject and objectbecome blurred here) Guattari argues that byallowing individuals access to Ogravenew materials ofexpressionOacute Ogravenew complexes of subjectivationOacutebecome possible new Ograveincorporeal universes ofreferenceOacute are opened up which allow for whatGuattari calls a process of resingularisation ETH aprocess of reordering our selves and our relationto the world (Chaosmosis 7) In such a prag-matic and aesthetic reconfiguration Ograveone createsnew modalities of subjectivity in the same way anartist creates new forms from a paletteOacute (ibid)(For Guattari the La Borde clinic where heworked understood as a machinic assemblagewas precisely a site of resingularisation But infact people resingularise themselves every dayacademics plant allotments manual labourersvisit the theatre Different activities take onaesthetic deterritorialising functions)

This is to take art away from the Frankfurtschool register For Adorno artOtildes importance layat least in one sense in its uselessness its irre-ducibility to conceptual thought Art did notpartake in and thus provided a critique ofinstrumental reason and its accompaniment theworld commodity system With Deleuze andGuattari and their allies we have a differentmapping of the world and of philosophyOtildes andartOtildes role within it Philosophy is no longer to beunderstood as a utopian pursuit22 but is ratherto do with pragmatics active concept creation inorder to solve problems (to get something done)Likewise with art Art is not useless but performsvery specific roles23 These roles or functionsdiffer depending on the kind of art and the

1 2 9

aesthetics of affect

milieu in which a work of art exists Indeedconceptual art might have more in common withwhat Deleuze and Guattari call philosophy (prob-lem solving) Installation art on the other handmight be a paradigmatic case of art as accesspoint to other worlds Julia Kristeva arrives atprecisely this conclusion (here she is writingabout contemporary installations at the VeniceBiennale)

In an installation it is the body in its entiretywhich is asked to participate through its sensa-tions through vision obviously but also hear-ing touch on occasions smell As if theseartists in the place of an OgraveobjectOacute sought toplace us in a space at the limits of the sacredand asked us not to contemplate images but tocommunicate with beings I had the impres-sion that [the artists] were communicating thisthat the ultimate aim of art is perhaps whatwas formerly celebrated under the term ofincarnation I mean by that a wish to make usfeel through the abstractions the forms thecolours the volumes the sensations a realexperience (Quoted in Bann 69)

For Kristeva art (in this case installation) is abloc of sensations made up of abstractionsforms colours and volumes This art is also asacred space whose aim it is to give us a real (inthis case multi-sensory) experience Kristevatalks about these installations not in terms ofrepresentation but in terms of their function afunction of incarnation For Kristeva thisaesthetic function is the Ograveultimate aim of artOacuteThis is in a sense to move to a post-mediumnotion of art practice in that it is not so impor-tant what the specifics of a medium might be (noGreenbergian truth to materials no more askingOgravewhat is artOacute Ogravewhat is paintingOacute and thus nomore deconstructions) rather what becomesimportant is what a particular art object can doIn relation to aesthetics and affects this functionmight be summed up as the making visible of theinvisible of the making perceptible of the imper-ceptible or as Deleuze and Guattari would say asthe harnessing of forces24 Another way of sayingthis is that art is a deterritorialisation a creativedeterritorialisation into the realm of affects

Art then might be understood as the namefor a function a magical an aesthetic function

of transformation Art is less involved in makingsense of the world and more involved in explor-ing the possibilities of being of becoming in theworld Less involved in knowledge and moreinvolved in experience in pushing forward theboundaries of what can be experienced25 Finallyless involved in shielding us from death butindeed precisely involved in actualising the possi-bilities of life Paradoxically the notion of anOgraveaesthetic functionOacute might well return us to aproductive utilisation of the term OgravevisualcultureOacute But this will be a return marked by itspassage through aesthetics through Adorno andDeleuze especially In a sense this passage ETH thischampioning of art as an autonomous aestheticpractice ETH was only the first moment the secondbeing a detachment of the aesthetic from itsapparent location within (and transcendentattachment to) certain objects (the canonicalobjects of art history) This immanent aestheticas function can now be thought in relation to avariety of objects and practices So yes perhapswe can speak of a kind of visual culture after allnot through the notion of a general semiotics butrather through the notion of a general aesthetics

How might this effect the practice of arthistory A certain kind of art history mightdisappear that which attends only to artOtildes signi-fying character that which understands art posi-tions art work as representation Indeed theselatter functions might be placed alongside artOtildesother asignifying functions ETH artOtildes affective andintensive qualities (the molecular beneathwithin the molar) In this place art becomes amore complex and a more interesting objectAnd the business of art history changes from ahermeneutic to a heuristic activity art history asa kind of parallel to the work that art is alreadydoing rather than as an attempt to fix and inter-pret art indeed art history as precisely a kind ofcreative writing So I end this paper this skir-mish against representation with the outline of anew project the thinking of specific art worksthe writing on specific art works as explorationof artOtildes creative aesthetic and ethical function26

This will involve attending to the specificity of anart work and the specificity of the milieu inwhich the art object operates This is not a retreatfrom art history but a reconfiguration of its prac-

1 3 0

orsquosullivan

tice ETH a reconfiguration which might well involveas one of its strategies a return to those writerswho have always seen theaesthetic as the function of artand to those writers who mightnot be art historians but whoare nevertheless attuned to theaesthetics of affect

notes

My thanks to Angelakirsquos reviewers

1 Indeed there is a ldquotraditionrdquo of positioning crit-ical art history as a form of ideological critiqueand specifically as a critique of aesthetics See forexample Kurt Fosterrsquos polemical essay ldquoCriticalHistory of Art or a Transfiguration of Valuesrdquo

2 Jacques Derrida performs precisely this decon-struction of aesthetics in ldquoThe Parergonrdquo in hisThe Truth in Painting 37ndash82

3 For a more affirmative mapping of Derridarsquoscontribution towards thinking the art object seemy ldquoArt as Text Rethinking Representationrdquo

4 They can be described as extra-discursive in thesense that they are ldquooutsiderdquo discourse under-stood as structure (they are precisely what is irre-ducible to structure) They can be described asextra-textual in the sense that they do notproduce ndash or do not only produce ndash knowledgeAffects might however be understood as textualin that they are felt as differences in intensity

5 For Brian Massumi in ldquoThe Autonomy ofAffectrdquo affects are likewise understood asmoments of intensity ndash which might resonate withlinguistic expression but which strictly speakingare of a different and prior order For Massumi asfor myself ldquoapproaches to the image in its relationto language are incomplete if they operate only onthe semantic or semiotic level however that levelis defined (linguistically logically narratologicallyideologically or all of these combinations as aSymbolic) What they lose precisely is the event ndashin favour of structurerdquo (ibid 220)

Massumi identifies the realm of affect as one ofincreasing importance within ldquomedia literary andart theoryrdquo but points out the problem that thereis ldquono culturalndashtheoretical vocabulary specific toaffectrdquo indeed our ldquoentire vocabulary has derivedfrom theories of signification that are still weddedto structurerdquo (ibid 221) From one perspective

Massumi is right there is no vocabulary of affectHowever it is not so simple as inventing one Toinvent a language forof affect is to bring the latterinto representation ndash and hence to invite decon-struction In a sense there is no way out of thispredicament except to acknowledge it as a prob-lem ndash and move beyond it Which is what thispaper attempts to do

6 See Deleuzersquos ldquoSpinoza and the Three Ethicsrdquowhere ldquoaffectrdquo is defined as the effect affectionshave on the bodyrsquos duration the ldquopassagesbecomings rises and falls continuous variations ofpower (puissance) that pass from one state toanother We will call them affects strictly speak-ing and no longer affections They are signs ofincrease and decrease signs that are vectorial (ofthe joyndashsadness type) and no longer scalar like theaffections sensations or perceptionsrdquo (139)

7 As Feacutelix Guattari observes in an interview

The same semiotic material can be function-ing in different registers A material can beboth caught in paradigmatic chains of produc-tion chains of signification hellip but at the sametime can function in an a-signifying registerSo what determines the difference In onecase a signifier functions in what one mightcall a logic of discursive aggregates ie a logicof representation In the other case it func-tions in something that isnrsquot entirely a logicwhat Irsquove called an existential machinic a logicof bodies without organs a machinic ofbodies without organs (ldquoPragmaticMachinerdquo15)

8 For Guattari affects can be understood preciselyas what makes up life They establish a kind ofcentre or ldquoself-affirmationrdquo that occurs parallel tothe discursive (what Guattari terms ldquolinearrdquo)elements of subjectivity For Guattari this affec-tive element is present in Freudrsquos theory of thedrives but has been overlooked by ldquothe struc-turalistsrdquo (Guattari has Lacan in mind) (ldquoOnMachinesrdquo 10) Guattari writes

I consider that limiting ourselves to this coor-dinate [ie linearity] is precisely to lose theelement of the machinic centre of subjectiveautopoiesis and self-affirmation Whetherlocated at the level of the complete individualor partial subjectivity or even at the level ofsocial subjectivity this element undergoes apathic relationship by means of the affectWhat is it then that makes us state phenom-

1 3 1

aesthetics of affect

enologically that something is living It isprecisely this relation of affect This is not adescription nor a kind of propositional analy-sis resulting from a sense of hypotheses anddeductions ndash ie it is a living being thereforeit is a machine rather an immediate pathicand non-discursive apprehension occurs ofthe machinersquos ontological autocompositionrelationship (Ibid)

Interestingly in ldquoOn Machinesrdquo Guattari developsthe notion of a non-discursive affective foyerwhich has much in common with Bergsonrsquos notionof living beings as affective ldquocentres of indetermi-nationrdquo (28ndash34)

9 Lyotard addresses this double functioning of thesign in ldquoThe Tensorrdquo Like Guattari (see noteabove) Lyotardrsquos point of departure is Freudrsquostheory of the drives Lyotard merely points outthat the sign can operate within two (or presum-ably even more) economies metonymic andmetaphoric systems but also affective ones ldquoIt isat once a sign that creates meaning through diver-gence and opposition and a sign that createsintensity through strength and singularityrdquo (11)

10[T]he work of art is hellip a bloc of sensationsthat is to say a compound of percepts andaffects Percepts are no longer perceptionsthey are independent of a state of those whoexperience them Affects are no longer feel-ings or affections they go beyond thestrength of those who undergo themSensations percepts and affects are beingswhose validity lies in themselves and exceedsany lived (What is Philosophy 164)

In their chapter on art in What is PhilosophyDeleuze and Guattari map out a theory andlanguage of art outside of representation I want tonote here an interesting dovetailing of their theorywith a kind of aporia which ldquoThe Social History ofArtrdquo and in particular TJ Clark finds itselfhimselfin Suffice to say that Deleuze and Guattarirsquoslanguage ndash of movement materials and matter ndash isprecisely the object of art historyrsquos secret desireand fear a language of art which is no longer to dowith signifiers and signifieds (poached as Clarkhimself remarks from film theory) Unfortunatelyall materialist art historians (ldquoThe Social History ofArtrdquo) eventually and inevitably hit an aporiawhich very briefly goes like this how to attend tothe material object behind the ideological veils(the cultural readingsmeanings) whilst still attend-

ing to the objectrsquos history The problem arisesbecause ideology and history are here synony-mous In a sense ldquoThe Social History of Artrdquo andart history in general could not cannot put thislanguage together they are working within thehorizon of signification A language of material andmatter would for them be a fetishisation ndash anemptying out of meaning or of that trope of mean-ing history They would be guilty of the very ideo-logical mystification of which they are against It isonly within a different model or paradigm that alanguage of materials and matter makes sense

11 Massumi is useful in rethinking the relationshipbetween the event as intensity and experience

Although the realm of intensity thatDeleuzersquos philosophy strives to conceptualiseis transcendental in the sense that it is notdirectly accessible to experience it is nottranscendent it is not exactly outside experi-ence either It is immanent to it ndash always in itbut not of it Intensity and experience accom-pany one another like two mutually presup-posing dimensions or like two sides of a coinIntensity is immanent to matter and toevents to mind and to body and to everylevel of bifurcation composing them andwhich they compose (226)

Hence intensity for Massumi is indeed experi-enced ldquoin the proliferations of levels of organisa-tion it ceaselessly gives rise to generates andregenerates at every suspended momentrdquo (226)

12 For a tracking through of this oscillation seethe debates around allegory in the visual artscarried out in October in particular Craig OwensrsquoldquoThe Allegorical Impulse Towards a Theory ofPostmodernismrdquo and most impressive StephenMelvillersquos ldquoNotes on the Reemergence ofAllegory the Forgetting of Modernism theNecessity of Rhetoric and the Conditions ofPublicity in Art and Art Criticismrdquo

13 See for example Andrew Benjaminrsquos The PluralEvent For another interesting take on this prob-lematic especially in relation to Deleuzersquos projectof thinking multiplicity see Alain Badioursquos DeleuzeThe Clamor of Being

14 For Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophyart is a zone ldquoa zone of indetermination of indis-cernibility as if things beasts and persons hellipendlessly reach that point that immediatelyprecedes their natural differentiation This is what

1 3 2

orsquosullivan

is called an affect hellip Life alone creates such zoneswhere living beings whirl around and only art canreach and penetrate them in its enterprise of co-creationrdquo (173)

15 In general Lyotard tends to configure thisunknown event in Kantian terms specifically inrelation to the sublime As we shall see thereneed not be a recourse to the transcendent inorder to allow for the possibility of a beyond toeveryday experience

16 John Rajchman has also written on this notionof the abstract and on its difference to the moretypical one might say Greenbergian notion ofabstraction as reduction and purity For Rajchmanabstraction must be understood as a realm ofpossibilities of potentialities prior to figuration Inorder to paint ldquoone must come to see the surfacenot so much as empty or blank but rather asintense where lsquointensityrsquo means filled with theunseen virtuality of other strange possibilitiesrdquo(Rajchman 61) The question of how to ldquopaintoutside forcerdquo is according to Rajchmanrsquos readingof Deleuze ldquothe basic question of modernityrdquo (60)

17 This insight can be experienced Throughdrugs through meditation through anything thatif only for a moment dissolves the molar aggre-gate of our subjectivity

18 As Deleuze and Guattari remark in ldquo587BCndashAD 70 On Several Regimes of Signsrdquo theldquoprincipal strata binding human beings are theorganism signifiance and interpretation andsubjectification and subjectionrdquo (A ThousandPlateaus 134) It is the function of the next chapterldquoHow to Make Yourself a Body without Organsrdquoto offer strategies for destratification This chaptermight also be considered as a mapping through ofa series of experimental strategies for accessingthe realm of affect It is worth noting Deleuze andGuattarirsquos warning here against ldquowildly destratify-ingrdquo (A Thousand Plateaus 160) ndash this can endmerely in empty botched bodies without organs(or worse) In fact ldquoyou have to keep enough ofthe organism for it to reform each dawn and youhave to keep small supplies of signifiance andsubjectification if only to turn them against theirown systems when circumstances demand it hellipand you have to keep small rations of subjectivityin sufficient quantity to enable you to respond tothe dominant realityrdquo (ibid) See also my ldquoInViolence Three Case Studies Against theStratumrdquo

19 For a thorough working through of this logic ofthe real and the possible the virtual and the actualsee Deleuzersquos Bergsonism 96ndash98

20 As do philosophy science and as we have seenprosthetic technologies By altering our temporaland spatial registers new technology opens worldspreviously invisible to us but not worlds non-exis-tent We might say something similar about puremathematics abstract equations as a way of actu-alising events and processes which cannot berepresented (indeed this actualisation is a form ofproblem solving)

21 As Massumi remarks ldquoIt is the edge of thevirtual where it leaks into the actual that countsFor that seeping edge is where potential actuallyis foundrdquo (236)

22 For Deleuze and Guattari philosophy is not autopian pursuit in the sense of positing transcen-dent (and thus authoritarian) utopias Howeverphilosophy might be figured as utopian if weunderstand by this term immanent revolutionaryutopias Indeed for Deleuze and Guattari politicalphilosophy is this kind of utopian practice whichinvolves a ldquoresistance to the presentrdquo and acreation of concepts which in itself ldquocalls for afuture form for a new people that do not yetexistrdquo (What is Philosophy 108) Although notwithin the scope of this paper a reading ofFrankfurt school utopias via Deleuze andGuattarirsquos notion of immanence would be an inter-esting and productive project Deleuze andGuattari themselves seem to have this in mindwhen they footnote the writings of Ernst Bloch inWhat is Philosophy (224)

23 A good example of rethinking art away fromthe horizon of instrumental reason (and of thelatterrsquos critique) is Ronald Boguersquos ldquoArt andTerritoryrdquo Bogue taking his lead from Deleuzersquosnotion of the refrain argues that bird song as akind of art practice involves processes and move-ments of territorialisation deterritorialisationand reterritorialisation Which is to say that art isnot here involved in a logic of the possible but isto do with function a function of deterritorialisa-tion

24 Ronald Bogue has outlined this ldquoaesthetics offorcerdquo as he calls it in relation to painting andmore interestingly in relation to music (seeldquoGilles Deleuze The Aesthetics of Forcerdquo) Boguereads Deleuze as offering an ldquoopen systemrdquo of the

1 3 3

aesthetics of affect

arts where at stake is less a definition of art or anydemarcation between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic but rather a general function of art aswhat ldquoharnesses forcesrdquo (ibid 268) This is partic-ularly the case with painting and of courseDeleuze outlines this theory in relation to thepaintings of Francis Bacon However the functionof music is also involved in forces As Bogueremarks ldquoThe basic function of the refrain is toterritorialise forces to regularise control andencode the unpredictable world in regularpatterns But the refrain never remains purelyclosed and stable Its emergence from the chaoticflux is only provisional and its rhythms always issueforth to the cosmos at largerdquo (ibid 265)

This larger function of deterritorialisation isprecisely a ldquoline of flightrdquo into the molecular It isthis ndash an affective line (and I would argue anaesthetic one) ndash that defines art

25 This is precisely Lyotardrsquos point in ldquoPhilosophyand Painting in the Age of Their ExperimentationContribution to an Idea of PostmodernityrdquoldquoTodayrsquos art consists in exploring things unsayableand things invisible Strange machines are assem-bled where what we didnrsquot have the idea of sayingor the matter to feel can make itself heard andexperiencedrdquo (190)

26 I attempt such a project albeit briefly in thispaperrsquos companion piece ldquoWriting on Art (CaseStudy The Buddhist Puja)rdquo

bibliography

Adorno A Minima Moralia Trans EFN JephcottLondon Verso 1978

Adorno A Aesthetic Theory Trans C LenhardtLondon Routledge 1984

Badiou A Deleuze The Clamor of Being TransLouise Burchill Minneapolis U of Minnesota P1999

Bann S ldquoThree Images for Kristeva From Bellinito Proustrdquo Parallax 8 (autumn 1998) 65ndash79

Bataille G Prehistoric Painting Lascaux or the Birth ofArt Trans Austryn Wainhouse LondonMacmillan 1980

Benjamin A The Plural Event London Routledge1993

Bergson H Matter and Memory Trans NM Pauland WS Palmer New York Zone 1991

Bogue R ldquoGilles Deleuze The Aesthetics ofForcerdquo Deleuze A Critical Reader Ed Paul PattonOxford Blackwell 1996

Bogue R ldquoArt and Territoryrdquo A Deleuzian CenturyEd Ian Buchanan Durham Duke UP 1999

Burgin V ldquoThe End of Art Theoryrdquo The End of ArtTheory London Macmillan 1986

de Man P ldquoLiterary History and LiteraryModernityrdquo Blindness and Insight LondonRoutledge 1989

Derrida J The Truth in Painting Trans GeoffBennington and Ian McCleod Chicago U ofChicago P 1987

Deleuze G Bergsonism Trans Hugh Tomlinsonand Barbara Habberjam New York Zone 1991

Deleuze G Negotiations 1972ndash90 Trans MartinJoughin New York Columbia UP 1992

Deleuze G Difference and Repetition Trans PaulPatton London Athlone 1994

Deleuze G ldquoSpinoza and the Three Ethicsrdquo EssaysCritical and Clinical Trans Daniel W Smith andMichael Greco London Verso 1998

Deleuze G and F Guattari A Thousand PlateausTrans Brian Massumi London Athlone 1988

Deleuze G and F Guattari What is PhilosophyTrans Graham Burchell and Hugh TomlinsonLondon Verso 1994

Foster K ldquoCritical History of Art or aTransfiguration of Valuesrdquo New Literary History(spring 1972) 459ndash70

Guattari F ldquoPragmaticMachinerdquo Interview withCharles J Stivale lthttpwwwdcpeacnetedu~mnuesguattarihtmgt (1985)

Guattari F ldquoOn Machinesrdquo ComplexityArchitectureArtPhilosophy Trans VivianConstantinopoulos Ed Andrew BenjaminLondon Academy 1989

Guattari F Chaosmosis An Ethico-AestheticParadigm Trans Julian Pefanis and Paul BainsSydney Power Institute 1995

Lyotard J-F The Postmodern Condition A Report onKnowledge Trans Geoff Bennington and BrianMassumi Manchester Manchester UP 1984

Lyotard J-F Peregrinations Law Form Event NewYork Columbia UP 1988

1 3 4

orsquosullivan

Lyotard J-F ldquoThe Tensorrdquo Trans Sean Hand TheLyotard Reader Ed Andrew Benjamin OxfordBlackwell 1989

Lyotard J-F ldquoPhilosophy and Painting in the Ageof Their Experimentation Contribution to an Ideaof Postmodernityrdquo Trans Maria Minich Brewerand Daniel Brewer The Lyotard Reader EdAndrew Benjamin Oxford Blackwell 1989

Lyotard J-F ldquoCritical Reflectionsrdquo Trans WGJNiesluchawski Artforum 248 (1991) 92ndash93

Massumi B ldquoThe Autonomy of Affectrdquo Deleuze ACritical Reader Ed P Patton Oxford Blackwell1996

Melville S ldquoNotes on the Reemergence ofAllegory the Forgetting of Modernism theNecessity of Rhetoric and the Conditions ofPublicity in Art and Art Criticismrdquo October 19(1981) 55ndash92

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoIn Violence Three Case StudiesAgainst the Stratumrdquo Parallax 15 (summer 2000)104ndash09

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoWriting on Art (Case Study TheBuddhist Puja)rdquo Parallax 21 (forthcoming)

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoArt as Text RethinkingRepresentationrdquo Art History (forthcoming)

Owens C ldquoThe Allegorical Impulse Towards aTheory of Postmodernismrdquo October 12 (1980)67ndash86

Rajchman J ldquoAbstractionrdquo ConstructionsCambridge MA MIT P 1988

Simon OOtildeSullivanDepartment of Historical and Critical StudiesGoldsmiths CollegeNew CrossLondonSE14 6NWUKE-mail soOtildesullivangoldacuk

Page 3: THE AESTHETICS OF AFFECT: thinking art beyond …simonosullivan.net/articles/aesthetics-of-affect.pdfaesthetics of affect origin under erasure. First aesthetics fell foul of Marxism

orsquosullivan

Ogravewhat is an affectOacute we are already presupposingthat there is an answer (an answer which must begiven in language) We have in fact placed theaffect in a conceptual opposition that always andeverywhere promises and then frustrates mean-ing)

So much for writing and for art as a kind ofwriting In fact the affect is something elseentirely precisely an event or happening Indeedthis is what defines the affect It is not that deMan (or Derrida for that matter) is wrong Assubjects we can certainly be positioned and posi-tion ourselves in de ManOtildes temporal predicament(a name for which is representation) This hasoften been the way in the West ETH in modernismand in postmodernism Indeed we might sayfollowing Michael Fried and his detractors thatthis oscillation between aesthetics and its decon-struction has animated the discourse of arthistory up to today12 But this deconstructivemechanism this way of thinking art (andourselves) inevitably closes down the possibilityof accessing the event that is art Indeed withinthis mechanism art is either positioned as tran-scendent or with deconstruction is alwaysalready positioned and predetermined by thediscourse that surrounds it ETH the event as alwaysalready captured by representation Art herebecomes a broken promise a fallen angel

But is this the end of the story Might therein fact be a way of rescuing art from this pre-dicament this double bind without necessarilyreturning to a traditional transcendentaesthetic Indeed how might we think art asevent This is a slippery area ETH and much recentphilosophy has been written on how to think theevent13 It is almost a question of faith Eitheryou side with deconstruction the event as alwaysalready constituted determined by the scene ofthe event Or you get a little more religious theevent as something genuinely unexpectedImportantly this need not involve a transcendentaesthetic (no return to Clement Greenberg noreturn to Kant) In fact there may be a way ofreconfiguring the event as immanent to thisworld as not arriving from any kind of transcen-dent plane (and as not transporting us there) butas emerging from the realm of the virtual In therealm of the virtual art ETH art work ETH is no longer

an object as such or not only an object butrather a space a zone14 or what Alain Badioumight call an Ograveevent siteOacute Ogravea point of exile whereit is possible that something finally mighthappenOacute (84 n 5) At any rate art is a placewhere one might encounter the affect

Such an accessing of the event might involvewhat Henri Bergson calls attention a suspensionof normal motor activity which in itself allowsother OgraveplanesOacute of reality to be perceivable (anopening up to the world beyond utilitarian inter-ests) (101ETH02) Following Bergson we might saythat as beings in the world we are caught on acertain spatio-temporal register we see only whatwe have already seen (we see only what we areinterested in) At stake with art then might bean altering a switching of this register New(prosthetic) technologies can do this Switchingtemporal registers time-lapse photographyproducing firework flowers and flows of trafficslow-motion film revealing intricate movementswhich otherwise are a blur And switching spatialregisters too microscopes and telescopes showingus the molecular and the super-molar Indeed atthis point the new media coincide with artindeed the new media take on an aesthetic func-tion (a deterritorialising function) However weneed not turn to new technologies The realm ofaffects is all around us and there are as manydifferent strategies for accessing it as there aresubjects For Deleuze and Guattari these twosorcerers it is a question of making yourself abody without organs in this context a strategyfor accessing that which is normally OgraveoutsideOacuteyourself your Ograveexperimental milieuOacute whicheverywhere accompanies your sense of self (AThousand Plateaus 149ETH66) For Deleuze andGuattari this is a pragmatic project you do notjust read about the body without organs ETH youmake yourself one

Georges Bataille talks about such a pragmaticproject in Lascaux his book on the Lascaux cavepaintings For Bataille such a project such aritual can be understood as the creation of asacred space Indeed art for Bataille is preciselya mechanism for accessing a kind of immanentbeyond to everyday experience art operates as akind of play which takes the participant out ofmundane consciousness (hence BatailleOtildes under-

1 2 7

aesthetics of affect

standing of the Lascaux cave paintings asprecisely performative) This might involve arepresentational function (after all we can recog-nise the animals at Lascaux) but representationis not these paintingsOtilde sole purpose and we misssomething essential about them if we attendmerely to their history (if we simply read them)Jean-Fran ois Lyotard is perhaps most attuned tothis experimental and rupturing quality of artLyotard calls for a practice of patience of listen-ing ETH a kind of meditative state that allows forproduces an opening for an experience of theevent precisely as the affect In PeregrinationsLyotard writes

[One must] become open to the OgraveIt happensthatOacute rather than the OgraveWhat happensOacute Eacute [andthis] requires at the very least a high degree ofrefinement in the perception of small differ-ences Eacute In order to take on this attitude youhave to impoverish your mind clean it out asmuch as possible so that you make it inca-pable of anticipating the meaning the OgraveWhatOacuteof the OgraveIt happensEacuteOacute The secret of such asce-sis lies in the power to be able to endure occur-rences as OgravedirectlyOacute as possible without themediation of a Ogravepre-textOacute Thus to encounterthe event is like bordering on nothingness(18)15

And so this event this affect as Bataille alsoteaches us is not really about self-conscious-ness ETH the representation of experience tooneself the self as constituted through represen-tation ETH at all In fact we might say that theaffect is a more brutal apersonal thing It is thatwhich connects us to the world It is the matterin us responding and resonating with the matteraround us The affect is in this sense transhu-man Indeed with the affect what we have is akind of transhuman aesthetic Paul de Manmight figure art as a shield from mortality areassuring mirror to a fearful subject (and thenof course demonstrate that the shield is alwaysalready broken) But in fact art is somethingmuch more dangerous a portal an access pointto another world (our world experienced differ-ently) a world of impermanence and interpene-tration a molecular world of becomingAccording to Deleuze and Guattari this ulti-mately is what makes painting abstract the

OgravesummoningOacute and making visible of forces(What is Philosophy 181ETH82)16

This world of affects this universe of forces isour own world seen without the spectacles ofsubjectivity But how to remove these spectacleswhich are not really spectacles at all but the verycondition of our subjectivity How indeed tosidestep our selves In fact we do it all thetime ETH we are involved in molecular processesthat go on OgravebeyondOacute our subjectivity Indeed weOgraveareOacute these processes17 We OgraveareOacute ETH as well assubjects (bound by strata) ETH bundles of eventsbundles of affects (in a constant process ofdestratification)18 At stake here then are prac-tices and strategies which reveal this Ograveother sideOacuteto ourselves practices which imaginatively andpragmatically switch the register After all whynot try something new As Deleuze remarks in aninterview OgraveWhat weOtildere interested in you see aremodes of individuation beyond those of thingspersons or subjects the individuation say of atime of day of a region a climate a river or awind of an event And maybe itOtildes a mistake tobelieve in the existence of things persons orsubjectsOacute (Negotiations 26)

This is artOtildes function to switch our intensiveregister to reconnect us with the world Artopens us up to the non-human universe that weare part of Indeed art might well have a repre-sentational function (after all art objects likeeverything else can be read) but art also operatesas a fissure in representation And we as specta-tors as representational creatures are involved ina dance with art a dance in which ETH through care-ful manoeuvres ETH the molecular is opened up theaesthetic is activated and art does what is itschief modus operandi it transforms if only for amoment our sense of our OgraveselvesOacute and ournotion of our world

This is of course to claim quite an impor-tance for art Certainly it is to move far awayfrom those postmodernists who assert that it istime for art to be included within the Ogravebroaderpicture of representational practices in contem-porary societyOacute (Burgin 147) Indeed it is toclaim a kind of autonomy for art But this auton-omy is not the same as for example AdornoOtildesalthough it might appear similar It is in fact areconfiguration of aesthetics away from Adorno

1 2 8

orsquosullivan

and the whole Kantian heritage In AestheticTheory Adorno writes OgraveArtOtildes utopia thecounter-factual yet-to-come is draped in Black itgoes on being a recollection of the possible witha critical edge against the real Eacute It is the possi-ble as promised by its impossibility Art is thepromise of happiness a promise that isconstantly being brokenOacute (196)

For Adorno art operates as a utopian blink itpresents the possible through its difference to theexistent Indeed art for Adorno is not really ofthis world at all ETH it prefigures and promises aworld yet-to-come Art if you like operateswithin Walter BenjaminOtildes messianic time Andyet art is inevitably doomed to frustration thepromise (of reconciliation) is constantly beingbroken Art operates within this melancholyfield In fact it is worth noting that philosophyfor Adorno operates on the same register OgraveTheonly philosophy which can be reasonably prac-tised in the face of despair is the attempt tocontemplate all things as they would presentthemselves from the standpoint of redemptionOacute(Minima Moralia 247) In a sense then Adornohas abandoned the existent (his is a forsakenworld) Indeed this is what gives his work itsmelancholy tenor

However we might want to turn from Adornoto Deleuze and to a more affirmative notion ofthe aesthetic impulse Here instead of the exis-tent and the possible as ontological categoriesand as coordinates for art we might utiliseDeleuzeOtildes categories of the actual and thevirtual In Difference and Repetition Deleuzeoutlines this shift and the difference between thetwo sets of categories as follows

The only danger in all this is that the virtualcould be confused with the possible The possi-ble is opposed to the real the process under-gone by the possible is therefore aOgraverealisationOacute By contrast the virtual is notopposed to the real it possesses a full realityby itself The process it undergoes is actualisa-tion It would be wrong to see only a verbaldispute here it is a question of existence itself(211)

At stake in art is not a utopian and in somesenses negative aesthetic but an affirmativeactualisation of the virtual ETH the latter being a

genuinely creative act (as opposed to the realisa-tion of the possible which ultimately alwaysalready resembles the real)19 The virtual herecan be understood as the realm of affects Artprecisely actualises these invisible universes20 orat least it opens up a portal onto these othervirtual worlds (we might say that art is situatedon the borderline between the actual and thevirtual)21 This gives art an ethical imperativebecause it involves a kind of moving beyond thealready familiar (the human) precisely a kind ofself-overcoming

For Guattari this new ethico-aesthetic para-digm pertains not just to art but to subjectivityas well (in fact notions of subject and objectbecome blurred here) Guattari argues that byallowing individuals access to Ogravenew materials ofexpressionOacute Ogravenew complexes of subjectivationOacutebecome possible new Ograveincorporeal universes ofreferenceOacute are opened up which allow for whatGuattari calls a process of resingularisation ETH aprocess of reordering our selves and our relationto the world (Chaosmosis 7) In such a prag-matic and aesthetic reconfiguration Ograveone createsnew modalities of subjectivity in the same way anartist creates new forms from a paletteOacute (ibid)(For Guattari the La Borde clinic where heworked understood as a machinic assemblagewas precisely a site of resingularisation But infact people resingularise themselves every dayacademics plant allotments manual labourersvisit the theatre Different activities take onaesthetic deterritorialising functions)

This is to take art away from the Frankfurtschool register For Adorno artOtildes importance layat least in one sense in its uselessness its irre-ducibility to conceptual thought Art did notpartake in and thus provided a critique ofinstrumental reason and its accompaniment theworld commodity system With Deleuze andGuattari and their allies we have a differentmapping of the world and of philosophyOtildes andartOtildes role within it Philosophy is no longer to beunderstood as a utopian pursuit22 but is ratherto do with pragmatics active concept creation inorder to solve problems (to get something done)Likewise with art Art is not useless but performsvery specific roles23 These roles or functionsdiffer depending on the kind of art and the

1 2 9

aesthetics of affect

milieu in which a work of art exists Indeedconceptual art might have more in common withwhat Deleuze and Guattari call philosophy (prob-lem solving) Installation art on the other handmight be a paradigmatic case of art as accesspoint to other worlds Julia Kristeva arrives atprecisely this conclusion (here she is writingabout contemporary installations at the VeniceBiennale)

In an installation it is the body in its entiretywhich is asked to participate through its sensa-tions through vision obviously but also hear-ing touch on occasions smell As if theseartists in the place of an OgraveobjectOacute sought toplace us in a space at the limits of the sacredand asked us not to contemplate images but tocommunicate with beings I had the impres-sion that [the artists] were communicating thisthat the ultimate aim of art is perhaps whatwas formerly celebrated under the term ofincarnation I mean by that a wish to make usfeel through the abstractions the forms thecolours the volumes the sensations a realexperience (Quoted in Bann 69)

For Kristeva art (in this case installation) is abloc of sensations made up of abstractionsforms colours and volumes This art is also asacred space whose aim it is to give us a real (inthis case multi-sensory) experience Kristevatalks about these installations not in terms ofrepresentation but in terms of their function afunction of incarnation For Kristeva thisaesthetic function is the Ograveultimate aim of artOacuteThis is in a sense to move to a post-mediumnotion of art practice in that it is not so impor-tant what the specifics of a medium might be (noGreenbergian truth to materials no more askingOgravewhat is artOacute Ogravewhat is paintingOacute and thus nomore deconstructions) rather what becomesimportant is what a particular art object can doIn relation to aesthetics and affects this functionmight be summed up as the making visible of theinvisible of the making perceptible of the imper-ceptible or as Deleuze and Guattari would say asthe harnessing of forces24 Another way of sayingthis is that art is a deterritorialisation a creativedeterritorialisation into the realm of affects

Art then might be understood as the namefor a function a magical an aesthetic function

of transformation Art is less involved in makingsense of the world and more involved in explor-ing the possibilities of being of becoming in theworld Less involved in knowledge and moreinvolved in experience in pushing forward theboundaries of what can be experienced25 Finallyless involved in shielding us from death butindeed precisely involved in actualising the possi-bilities of life Paradoxically the notion of anOgraveaesthetic functionOacute might well return us to aproductive utilisation of the term OgravevisualcultureOacute But this will be a return marked by itspassage through aesthetics through Adorno andDeleuze especially In a sense this passage ETH thischampioning of art as an autonomous aestheticpractice ETH was only the first moment the secondbeing a detachment of the aesthetic from itsapparent location within (and transcendentattachment to) certain objects (the canonicalobjects of art history) This immanent aestheticas function can now be thought in relation to avariety of objects and practices So yes perhapswe can speak of a kind of visual culture after allnot through the notion of a general semiotics butrather through the notion of a general aesthetics

How might this effect the practice of arthistory A certain kind of art history mightdisappear that which attends only to artOtildes signi-fying character that which understands art posi-tions art work as representation Indeed theselatter functions might be placed alongside artOtildesother asignifying functions ETH artOtildes affective andintensive qualities (the molecular beneathwithin the molar) In this place art becomes amore complex and a more interesting objectAnd the business of art history changes from ahermeneutic to a heuristic activity art history asa kind of parallel to the work that art is alreadydoing rather than as an attempt to fix and inter-pret art indeed art history as precisely a kind ofcreative writing So I end this paper this skir-mish against representation with the outline of anew project the thinking of specific art worksthe writing on specific art works as explorationof artOtildes creative aesthetic and ethical function26

This will involve attending to the specificity of anart work and the specificity of the milieu inwhich the art object operates This is not a retreatfrom art history but a reconfiguration of its prac-

1 3 0

orsquosullivan

tice ETH a reconfiguration which might well involveas one of its strategies a return to those writerswho have always seen theaesthetic as the function of artand to those writers who mightnot be art historians but whoare nevertheless attuned to theaesthetics of affect

notes

My thanks to Angelakirsquos reviewers

1 Indeed there is a ldquotraditionrdquo of positioning crit-ical art history as a form of ideological critiqueand specifically as a critique of aesthetics See forexample Kurt Fosterrsquos polemical essay ldquoCriticalHistory of Art or a Transfiguration of Valuesrdquo

2 Jacques Derrida performs precisely this decon-struction of aesthetics in ldquoThe Parergonrdquo in hisThe Truth in Painting 37ndash82

3 For a more affirmative mapping of Derridarsquoscontribution towards thinking the art object seemy ldquoArt as Text Rethinking Representationrdquo

4 They can be described as extra-discursive in thesense that they are ldquooutsiderdquo discourse under-stood as structure (they are precisely what is irre-ducible to structure) They can be described asextra-textual in the sense that they do notproduce ndash or do not only produce ndash knowledgeAffects might however be understood as textualin that they are felt as differences in intensity

5 For Brian Massumi in ldquoThe Autonomy ofAffectrdquo affects are likewise understood asmoments of intensity ndash which might resonate withlinguistic expression but which strictly speakingare of a different and prior order For Massumi asfor myself ldquoapproaches to the image in its relationto language are incomplete if they operate only onthe semantic or semiotic level however that levelis defined (linguistically logically narratologicallyideologically or all of these combinations as aSymbolic) What they lose precisely is the event ndashin favour of structurerdquo (ibid 220)

Massumi identifies the realm of affect as one ofincreasing importance within ldquomedia literary andart theoryrdquo but points out the problem that thereis ldquono culturalndashtheoretical vocabulary specific toaffectrdquo indeed our ldquoentire vocabulary has derivedfrom theories of signification that are still weddedto structurerdquo (ibid 221) From one perspective

Massumi is right there is no vocabulary of affectHowever it is not so simple as inventing one Toinvent a language forof affect is to bring the latterinto representation ndash and hence to invite decon-struction In a sense there is no way out of thispredicament except to acknowledge it as a prob-lem ndash and move beyond it Which is what thispaper attempts to do

6 See Deleuzersquos ldquoSpinoza and the Three Ethicsrdquowhere ldquoaffectrdquo is defined as the effect affectionshave on the bodyrsquos duration the ldquopassagesbecomings rises and falls continuous variations ofpower (puissance) that pass from one state toanother We will call them affects strictly speak-ing and no longer affections They are signs ofincrease and decrease signs that are vectorial (ofthe joyndashsadness type) and no longer scalar like theaffections sensations or perceptionsrdquo (139)

7 As Feacutelix Guattari observes in an interview

The same semiotic material can be function-ing in different registers A material can beboth caught in paradigmatic chains of produc-tion chains of signification hellip but at the sametime can function in an a-signifying registerSo what determines the difference In onecase a signifier functions in what one mightcall a logic of discursive aggregates ie a logicof representation In the other case it func-tions in something that isnrsquot entirely a logicwhat Irsquove called an existential machinic a logicof bodies without organs a machinic ofbodies without organs (ldquoPragmaticMachinerdquo15)

8 For Guattari affects can be understood preciselyas what makes up life They establish a kind ofcentre or ldquoself-affirmationrdquo that occurs parallel tothe discursive (what Guattari terms ldquolinearrdquo)elements of subjectivity For Guattari this affec-tive element is present in Freudrsquos theory of thedrives but has been overlooked by ldquothe struc-turalistsrdquo (Guattari has Lacan in mind) (ldquoOnMachinesrdquo 10) Guattari writes

I consider that limiting ourselves to this coor-dinate [ie linearity] is precisely to lose theelement of the machinic centre of subjectiveautopoiesis and self-affirmation Whetherlocated at the level of the complete individualor partial subjectivity or even at the level ofsocial subjectivity this element undergoes apathic relationship by means of the affectWhat is it then that makes us state phenom-

1 3 1

aesthetics of affect

enologically that something is living It isprecisely this relation of affect This is not adescription nor a kind of propositional analy-sis resulting from a sense of hypotheses anddeductions ndash ie it is a living being thereforeit is a machine rather an immediate pathicand non-discursive apprehension occurs ofthe machinersquos ontological autocompositionrelationship (Ibid)

Interestingly in ldquoOn Machinesrdquo Guattari developsthe notion of a non-discursive affective foyerwhich has much in common with Bergsonrsquos notionof living beings as affective ldquocentres of indetermi-nationrdquo (28ndash34)

9 Lyotard addresses this double functioning of thesign in ldquoThe Tensorrdquo Like Guattari (see noteabove) Lyotardrsquos point of departure is Freudrsquostheory of the drives Lyotard merely points outthat the sign can operate within two (or presum-ably even more) economies metonymic andmetaphoric systems but also affective ones ldquoIt isat once a sign that creates meaning through diver-gence and opposition and a sign that createsintensity through strength and singularityrdquo (11)

10[T]he work of art is hellip a bloc of sensationsthat is to say a compound of percepts andaffects Percepts are no longer perceptionsthey are independent of a state of those whoexperience them Affects are no longer feel-ings or affections they go beyond thestrength of those who undergo themSensations percepts and affects are beingswhose validity lies in themselves and exceedsany lived (What is Philosophy 164)

In their chapter on art in What is PhilosophyDeleuze and Guattari map out a theory andlanguage of art outside of representation I want tonote here an interesting dovetailing of their theorywith a kind of aporia which ldquoThe Social History ofArtrdquo and in particular TJ Clark finds itselfhimselfin Suffice to say that Deleuze and Guattarirsquoslanguage ndash of movement materials and matter ndash isprecisely the object of art historyrsquos secret desireand fear a language of art which is no longer to dowith signifiers and signifieds (poached as Clarkhimself remarks from film theory) Unfortunatelyall materialist art historians (ldquoThe Social History ofArtrdquo) eventually and inevitably hit an aporiawhich very briefly goes like this how to attend tothe material object behind the ideological veils(the cultural readingsmeanings) whilst still attend-

ing to the objectrsquos history The problem arisesbecause ideology and history are here synony-mous In a sense ldquoThe Social History of Artrdquo andart history in general could not cannot put thislanguage together they are working within thehorizon of signification A language of material andmatter would for them be a fetishisation ndash anemptying out of meaning or of that trope of mean-ing history They would be guilty of the very ideo-logical mystification of which they are against It isonly within a different model or paradigm that alanguage of materials and matter makes sense

11 Massumi is useful in rethinking the relationshipbetween the event as intensity and experience

Although the realm of intensity thatDeleuzersquos philosophy strives to conceptualiseis transcendental in the sense that it is notdirectly accessible to experience it is nottranscendent it is not exactly outside experi-ence either It is immanent to it ndash always in itbut not of it Intensity and experience accom-pany one another like two mutually presup-posing dimensions or like two sides of a coinIntensity is immanent to matter and toevents to mind and to body and to everylevel of bifurcation composing them andwhich they compose (226)

Hence intensity for Massumi is indeed experi-enced ldquoin the proliferations of levels of organisa-tion it ceaselessly gives rise to generates andregenerates at every suspended momentrdquo (226)

12 For a tracking through of this oscillation seethe debates around allegory in the visual artscarried out in October in particular Craig OwensrsquoldquoThe Allegorical Impulse Towards a Theory ofPostmodernismrdquo and most impressive StephenMelvillersquos ldquoNotes on the Reemergence ofAllegory the Forgetting of Modernism theNecessity of Rhetoric and the Conditions ofPublicity in Art and Art Criticismrdquo

13 See for example Andrew Benjaminrsquos The PluralEvent For another interesting take on this prob-lematic especially in relation to Deleuzersquos projectof thinking multiplicity see Alain Badioursquos DeleuzeThe Clamor of Being

14 For Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophyart is a zone ldquoa zone of indetermination of indis-cernibility as if things beasts and persons hellipendlessly reach that point that immediatelyprecedes their natural differentiation This is what

1 3 2

orsquosullivan

is called an affect hellip Life alone creates such zoneswhere living beings whirl around and only art canreach and penetrate them in its enterprise of co-creationrdquo (173)

15 In general Lyotard tends to configure thisunknown event in Kantian terms specifically inrelation to the sublime As we shall see thereneed not be a recourse to the transcendent inorder to allow for the possibility of a beyond toeveryday experience

16 John Rajchman has also written on this notionof the abstract and on its difference to the moretypical one might say Greenbergian notion ofabstraction as reduction and purity For Rajchmanabstraction must be understood as a realm ofpossibilities of potentialities prior to figuration Inorder to paint ldquoone must come to see the surfacenot so much as empty or blank but rather asintense where lsquointensityrsquo means filled with theunseen virtuality of other strange possibilitiesrdquo(Rajchman 61) The question of how to ldquopaintoutside forcerdquo is according to Rajchmanrsquos readingof Deleuze ldquothe basic question of modernityrdquo (60)

17 This insight can be experienced Throughdrugs through meditation through anything thatif only for a moment dissolves the molar aggre-gate of our subjectivity

18 As Deleuze and Guattari remark in ldquo587BCndashAD 70 On Several Regimes of Signsrdquo theldquoprincipal strata binding human beings are theorganism signifiance and interpretation andsubjectification and subjectionrdquo (A ThousandPlateaus 134) It is the function of the next chapterldquoHow to Make Yourself a Body without Organsrdquoto offer strategies for destratification This chaptermight also be considered as a mapping through ofa series of experimental strategies for accessingthe realm of affect It is worth noting Deleuze andGuattarirsquos warning here against ldquowildly destratify-ingrdquo (A Thousand Plateaus 160) ndash this can endmerely in empty botched bodies without organs(or worse) In fact ldquoyou have to keep enough ofthe organism for it to reform each dawn and youhave to keep small supplies of signifiance andsubjectification if only to turn them against theirown systems when circumstances demand it hellipand you have to keep small rations of subjectivityin sufficient quantity to enable you to respond tothe dominant realityrdquo (ibid) See also my ldquoInViolence Three Case Studies Against theStratumrdquo

19 For a thorough working through of this logic ofthe real and the possible the virtual and the actualsee Deleuzersquos Bergsonism 96ndash98

20 As do philosophy science and as we have seenprosthetic technologies By altering our temporaland spatial registers new technology opens worldspreviously invisible to us but not worlds non-exis-tent We might say something similar about puremathematics abstract equations as a way of actu-alising events and processes which cannot berepresented (indeed this actualisation is a form ofproblem solving)

21 As Massumi remarks ldquoIt is the edge of thevirtual where it leaks into the actual that countsFor that seeping edge is where potential actuallyis foundrdquo (236)

22 For Deleuze and Guattari philosophy is not autopian pursuit in the sense of positing transcen-dent (and thus authoritarian) utopias Howeverphilosophy might be figured as utopian if weunderstand by this term immanent revolutionaryutopias Indeed for Deleuze and Guattari politicalphilosophy is this kind of utopian practice whichinvolves a ldquoresistance to the presentrdquo and acreation of concepts which in itself ldquocalls for afuture form for a new people that do not yetexistrdquo (What is Philosophy 108) Although notwithin the scope of this paper a reading ofFrankfurt school utopias via Deleuze andGuattarirsquos notion of immanence would be an inter-esting and productive project Deleuze andGuattari themselves seem to have this in mindwhen they footnote the writings of Ernst Bloch inWhat is Philosophy (224)

23 A good example of rethinking art away fromthe horizon of instrumental reason (and of thelatterrsquos critique) is Ronald Boguersquos ldquoArt andTerritoryrdquo Bogue taking his lead from Deleuzersquosnotion of the refrain argues that bird song as akind of art practice involves processes and move-ments of territorialisation deterritorialisationand reterritorialisation Which is to say that art isnot here involved in a logic of the possible but isto do with function a function of deterritorialisa-tion

24 Ronald Bogue has outlined this ldquoaesthetics offorcerdquo as he calls it in relation to painting andmore interestingly in relation to music (seeldquoGilles Deleuze The Aesthetics of Forcerdquo) Boguereads Deleuze as offering an ldquoopen systemrdquo of the

1 3 3

aesthetics of affect

arts where at stake is less a definition of art or anydemarcation between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic but rather a general function of art aswhat ldquoharnesses forcesrdquo (ibid 268) This is partic-ularly the case with painting and of courseDeleuze outlines this theory in relation to thepaintings of Francis Bacon However the functionof music is also involved in forces As Bogueremarks ldquoThe basic function of the refrain is toterritorialise forces to regularise control andencode the unpredictable world in regularpatterns But the refrain never remains purelyclosed and stable Its emergence from the chaoticflux is only provisional and its rhythms always issueforth to the cosmos at largerdquo (ibid 265)

This larger function of deterritorialisation isprecisely a ldquoline of flightrdquo into the molecular It isthis ndash an affective line (and I would argue anaesthetic one) ndash that defines art

25 This is precisely Lyotardrsquos point in ldquoPhilosophyand Painting in the Age of Their ExperimentationContribution to an Idea of PostmodernityrdquoldquoTodayrsquos art consists in exploring things unsayableand things invisible Strange machines are assem-bled where what we didnrsquot have the idea of sayingor the matter to feel can make itself heard andexperiencedrdquo (190)

26 I attempt such a project albeit briefly in thispaperrsquos companion piece ldquoWriting on Art (CaseStudy The Buddhist Puja)rdquo

bibliography

Adorno A Minima Moralia Trans EFN JephcottLondon Verso 1978

Adorno A Aesthetic Theory Trans C LenhardtLondon Routledge 1984

Badiou A Deleuze The Clamor of Being TransLouise Burchill Minneapolis U of Minnesota P1999

Bann S ldquoThree Images for Kristeva From Bellinito Proustrdquo Parallax 8 (autumn 1998) 65ndash79

Bataille G Prehistoric Painting Lascaux or the Birth ofArt Trans Austryn Wainhouse LondonMacmillan 1980

Benjamin A The Plural Event London Routledge1993

Bergson H Matter and Memory Trans NM Pauland WS Palmer New York Zone 1991

Bogue R ldquoGilles Deleuze The Aesthetics ofForcerdquo Deleuze A Critical Reader Ed Paul PattonOxford Blackwell 1996

Bogue R ldquoArt and Territoryrdquo A Deleuzian CenturyEd Ian Buchanan Durham Duke UP 1999

Burgin V ldquoThe End of Art Theoryrdquo The End of ArtTheory London Macmillan 1986

de Man P ldquoLiterary History and LiteraryModernityrdquo Blindness and Insight LondonRoutledge 1989

Derrida J The Truth in Painting Trans GeoffBennington and Ian McCleod Chicago U ofChicago P 1987

Deleuze G Bergsonism Trans Hugh Tomlinsonand Barbara Habberjam New York Zone 1991

Deleuze G Negotiations 1972ndash90 Trans MartinJoughin New York Columbia UP 1992

Deleuze G Difference and Repetition Trans PaulPatton London Athlone 1994

Deleuze G ldquoSpinoza and the Three Ethicsrdquo EssaysCritical and Clinical Trans Daniel W Smith andMichael Greco London Verso 1998

Deleuze G and F Guattari A Thousand PlateausTrans Brian Massumi London Athlone 1988

Deleuze G and F Guattari What is PhilosophyTrans Graham Burchell and Hugh TomlinsonLondon Verso 1994

Foster K ldquoCritical History of Art or aTransfiguration of Valuesrdquo New Literary History(spring 1972) 459ndash70

Guattari F ldquoPragmaticMachinerdquo Interview withCharles J Stivale lthttpwwwdcpeacnetedu~mnuesguattarihtmgt (1985)

Guattari F ldquoOn Machinesrdquo ComplexityArchitectureArtPhilosophy Trans VivianConstantinopoulos Ed Andrew BenjaminLondon Academy 1989

Guattari F Chaosmosis An Ethico-AestheticParadigm Trans Julian Pefanis and Paul BainsSydney Power Institute 1995

Lyotard J-F The Postmodern Condition A Report onKnowledge Trans Geoff Bennington and BrianMassumi Manchester Manchester UP 1984

Lyotard J-F Peregrinations Law Form Event NewYork Columbia UP 1988

1 3 4

orsquosullivan

Lyotard J-F ldquoThe Tensorrdquo Trans Sean Hand TheLyotard Reader Ed Andrew Benjamin OxfordBlackwell 1989

Lyotard J-F ldquoPhilosophy and Painting in the Ageof Their Experimentation Contribution to an Ideaof Postmodernityrdquo Trans Maria Minich Brewerand Daniel Brewer The Lyotard Reader EdAndrew Benjamin Oxford Blackwell 1989

Lyotard J-F ldquoCritical Reflectionsrdquo Trans WGJNiesluchawski Artforum 248 (1991) 92ndash93

Massumi B ldquoThe Autonomy of Affectrdquo Deleuze ACritical Reader Ed P Patton Oxford Blackwell1996

Melville S ldquoNotes on the Reemergence ofAllegory the Forgetting of Modernism theNecessity of Rhetoric and the Conditions ofPublicity in Art and Art Criticismrdquo October 19(1981) 55ndash92

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoIn Violence Three Case StudiesAgainst the Stratumrdquo Parallax 15 (summer 2000)104ndash09

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoWriting on Art (Case Study TheBuddhist Puja)rdquo Parallax 21 (forthcoming)

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoArt as Text RethinkingRepresentationrdquo Art History (forthcoming)

Owens C ldquoThe Allegorical Impulse Towards aTheory of Postmodernismrdquo October 12 (1980)67ndash86

Rajchman J ldquoAbstractionrdquo ConstructionsCambridge MA MIT P 1988

Simon OOtildeSullivanDepartment of Historical and Critical StudiesGoldsmiths CollegeNew CrossLondonSE14 6NWUKE-mail soOtildesullivangoldacuk

Page 4: THE AESTHETICS OF AFFECT: thinking art beyond …simonosullivan.net/articles/aesthetics-of-affect.pdfaesthetics of affect origin under erasure. First aesthetics fell foul of Marxism

aesthetics of affect

standing of the Lascaux cave paintings asprecisely performative) This might involve arepresentational function (after all we can recog-nise the animals at Lascaux) but representationis not these paintingsOtilde sole purpose and we misssomething essential about them if we attendmerely to their history (if we simply read them)Jean-Fran ois Lyotard is perhaps most attuned tothis experimental and rupturing quality of artLyotard calls for a practice of patience of listen-ing ETH a kind of meditative state that allows forproduces an opening for an experience of theevent precisely as the affect In PeregrinationsLyotard writes

[One must] become open to the OgraveIt happensthatOacute rather than the OgraveWhat happensOacute Eacute [andthis] requires at the very least a high degree ofrefinement in the perception of small differ-ences Eacute In order to take on this attitude youhave to impoverish your mind clean it out asmuch as possible so that you make it inca-pable of anticipating the meaning the OgraveWhatOacuteof the OgraveIt happensEacuteOacute The secret of such asce-sis lies in the power to be able to endure occur-rences as OgravedirectlyOacute as possible without themediation of a Ogravepre-textOacute Thus to encounterthe event is like bordering on nothingness(18)15

And so this event this affect as Bataille alsoteaches us is not really about self-conscious-ness ETH the representation of experience tooneself the self as constituted through represen-tation ETH at all In fact we might say that theaffect is a more brutal apersonal thing It is thatwhich connects us to the world It is the matterin us responding and resonating with the matteraround us The affect is in this sense transhu-man Indeed with the affect what we have is akind of transhuman aesthetic Paul de Manmight figure art as a shield from mortality areassuring mirror to a fearful subject (and thenof course demonstrate that the shield is alwaysalready broken) But in fact art is somethingmuch more dangerous a portal an access pointto another world (our world experienced differ-ently) a world of impermanence and interpene-tration a molecular world of becomingAccording to Deleuze and Guattari this ulti-mately is what makes painting abstract the

OgravesummoningOacute and making visible of forces(What is Philosophy 181ETH82)16

This world of affects this universe of forces isour own world seen without the spectacles ofsubjectivity But how to remove these spectacleswhich are not really spectacles at all but the verycondition of our subjectivity How indeed tosidestep our selves In fact we do it all thetime ETH we are involved in molecular processesthat go on OgravebeyondOacute our subjectivity Indeed weOgraveareOacute these processes17 We OgraveareOacute ETH as well assubjects (bound by strata) ETH bundles of eventsbundles of affects (in a constant process ofdestratification)18 At stake here then are prac-tices and strategies which reveal this Ograveother sideOacuteto ourselves practices which imaginatively andpragmatically switch the register After all whynot try something new As Deleuze remarks in aninterview OgraveWhat weOtildere interested in you see aremodes of individuation beyond those of thingspersons or subjects the individuation say of atime of day of a region a climate a river or awind of an event And maybe itOtildes a mistake tobelieve in the existence of things persons orsubjectsOacute (Negotiations 26)

This is artOtildes function to switch our intensiveregister to reconnect us with the world Artopens us up to the non-human universe that weare part of Indeed art might well have a repre-sentational function (after all art objects likeeverything else can be read) but art also operatesas a fissure in representation And we as specta-tors as representational creatures are involved ina dance with art a dance in which ETH through care-ful manoeuvres ETH the molecular is opened up theaesthetic is activated and art does what is itschief modus operandi it transforms if only for amoment our sense of our OgraveselvesOacute and ournotion of our world

This is of course to claim quite an impor-tance for art Certainly it is to move far awayfrom those postmodernists who assert that it istime for art to be included within the Ogravebroaderpicture of representational practices in contem-porary societyOacute (Burgin 147) Indeed it is toclaim a kind of autonomy for art But this auton-omy is not the same as for example AdornoOtildesalthough it might appear similar It is in fact areconfiguration of aesthetics away from Adorno

1 2 8

orsquosullivan

and the whole Kantian heritage In AestheticTheory Adorno writes OgraveArtOtildes utopia thecounter-factual yet-to-come is draped in Black itgoes on being a recollection of the possible witha critical edge against the real Eacute It is the possi-ble as promised by its impossibility Art is thepromise of happiness a promise that isconstantly being brokenOacute (196)

For Adorno art operates as a utopian blink itpresents the possible through its difference to theexistent Indeed art for Adorno is not really ofthis world at all ETH it prefigures and promises aworld yet-to-come Art if you like operateswithin Walter BenjaminOtildes messianic time Andyet art is inevitably doomed to frustration thepromise (of reconciliation) is constantly beingbroken Art operates within this melancholyfield In fact it is worth noting that philosophyfor Adorno operates on the same register OgraveTheonly philosophy which can be reasonably prac-tised in the face of despair is the attempt tocontemplate all things as they would presentthemselves from the standpoint of redemptionOacute(Minima Moralia 247) In a sense then Adornohas abandoned the existent (his is a forsakenworld) Indeed this is what gives his work itsmelancholy tenor

However we might want to turn from Adornoto Deleuze and to a more affirmative notion ofthe aesthetic impulse Here instead of the exis-tent and the possible as ontological categoriesand as coordinates for art we might utiliseDeleuzeOtildes categories of the actual and thevirtual In Difference and Repetition Deleuzeoutlines this shift and the difference between thetwo sets of categories as follows

The only danger in all this is that the virtualcould be confused with the possible The possi-ble is opposed to the real the process under-gone by the possible is therefore aOgraverealisationOacute By contrast the virtual is notopposed to the real it possesses a full realityby itself The process it undergoes is actualisa-tion It would be wrong to see only a verbaldispute here it is a question of existence itself(211)

At stake in art is not a utopian and in somesenses negative aesthetic but an affirmativeactualisation of the virtual ETH the latter being a

genuinely creative act (as opposed to the realisa-tion of the possible which ultimately alwaysalready resembles the real)19 The virtual herecan be understood as the realm of affects Artprecisely actualises these invisible universes20 orat least it opens up a portal onto these othervirtual worlds (we might say that art is situatedon the borderline between the actual and thevirtual)21 This gives art an ethical imperativebecause it involves a kind of moving beyond thealready familiar (the human) precisely a kind ofself-overcoming

For Guattari this new ethico-aesthetic para-digm pertains not just to art but to subjectivityas well (in fact notions of subject and objectbecome blurred here) Guattari argues that byallowing individuals access to Ogravenew materials ofexpressionOacute Ogravenew complexes of subjectivationOacutebecome possible new Ograveincorporeal universes ofreferenceOacute are opened up which allow for whatGuattari calls a process of resingularisation ETH aprocess of reordering our selves and our relationto the world (Chaosmosis 7) In such a prag-matic and aesthetic reconfiguration Ograveone createsnew modalities of subjectivity in the same way anartist creates new forms from a paletteOacute (ibid)(For Guattari the La Borde clinic where heworked understood as a machinic assemblagewas precisely a site of resingularisation But infact people resingularise themselves every dayacademics plant allotments manual labourersvisit the theatre Different activities take onaesthetic deterritorialising functions)

This is to take art away from the Frankfurtschool register For Adorno artOtildes importance layat least in one sense in its uselessness its irre-ducibility to conceptual thought Art did notpartake in and thus provided a critique ofinstrumental reason and its accompaniment theworld commodity system With Deleuze andGuattari and their allies we have a differentmapping of the world and of philosophyOtildes andartOtildes role within it Philosophy is no longer to beunderstood as a utopian pursuit22 but is ratherto do with pragmatics active concept creation inorder to solve problems (to get something done)Likewise with art Art is not useless but performsvery specific roles23 These roles or functionsdiffer depending on the kind of art and the

1 2 9

aesthetics of affect

milieu in which a work of art exists Indeedconceptual art might have more in common withwhat Deleuze and Guattari call philosophy (prob-lem solving) Installation art on the other handmight be a paradigmatic case of art as accesspoint to other worlds Julia Kristeva arrives atprecisely this conclusion (here she is writingabout contemporary installations at the VeniceBiennale)

In an installation it is the body in its entiretywhich is asked to participate through its sensa-tions through vision obviously but also hear-ing touch on occasions smell As if theseartists in the place of an OgraveobjectOacute sought toplace us in a space at the limits of the sacredand asked us not to contemplate images but tocommunicate with beings I had the impres-sion that [the artists] were communicating thisthat the ultimate aim of art is perhaps whatwas formerly celebrated under the term ofincarnation I mean by that a wish to make usfeel through the abstractions the forms thecolours the volumes the sensations a realexperience (Quoted in Bann 69)

For Kristeva art (in this case installation) is abloc of sensations made up of abstractionsforms colours and volumes This art is also asacred space whose aim it is to give us a real (inthis case multi-sensory) experience Kristevatalks about these installations not in terms ofrepresentation but in terms of their function afunction of incarnation For Kristeva thisaesthetic function is the Ograveultimate aim of artOacuteThis is in a sense to move to a post-mediumnotion of art practice in that it is not so impor-tant what the specifics of a medium might be (noGreenbergian truth to materials no more askingOgravewhat is artOacute Ogravewhat is paintingOacute and thus nomore deconstructions) rather what becomesimportant is what a particular art object can doIn relation to aesthetics and affects this functionmight be summed up as the making visible of theinvisible of the making perceptible of the imper-ceptible or as Deleuze and Guattari would say asthe harnessing of forces24 Another way of sayingthis is that art is a deterritorialisation a creativedeterritorialisation into the realm of affects

Art then might be understood as the namefor a function a magical an aesthetic function

of transformation Art is less involved in makingsense of the world and more involved in explor-ing the possibilities of being of becoming in theworld Less involved in knowledge and moreinvolved in experience in pushing forward theboundaries of what can be experienced25 Finallyless involved in shielding us from death butindeed precisely involved in actualising the possi-bilities of life Paradoxically the notion of anOgraveaesthetic functionOacute might well return us to aproductive utilisation of the term OgravevisualcultureOacute But this will be a return marked by itspassage through aesthetics through Adorno andDeleuze especially In a sense this passage ETH thischampioning of art as an autonomous aestheticpractice ETH was only the first moment the secondbeing a detachment of the aesthetic from itsapparent location within (and transcendentattachment to) certain objects (the canonicalobjects of art history) This immanent aestheticas function can now be thought in relation to avariety of objects and practices So yes perhapswe can speak of a kind of visual culture after allnot through the notion of a general semiotics butrather through the notion of a general aesthetics

How might this effect the practice of arthistory A certain kind of art history mightdisappear that which attends only to artOtildes signi-fying character that which understands art posi-tions art work as representation Indeed theselatter functions might be placed alongside artOtildesother asignifying functions ETH artOtildes affective andintensive qualities (the molecular beneathwithin the molar) In this place art becomes amore complex and a more interesting objectAnd the business of art history changes from ahermeneutic to a heuristic activity art history asa kind of parallel to the work that art is alreadydoing rather than as an attempt to fix and inter-pret art indeed art history as precisely a kind ofcreative writing So I end this paper this skir-mish against representation with the outline of anew project the thinking of specific art worksthe writing on specific art works as explorationof artOtildes creative aesthetic and ethical function26

This will involve attending to the specificity of anart work and the specificity of the milieu inwhich the art object operates This is not a retreatfrom art history but a reconfiguration of its prac-

1 3 0

orsquosullivan

tice ETH a reconfiguration which might well involveas one of its strategies a return to those writerswho have always seen theaesthetic as the function of artand to those writers who mightnot be art historians but whoare nevertheless attuned to theaesthetics of affect

notes

My thanks to Angelakirsquos reviewers

1 Indeed there is a ldquotraditionrdquo of positioning crit-ical art history as a form of ideological critiqueand specifically as a critique of aesthetics See forexample Kurt Fosterrsquos polemical essay ldquoCriticalHistory of Art or a Transfiguration of Valuesrdquo

2 Jacques Derrida performs precisely this decon-struction of aesthetics in ldquoThe Parergonrdquo in hisThe Truth in Painting 37ndash82

3 For a more affirmative mapping of Derridarsquoscontribution towards thinking the art object seemy ldquoArt as Text Rethinking Representationrdquo

4 They can be described as extra-discursive in thesense that they are ldquooutsiderdquo discourse under-stood as structure (they are precisely what is irre-ducible to structure) They can be described asextra-textual in the sense that they do notproduce ndash or do not only produce ndash knowledgeAffects might however be understood as textualin that they are felt as differences in intensity

5 For Brian Massumi in ldquoThe Autonomy ofAffectrdquo affects are likewise understood asmoments of intensity ndash which might resonate withlinguistic expression but which strictly speakingare of a different and prior order For Massumi asfor myself ldquoapproaches to the image in its relationto language are incomplete if they operate only onthe semantic or semiotic level however that levelis defined (linguistically logically narratologicallyideologically or all of these combinations as aSymbolic) What they lose precisely is the event ndashin favour of structurerdquo (ibid 220)

Massumi identifies the realm of affect as one ofincreasing importance within ldquomedia literary andart theoryrdquo but points out the problem that thereis ldquono culturalndashtheoretical vocabulary specific toaffectrdquo indeed our ldquoentire vocabulary has derivedfrom theories of signification that are still weddedto structurerdquo (ibid 221) From one perspective

Massumi is right there is no vocabulary of affectHowever it is not so simple as inventing one Toinvent a language forof affect is to bring the latterinto representation ndash and hence to invite decon-struction In a sense there is no way out of thispredicament except to acknowledge it as a prob-lem ndash and move beyond it Which is what thispaper attempts to do

6 See Deleuzersquos ldquoSpinoza and the Three Ethicsrdquowhere ldquoaffectrdquo is defined as the effect affectionshave on the bodyrsquos duration the ldquopassagesbecomings rises and falls continuous variations ofpower (puissance) that pass from one state toanother We will call them affects strictly speak-ing and no longer affections They are signs ofincrease and decrease signs that are vectorial (ofthe joyndashsadness type) and no longer scalar like theaffections sensations or perceptionsrdquo (139)

7 As Feacutelix Guattari observes in an interview

The same semiotic material can be function-ing in different registers A material can beboth caught in paradigmatic chains of produc-tion chains of signification hellip but at the sametime can function in an a-signifying registerSo what determines the difference In onecase a signifier functions in what one mightcall a logic of discursive aggregates ie a logicof representation In the other case it func-tions in something that isnrsquot entirely a logicwhat Irsquove called an existential machinic a logicof bodies without organs a machinic ofbodies without organs (ldquoPragmaticMachinerdquo15)

8 For Guattari affects can be understood preciselyas what makes up life They establish a kind ofcentre or ldquoself-affirmationrdquo that occurs parallel tothe discursive (what Guattari terms ldquolinearrdquo)elements of subjectivity For Guattari this affec-tive element is present in Freudrsquos theory of thedrives but has been overlooked by ldquothe struc-turalistsrdquo (Guattari has Lacan in mind) (ldquoOnMachinesrdquo 10) Guattari writes

I consider that limiting ourselves to this coor-dinate [ie linearity] is precisely to lose theelement of the machinic centre of subjectiveautopoiesis and self-affirmation Whetherlocated at the level of the complete individualor partial subjectivity or even at the level ofsocial subjectivity this element undergoes apathic relationship by means of the affectWhat is it then that makes us state phenom-

1 3 1

aesthetics of affect

enologically that something is living It isprecisely this relation of affect This is not adescription nor a kind of propositional analy-sis resulting from a sense of hypotheses anddeductions ndash ie it is a living being thereforeit is a machine rather an immediate pathicand non-discursive apprehension occurs ofthe machinersquos ontological autocompositionrelationship (Ibid)

Interestingly in ldquoOn Machinesrdquo Guattari developsthe notion of a non-discursive affective foyerwhich has much in common with Bergsonrsquos notionof living beings as affective ldquocentres of indetermi-nationrdquo (28ndash34)

9 Lyotard addresses this double functioning of thesign in ldquoThe Tensorrdquo Like Guattari (see noteabove) Lyotardrsquos point of departure is Freudrsquostheory of the drives Lyotard merely points outthat the sign can operate within two (or presum-ably even more) economies metonymic andmetaphoric systems but also affective ones ldquoIt isat once a sign that creates meaning through diver-gence and opposition and a sign that createsintensity through strength and singularityrdquo (11)

10[T]he work of art is hellip a bloc of sensationsthat is to say a compound of percepts andaffects Percepts are no longer perceptionsthey are independent of a state of those whoexperience them Affects are no longer feel-ings or affections they go beyond thestrength of those who undergo themSensations percepts and affects are beingswhose validity lies in themselves and exceedsany lived (What is Philosophy 164)

In their chapter on art in What is PhilosophyDeleuze and Guattari map out a theory andlanguage of art outside of representation I want tonote here an interesting dovetailing of their theorywith a kind of aporia which ldquoThe Social History ofArtrdquo and in particular TJ Clark finds itselfhimselfin Suffice to say that Deleuze and Guattarirsquoslanguage ndash of movement materials and matter ndash isprecisely the object of art historyrsquos secret desireand fear a language of art which is no longer to dowith signifiers and signifieds (poached as Clarkhimself remarks from film theory) Unfortunatelyall materialist art historians (ldquoThe Social History ofArtrdquo) eventually and inevitably hit an aporiawhich very briefly goes like this how to attend tothe material object behind the ideological veils(the cultural readingsmeanings) whilst still attend-

ing to the objectrsquos history The problem arisesbecause ideology and history are here synony-mous In a sense ldquoThe Social History of Artrdquo andart history in general could not cannot put thislanguage together they are working within thehorizon of signification A language of material andmatter would for them be a fetishisation ndash anemptying out of meaning or of that trope of mean-ing history They would be guilty of the very ideo-logical mystification of which they are against It isonly within a different model or paradigm that alanguage of materials and matter makes sense

11 Massumi is useful in rethinking the relationshipbetween the event as intensity and experience

Although the realm of intensity thatDeleuzersquos philosophy strives to conceptualiseis transcendental in the sense that it is notdirectly accessible to experience it is nottranscendent it is not exactly outside experi-ence either It is immanent to it ndash always in itbut not of it Intensity and experience accom-pany one another like two mutually presup-posing dimensions or like two sides of a coinIntensity is immanent to matter and toevents to mind and to body and to everylevel of bifurcation composing them andwhich they compose (226)

Hence intensity for Massumi is indeed experi-enced ldquoin the proliferations of levels of organisa-tion it ceaselessly gives rise to generates andregenerates at every suspended momentrdquo (226)

12 For a tracking through of this oscillation seethe debates around allegory in the visual artscarried out in October in particular Craig OwensrsquoldquoThe Allegorical Impulse Towards a Theory ofPostmodernismrdquo and most impressive StephenMelvillersquos ldquoNotes on the Reemergence ofAllegory the Forgetting of Modernism theNecessity of Rhetoric and the Conditions ofPublicity in Art and Art Criticismrdquo

13 See for example Andrew Benjaminrsquos The PluralEvent For another interesting take on this prob-lematic especially in relation to Deleuzersquos projectof thinking multiplicity see Alain Badioursquos DeleuzeThe Clamor of Being

14 For Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophyart is a zone ldquoa zone of indetermination of indis-cernibility as if things beasts and persons hellipendlessly reach that point that immediatelyprecedes their natural differentiation This is what

1 3 2

orsquosullivan

is called an affect hellip Life alone creates such zoneswhere living beings whirl around and only art canreach and penetrate them in its enterprise of co-creationrdquo (173)

15 In general Lyotard tends to configure thisunknown event in Kantian terms specifically inrelation to the sublime As we shall see thereneed not be a recourse to the transcendent inorder to allow for the possibility of a beyond toeveryday experience

16 John Rajchman has also written on this notionof the abstract and on its difference to the moretypical one might say Greenbergian notion ofabstraction as reduction and purity For Rajchmanabstraction must be understood as a realm ofpossibilities of potentialities prior to figuration Inorder to paint ldquoone must come to see the surfacenot so much as empty or blank but rather asintense where lsquointensityrsquo means filled with theunseen virtuality of other strange possibilitiesrdquo(Rajchman 61) The question of how to ldquopaintoutside forcerdquo is according to Rajchmanrsquos readingof Deleuze ldquothe basic question of modernityrdquo (60)

17 This insight can be experienced Throughdrugs through meditation through anything thatif only for a moment dissolves the molar aggre-gate of our subjectivity

18 As Deleuze and Guattari remark in ldquo587BCndashAD 70 On Several Regimes of Signsrdquo theldquoprincipal strata binding human beings are theorganism signifiance and interpretation andsubjectification and subjectionrdquo (A ThousandPlateaus 134) It is the function of the next chapterldquoHow to Make Yourself a Body without Organsrdquoto offer strategies for destratification This chaptermight also be considered as a mapping through ofa series of experimental strategies for accessingthe realm of affect It is worth noting Deleuze andGuattarirsquos warning here against ldquowildly destratify-ingrdquo (A Thousand Plateaus 160) ndash this can endmerely in empty botched bodies without organs(or worse) In fact ldquoyou have to keep enough ofthe organism for it to reform each dawn and youhave to keep small supplies of signifiance andsubjectification if only to turn them against theirown systems when circumstances demand it hellipand you have to keep small rations of subjectivityin sufficient quantity to enable you to respond tothe dominant realityrdquo (ibid) See also my ldquoInViolence Three Case Studies Against theStratumrdquo

19 For a thorough working through of this logic ofthe real and the possible the virtual and the actualsee Deleuzersquos Bergsonism 96ndash98

20 As do philosophy science and as we have seenprosthetic technologies By altering our temporaland spatial registers new technology opens worldspreviously invisible to us but not worlds non-exis-tent We might say something similar about puremathematics abstract equations as a way of actu-alising events and processes which cannot berepresented (indeed this actualisation is a form ofproblem solving)

21 As Massumi remarks ldquoIt is the edge of thevirtual where it leaks into the actual that countsFor that seeping edge is where potential actuallyis foundrdquo (236)

22 For Deleuze and Guattari philosophy is not autopian pursuit in the sense of positing transcen-dent (and thus authoritarian) utopias Howeverphilosophy might be figured as utopian if weunderstand by this term immanent revolutionaryutopias Indeed for Deleuze and Guattari politicalphilosophy is this kind of utopian practice whichinvolves a ldquoresistance to the presentrdquo and acreation of concepts which in itself ldquocalls for afuture form for a new people that do not yetexistrdquo (What is Philosophy 108) Although notwithin the scope of this paper a reading ofFrankfurt school utopias via Deleuze andGuattarirsquos notion of immanence would be an inter-esting and productive project Deleuze andGuattari themselves seem to have this in mindwhen they footnote the writings of Ernst Bloch inWhat is Philosophy (224)

23 A good example of rethinking art away fromthe horizon of instrumental reason (and of thelatterrsquos critique) is Ronald Boguersquos ldquoArt andTerritoryrdquo Bogue taking his lead from Deleuzersquosnotion of the refrain argues that bird song as akind of art practice involves processes and move-ments of territorialisation deterritorialisationand reterritorialisation Which is to say that art isnot here involved in a logic of the possible but isto do with function a function of deterritorialisa-tion

24 Ronald Bogue has outlined this ldquoaesthetics offorcerdquo as he calls it in relation to painting andmore interestingly in relation to music (seeldquoGilles Deleuze The Aesthetics of Forcerdquo) Boguereads Deleuze as offering an ldquoopen systemrdquo of the

1 3 3

aesthetics of affect

arts where at stake is less a definition of art or anydemarcation between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic but rather a general function of art aswhat ldquoharnesses forcesrdquo (ibid 268) This is partic-ularly the case with painting and of courseDeleuze outlines this theory in relation to thepaintings of Francis Bacon However the functionof music is also involved in forces As Bogueremarks ldquoThe basic function of the refrain is toterritorialise forces to regularise control andencode the unpredictable world in regularpatterns But the refrain never remains purelyclosed and stable Its emergence from the chaoticflux is only provisional and its rhythms always issueforth to the cosmos at largerdquo (ibid 265)

This larger function of deterritorialisation isprecisely a ldquoline of flightrdquo into the molecular It isthis ndash an affective line (and I would argue anaesthetic one) ndash that defines art

25 This is precisely Lyotardrsquos point in ldquoPhilosophyand Painting in the Age of Their ExperimentationContribution to an Idea of PostmodernityrdquoldquoTodayrsquos art consists in exploring things unsayableand things invisible Strange machines are assem-bled where what we didnrsquot have the idea of sayingor the matter to feel can make itself heard andexperiencedrdquo (190)

26 I attempt such a project albeit briefly in thispaperrsquos companion piece ldquoWriting on Art (CaseStudy The Buddhist Puja)rdquo

bibliography

Adorno A Minima Moralia Trans EFN JephcottLondon Verso 1978

Adorno A Aesthetic Theory Trans C LenhardtLondon Routledge 1984

Badiou A Deleuze The Clamor of Being TransLouise Burchill Minneapolis U of Minnesota P1999

Bann S ldquoThree Images for Kristeva From Bellinito Proustrdquo Parallax 8 (autumn 1998) 65ndash79

Bataille G Prehistoric Painting Lascaux or the Birth ofArt Trans Austryn Wainhouse LondonMacmillan 1980

Benjamin A The Plural Event London Routledge1993

Bergson H Matter and Memory Trans NM Pauland WS Palmer New York Zone 1991

Bogue R ldquoGilles Deleuze The Aesthetics ofForcerdquo Deleuze A Critical Reader Ed Paul PattonOxford Blackwell 1996

Bogue R ldquoArt and Territoryrdquo A Deleuzian CenturyEd Ian Buchanan Durham Duke UP 1999

Burgin V ldquoThe End of Art Theoryrdquo The End of ArtTheory London Macmillan 1986

de Man P ldquoLiterary History and LiteraryModernityrdquo Blindness and Insight LondonRoutledge 1989

Derrida J The Truth in Painting Trans GeoffBennington and Ian McCleod Chicago U ofChicago P 1987

Deleuze G Bergsonism Trans Hugh Tomlinsonand Barbara Habberjam New York Zone 1991

Deleuze G Negotiations 1972ndash90 Trans MartinJoughin New York Columbia UP 1992

Deleuze G Difference and Repetition Trans PaulPatton London Athlone 1994

Deleuze G ldquoSpinoza and the Three Ethicsrdquo EssaysCritical and Clinical Trans Daniel W Smith andMichael Greco London Verso 1998

Deleuze G and F Guattari A Thousand PlateausTrans Brian Massumi London Athlone 1988

Deleuze G and F Guattari What is PhilosophyTrans Graham Burchell and Hugh TomlinsonLondon Verso 1994

Foster K ldquoCritical History of Art or aTransfiguration of Valuesrdquo New Literary History(spring 1972) 459ndash70

Guattari F ldquoPragmaticMachinerdquo Interview withCharles J Stivale lthttpwwwdcpeacnetedu~mnuesguattarihtmgt (1985)

Guattari F ldquoOn Machinesrdquo ComplexityArchitectureArtPhilosophy Trans VivianConstantinopoulos Ed Andrew BenjaminLondon Academy 1989

Guattari F Chaosmosis An Ethico-AestheticParadigm Trans Julian Pefanis and Paul BainsSydney Power Institute 1995

Lyotard J-F The Postmodern Condition A Report onKnowledge Trans Geoff Bennington and BrianMassumi Manchester Manchester UP 1984

Lyotard J-F Peregrinations Law Form Event NewYork Columbia UP 1988

1 3 4

orsquosullivan

Lyotard J-F ldquoThe Tensorrdquo Trans Sean Hand TheLyotard Reader Ed Andrew Benjamin OxfordBlackwell 1989

Lyotard J-F ldquoPhilosophy and Painting in the Ageof Their Experimentation Contribution to an Ideaof Postmodernityrdquo Trans Maria Minich Brewerand Daniel Brewer The Lyotard Reader EdAndrew Benjamin Oxford Blackwell 1989

Lyotard J-F ldquoCritical Reflectionsrdquo Trans WGJNiesluchawski Artforum 248 (1991) 92ndash93

Massumi B ldquoThe Autonomy of Affectrdquo Deleuze ACritical Reader Ed P Patton Oxford Blackwell1996

Melville S ldquoNotes on the Reemergence ofAllegory the Forgetting of Modernism theNecessity of Rhetoric and the Conditions ofPublicity in Art and Art Criticismrdquo October 19(1981) 55ndash92

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoIn Violence Three Case StudiesAgainst the Stratumrdquo Parallax 15 (summer 2000)104ndash09

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoWriting on Art (Case Study TheBuddhist Puja)rdquo Parallax 21 (forthcoming)

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoArt as Text RethinkingRepresentationrdquo Art History (forthcoming)

Owens C ldquoThe Allegorical Impulse Towards aTheory of Postmodernismrdquo October 12 (1980)67ndash86

Rajchman J ldquoAbstractionrdquo ConstructionsCambridge MA MIT P 1988

Simon OOtildeSullivanDepartment of Historical and Critical StudiesGoldsmiths CollegeNew CrossLondonSE14 6NWUKE-mail soOtildesullivangoldacuk

Page 5: THE AESTHETICS OF AFFECT: thinking art beyond …simonosullivan.net/articles/aesthetics-of-affect.pdfaesthetics of affect origin under erasure. First aesthetics fell foul of Marxism

orsquosullivan

and the whole Kantian heritage In AestheticTheory Adorno writes OgraveArtOtildes utopia thecounter-factual yet-to-come is draped in Black itgoes on being a recollection of the possible witha critical edge against the real Eacute It is the possi-ble as promised by its impossibility Art is thepromise of happiness a promise that isconstantly being brokenOacute (196)

For Adorno art operates as a utopian blink itpresents the possible through its difference to theexistent Indeed art for Adorno is not really ofthis world at all ETH it prefigures and promises aworld yet-to-come Art if you like operateswithin Walter BenjaminOtildes messianic time Andyet art is inevitably doomed to frustration thepromise (of reconciliation) is constantly beingbroken Art operates within this melancholyfield In fact it is worth noting that philosophyfor Adorno operates on the same register OgraveTheonly philosophy which can be reasonably prac-tised in the face of despair is the attempt tocontemplate all things as they would presentthemselves from the standpoint of redemptionOacute(Minima Moralia 247) In a sense then Adornohas abandoned the existent (his is a forsakenworld) Indeed this is what gives his work itsmelancholy tenor

However we might want to turn from Adornoto Deleuze and to a more affirmative notion ofthe aesthetic impulse Here instead of the exis-tent and the possible as ontological categoriesand as coordinates for art we might utiliseDeleuzeOtildes categories of the actual and thevirtual In Difference and Repetition Deleuzeoutlines this shift and the difference between thetwo sets of categories as follows

The only danger in all this is that the virtualcould be confused with the possible The possi-ble is opposed to the real the process under-gone by the possible is therefore aOgraverealisationOacute By contrast the virtual is notopposed to the real it possesses a full realityby itself The process it undergoes is actualisa-tion It would be wrong to see only a verbaldispute here it is a question of existence itself(211)

At stake in art is not a utopian and in somesenses negative aesthetic but an affirmativeactualisation of the virtual ETH the latter being a

genuinely creative act (as opposed to the realisa-tion of the possible which ultimately alwaysalready resembles the real)19 The virtual herecan be understood as the realm of affects Artprecisely actualises these invisible universes20 orat least it opens up a portal onto these othervirtual worlds (we might say that art is situatedon the borderline between the actual and thevirtual)21 This gives art an ethical imperativebecause it involves a kind of moving beyond thealready familiar (the human) precisely a kind ofself-overcoming

For Guattari this new ethico-aesthetic para-digm pertains not just to art but to subjectivityas well (in fact notions of subject and objectbecome blurred here) Guattari argues that byallowing individuals access to Ogravenew materials ofexpressionOacute Ogravenew complexes of subjectivationOacutebecome possible new Ograveincorporeal universes ofreferenceOacute are opened up which allow for whatGuattari calls a process of resingularisation ETH aprocess of reordering our selves and our relationto the world (Chaosmosis 7) In such a prag-matic and aesthetic reconfiguration Ograveone createsnew modalities of subjectivity in the same way anartist creates new forms from a paletteOacute (ibid)(For Guattari the La Borde clinic where heworked understood as a machinic assemblagewas precisely a site of resingularisation But infact people resingularise themselves every dayacademics plant allotments manual labourersvisit the theatre Different activities take onaesthetic deterritorialising functions)

This is to take art away from the Frankfurtschool register For Adorno artOtildes importance layat least in one sense in its uselessness its irre-ducibility to conceptual thought Art did notpartake in and thus provided a critique ofinstrumental reason and its accompaniment theworld commodity system With Deleuze andGuattari and their allies we have a differentmapping of the world and of philosophyOtildes andartOtildes role within it Philosophy is no longer to beunderstood as a utopian pursuit22 but is ratherto do with pragmatics active concept creation inorder to solve problems (to get something done)Likewise with art Art is not useless but performsvery specific roles23 These roles or functionsdiffer depending on the kind of art and the

1 2 9

aesthetics of affect

milieu in which a work of art exists Indeedconceptual art might have more in common withwhat Deleuze and Guattari call philosophy (prob-lem solving) Installation art on the other handmight be a paradigmatic case of art as accesspoint to other worlds Julia Kristeva arrives atprecisely this conclusion (here she is writingabout contemporary installations at the VeniceBiennale)

In an installation it is the body in its entiretywhich is asked to participate through its sensa-tions through vision obviously but also hear-ing touch on occasions smell As if theseartists in the place of an OgraveobjectOacute sought toplace us in a space at the limits of the sacredand asked us not to contemplate images but tocommunicate with beings I had the impres-sion that [the artists] were communicating thisthat the ultimate aim of art is perhaps whatwas formerly celebrated under the term ofincarnation I mean by that a wish to make usfeel through the abstractions the forms thecolours the volumes the sensations a realexperience (Quoted in Bann 69)

For Kristeva art (in this case installation) is abloc of sensations made up of abstractionsforms colours and volumes This art is also asacred space whose aim it is to give us a real (inthis case multi-sensory) experience Kristevatalks about these installations not in terms ofrepresentation but in terms of their function afunction of incarnation For Kristeva thisaesthetic function is the Ograveultimate aim of artOacuteThis is in a sense to move to a post-mediumnotion of art practice in that it is not so impor-tant what the specifics of a medium might be (noGreenbergian truth to materials no more askingOgravewhat is artOacute Ogravewhat is paintingOacute and thus nomore deconstructions) rather what becomesimportant is what a particular art object can doIn relation to aesthetics and affects this functionmight be summed up as the making visible of theinvisible of the making perceptible of the imper-ceptible or as Deleuze and Guattari would say asthe harnessing of forces24 Another way of sayingthis is that art is a deterritorialisation a creativedeterritorialisation into the realm of affects

Art then might be understood as the namefor a function a magical an aesthetic function

of transformation Art is less involved in makingsense of the world and more involved in explor-ing the possibilities of being of becoming in theworld Less involved in knowledge and moreinvolved in experience in pushing forward theboundaries of what can be experienced25 Finallyless involved in shielding us from death butindeed precisely involved in actualising the possi-bilities of life Paradoxically the notion of anOgraveaesthetic functionOacute might well return us to aproductive utilisation of the term OgravevisualcultureOacute But this will be a return marked by itspassage through aesthetics through Adorno andDeleuze especially In a sense this passage ETH thischampioning of art as an autonomous aestheticpractice ETH was only the first moment the secondbeing a detachment of the aesthetic from itsapparent location within (and transcendentattachment to) certain objects (the canonicalobjects of art history) This immanent aestheticas function can now be thought in relation to avariety of objects and practices So yes perhapswe can speak of a kind of visual culture after allnot through the notion of a general semiotics butrather through the notion of a general aesthetics

How might this effect the practice of arthistory A certain kind of art history mightdisappear that which attends only to artOtildes signi-fying character that which understands art posi-tions art work as representation Indeed theselatter functions might be placed alongside artOtildesother asignifying functions ETH artOtildes affective andintensive qualities (the molecular beneathwithin the molar) In this place art becomes amore complex and a more interesting objectAnd the business of art history changes from ahermeneutic to a heuristic activity art history asa kind of parallel to the work that art is alreadydoing rather than as an attempt to fix and inter-pret art indeed art history as precisely a kind ofcreative writing So I end this paper this skir-mish against representation with the outline of anew project the thinking of specific art worksthe writing on specific art works as explorationof artOtildes creative aesthetic and ethical function26

This will involve attending to the specificity of anart work and the specificity of the milieu inwhich the art object operates This is not a retreatfrom art history but a reconfiguration of its prac-

1 3 0

orsquosullivan

tice ETH a reconfiguration which might well involveas one of its strategies a return to those writerswho have always seen theaesthetic as the function of artand to those writers who mightnot be art historians but whoare nevertheless attuned to theaesthetics of affect

notes

My thanks to Angelakirsquos reviewers

1 Indeed there is a ldquotraditionrdquo of positioning crit-ical art history as a form of ideological critiqueand specifically as a critique of aesthetics See forexample Kurt Fosterrsquos polemical essay ldquoCriticalHistory of Art or a Transfiguration of Valuesrdquo

2 Jacques Derrida performs precisely this decon-struction of aesthetics in ldquoThe Parergonrdquo in hisThe Truth in Painting 37ndash82

3 For a more affirmative mapping of Derridarsquoscontribution towards thinking the art object seemy ldquoArt as Text Rethinking Representationrdquo

4 They can be described as extra-discursive in thesense that they are ldquooutsiderdquo discourse under-stood as structure (they are precisely what is irre-ducible to structure) They can be described asextra-textual in the sense that they do notproduce ndash or do not only produce ndash knowledgeAffects might however be understood as textualin that they are felt as differences in intensity

5 For Brian Massumi in ldquoThe Autonomy ofAffectrdquo affects are likewise understood asmoments of intensity ndash which might resonate withlinguistic expression but which strictly speakingare of a different and prior order For Massumi asfor myself ldquoapproaches to the image in its relationto language are incomplete if they operate only onthe semantic or semiotic level however that levelis defined (linguistically logically narratologicallyideologically or all of these combinations as aSymbolic) What they lose precisely is the event ndashin favour of structurerdquo (ibid 220)

Massumi identifies the realm of affect as one ofincreasing importance within ldquomedia literary andart theoryrdquo but points out the problem that thereis ldquono culturalndashtheoretical vocabulary specific toaffectrdquo indeed our ldquoentire vocabulary has derivedfrom theories of signification that are still weddedto structurerdquo (ibid 221) From one perspective

Massumi is right there is no vocabulary of affectHowever it is not so simple as inventing one Toinvent a language forof affect is to bring the latterinto representation ndash and hence to invite decon-struction In a sense there is no way out of thispredicament except to acknowledge it as a prob-lem ndash and move beyond it Which is what thispaper attempts to do

6 See Deleuzersquos ldquoSpinoza and the Three Ethicsrdquowhere ldquoaffectrdquo is defined as the effect affectionshave on the bodyrsquos duration the ldquopassagesbecomings rises and falls continuous variations ofpower (puissance) that pass from one state toanother We will call them affects strictly speak-ing and no longer affections They are signs ofincrease and decrease signs that are vectorial (ofthe joyndashsadness type) and no longer scalar like theaffections sensations or perceptionsrdquo (139)

7 As Feacutelix Guattari observes in an interview

The same semiotic material can be function-ing in different registers A material can beboth caught in paradigmatic chains of produc-tion chains of signification hellip but at the sametime can function in an a-signifying registerSo what determines the difference In onecase a signifier functions in what one mightcall a logic of discursive aggregates ie a logicof representation In the other case it func-tions in something that isnrsquot entirely a logicwhat Irsquove called an existential machinic a logicof bodies without organs a machinic ofbodies without organs (ldquoPragmaticMachinerdquo15)

8 For Guattari affects can be understood preciselyas what makes up life They establish a kind ofcentre or ldquoself-affirmationrdquo that occurs parallel tothe discursive (what Guattari terms ldquolinearrdquo)elements of subjectivity For Guattari this affec-tive element is present in Freudrsquos theory of thedrives but has been overlooked by ldquothe struc-turalistsrdquo (Guattari has Lacan in mind) (ldquoOnMachinesrdquo 10) Guattari writes

I consider that limiting ourselves to this coor-dinate [ie linearity] is precisely to lose theelement of the machinic centre of subjectiveautopoiesis and self-affirmation Whetherlocated at the level of the complete individualor partial subjectivity or even at the level ofsocial subjectivity this element undergoes apathic relationship by means of the affectWhat is it then that makes us state phenom-

1 3 1

aesthetics of affect

enologically that something is living It isprecisely this relation of affect This is not adescription nor a kind of propositional analy-sis resulting from a sense of hypotheses anddeductions ndash ie it is a living being thereforeit is a machine rather an immediate pathicand non-discursive apprehension occurs ofthe machinersquos ontological autocompositionrelationship (Ibid)

Interestingly in ldquoOn Machinesrdquo Guattari developsthe notion of a non-discursive affective foyerwhich has much in common with Bergsonrsquos notionof living beings as affective ldquocentres of indetermi-nationrdquo (28ndash34)

9 Lyotard addresses this double functioning of thesign in ldquoThe Tensorrdquo Like Guattari (see noteabove) Lyotardrsquos point of departure is Freudrsquostheory of the drives Lyotard merely points outthat the sign can operate within two (or presum-ably even more) economies metonymic andmetaphoric systems but also affective ones ldquoIt isat once a sign that creates meaning through diver-gence and opposition and a sign that createsintensity through strength and singularityrdquo (11)

10[T]he work of art is hellip a bloc of sensationsthat is to say a compound of percepts andaffects Percepts are no longer perceptionsthey are independent of a state of those whoexperience them Affects are no longer feel-ings or affections they go beyond thestrength of those who undergo themSensations percepts and affects are beingswhose validity lies in themselves and exceedsany lived (What is Philosophy 164)

In their chapter on art in What is PhilosophyDeleuze and Guattari map out a theory andlanguage of art outside of representation I want tonote here an interesting dovetailing of their theorywith a kind of aporia which ldquoThe Social History ofArtrdquo and in particular TJ Clark finds itselfhimselfin Suffice to say that Deleuze and Guattarirsquoslanguage ndash of movement materials and matter ndash isprecisely the object of art historyrsquos secret desireand fear a language of art which is no longer to dowith signifiers and signifieds (poached as Clarkhimself remarks from film theory) Unfortunatelyall materialist art historians (ldquoThe Social History ofArtrdquo) eventually and inevitably hit an aporiawhich very briefly goes like this how to attend tothe material object behind the ideological veils(the cultural readingsmeanings) whilst still attend-

ing to the objectrsquos history The problem arisesbecause ideology and history are here synony-mous In a sense ldquoThe Social History of Artrdquo andart history in general could not cannot put thislanguage together they are working within thehorizon of signification A language of material andmatter would for them be a fetishisation ndash anemptying out of meaning or of that trope of mean-ing history They would be guilty of the very ideo-logical mystification of which they are against It isonly within a different model or paradigm that alanguage of materials and matter makes sense

11 Massumi is useful in rethinking the relationshipbetween the event as intensity and experience

Although the realm of intensity thatDeleuzersquos philosophy strives to conceptualiseis transcendental in the sense that it is notdirectly accessible to experience it is nottranscendent it is not exactly outside experi-ence either It is immanent to it ndash always in itbut not of it Intensity and experience accom-pany one another like two mutually presup-posing dimensions or like two sides of a coinIntensity is immanent to matter and toevents to mind and to body and to everylevel of bifurcation composing them andwhich they compose (226)

Hence intensity for Massumi is indeed experi-enced ldquoin the proliferations of levels of organisa-tion it ceaselessly gives rise to generates andregenerates at every suspended momentrdquo (226)

12 For a tracking through of this oscillation seethe debates around allegory in the visual artscarried out in October in particular Craig OwensrsquoldquoThe Allegorical Impulse Towards a Theory ofPostmodernismrdquo and most impressive StephenMelvillersquos ldquoNotes on the Reemergence ofAllegory the Forgetting of Modernism theNecessity of Rhetoric and the Conditions ofPublicity in Art and Art Criticismrdquo

13 See for example Andrew Benjaminrsquos The PluralEvent For another interesting take on this prob-lematic especially in relation to Deleuzersquos projectof thinking multiplicity see Alain Badioursquos DeleuzeThe Clamor of Being

14 For Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophyart is a zone ldquoa zone of indetermination of indis-cernibility as if things beasts and persons hellipendlessly reach that point that immediatelyprecedes their natural differentiation This is what

1 3 2

orsquosullivan

is called an affect hellip Life alone creates such zoneswhere living beings whirl around and only art canreach and penetrate them in its enterprise of co-creationrdquo (173)

15 In general Lyotard tends to configure thisunknown event in Kantian terms specifically inrelation to the sublime As we shall see thereneed not be a recourse to the transcendent inorder to allow for the possibility of a beyond toeveryday experience

16 John Rajchman has also written on this notionof the abstract and on its difference to the moretypical one might say Greenbergian notion ofabstraction as reduction and purity For Rajchmanabstraction must be understood as a realm ofpossibilities of potentialities prior to figuration Inorder to paint ldquoone must come to see the surfacenot so much as empty or blank but rather asintense where lsquointensityrsquo means filled with theunseen virtuality of other strange possibilitiesrdquo(Rajchman 61) The question of how to ldquopaintoutside forcerdquo is according to Rajchmanrsquos readingof Deleuze ldquothe basic question of modernityrdquo (60)

17 This insight can be experienced Throughdrugs through meditation through anything thatif only for a moment dissolves the molar aggre-gate of our subjectivity

18 As Deleuze and Guattari remark in ldquo587BCndashAD 70 On Several Regimes of Signsrdquo theldquoprincipal strata binding human beings are theorganism signifiance and interpretation andsubjectification and subjectionrdquo (A ThousandPlateaus 134) It is the function of the next chapterldquoHow to Make Yourself a Body without Organsrdquoto offer strategies for destratification This chaptermight also be considered as a mapping through ofa series of experimental strategies for accessingthe realm of affect It is worth noting Deleuze andGuattarirsquos warning here against ldquowildly destratify-ingrdquo (A Thousand Plateaus 160) ndash this can endmerely in empty botched bodies without organs(or worse) In fact ldquoyou have to keep enough ofthe organism for it to reform each dawn and youhave to keep small supplies of signifiance andsubjectification if only to turn them against theirown systems when circumstances demand it hellipand you have to keep small rations of subjectivityin sufficient quantity to enable you to respond tothe dominant realityrdquo (ibid) See also my ldquoInViolence Three Case Studies Against theStratumrdquo

19 For a thorough working through of this logic ofthe real and the possible the virtual and the actualsee Deleuzersquos Bergsonism 96ndash98

20 As do philosophy science and as we have seenprosthetic technologies By altering our temporaland spatial registers new technology opens worldspreviously invisible to us but not worlds non-exis-tent We might say something similar about puremathematics abstract equations as a way of actu-alising events and processes which cannot berepresented (indeed this actualisation is a form ofproblem solving)

21 As Massumi remarks ldquoIt is the edge of thevirtual where it leaks into the actual that countsFor that seeping edge is where potential actuallyis foundrdquo (236)

22 For Deleuze and Guattari philosophy is not autopian pursuit in the sense of positing transcen-dent (and thus authoritarian) utopias Howeverphilosophy might be figured as utopian if weunderstand by this term immanent revolutionaryutopias Indeed for Deleuze and Guattari politicalphilosophy is this kind of utopian practice whichinvolves a ldquoresistance to the presentrdquo and acreation of concepts which in itself ldquocalls for afuture form for a new people that do not yetexistrdquo (What is Philosophy 108) Although notwithin the scope of this paper a reading ofFrankfurt school utopias via Deleuze andGuattarirsquos notion of immanence would be an inter-esting and productive project Deleuze andGuattari themselves seem to have this in mindwhen they footnote the writings of Ernst Bloch inWhat is Philosophy (224)

23 A good example of rethinking art away fromthe horizon of instrumental reason (and of thelatterrsquos critique) is Ronald Boguersquos ldquoArt andTerritoryrdquo Bogue taking his lead from Deleuzersquosnotion of the refrain argues that bird song as akind of art practice involves processes and move-ments of territorialisation deterritorialisationand reterritorialisation Which is to say that art isnot here involved in a logic of the possible but isto do with function a function of deterritorialisa-tion

24 Ronald Bogue has outlined this ldquoaesthetics offorcerdquo as he calls it in relation to painting andmore interestingly in relation to music (seeldquoGilles Deleuze The Aesthetics of Forcerdquo) Boguereads Deleuze as offering an ldquoopen systemrdquo of the

1 3 3

aesthetics of affect

arts where at stake is less a definition of art or anydemarcation between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic but rather a general function of art aswhat ldquoharnesses forcesrdquo (ibid 268) This is partic-ularly the case with painting and of courseDeleuze outlines this theory in relation to thepaintings of Francis Bacon However the functionof music is also involved in forces As Bogueremarks ldquoThe basic function of the refrain is toterritorialise forces to regularise control andencode the unpredictable world in regularpatterns But the refrain never remains purelyclosed and stable Its emergence from the chaoticflux is only provisional and its rhythms always issueforth to the cosmos at largerdquo (ibid 265)

This larger function of deterritorialisation isprecisely a ldquoline of flightrdquo into the molecular It isthis ndash an affective line (and I would argue anaesthetic one) ndash that defines art

25 This is precisely Lyotardrsquos point in ldquoPhilosophyand Painting in the Age of Their ExperimentationContribution to an Idea of PostmodernityrdquoldquoTodayrsquos art consists in exploring things unsayableand things invisible Strange machines are assem-bled where what we didnrsquot have the idea of sayingor the matter to feel can make itself heard andexperiencedrdquo (190)

26 I attempt such a project albeit briefly in thispaperrsquos companion piece ldquoWriting on Art (CaseStudy The Buddhist Puja)rdquo

bibliography

Adorno A Minima Moralia Trans EFN JephcottLondon Verso 1978

Adorno A Aesthetic Theory Trans C LenhardtLondon Routledge 1984

Badiou A Deleuze The Clamor of Being TransLouise Burchill Minneapolis U of Minnesota P1999

Bann S ldquoThree Images for Kristeva From Bellinito Proustrdquo Parallax 8 (autumn 1998) 65ndash79

Bataille G Prehistoric Painting Lascaux or the Birth ofArt Trans Austryn Wainhouse LondonMacmillan 1980

Benjamin A The Plural Event London Routledge1993

Bergson H Matter and Memory Trans NM Pauland WS Palmer New York Zone 1991

Bogue R ldquoGilles Deleuze The Aesthetics ofForcerdquo Deleuze A Critical Reader Ed Paul PattonOxford Blackwell 1996

Bogue R ldquoArt and Territoryrdquo A Deleuzian CenturyEd Ian Buchanan Durham Duke UP 1999

Burgin V ldquoThe End of Art Theoryrdquo The End of ArtTheory London Macmillan 1986

de Man P ldquoLiterary History and LiteraryModernityrdquo Blindness and Insight LondonRoutledge 1989

Derrida J The Truth in Painting Trans GeoffBennington and Ian McCleod Chicago U ofChicago P 1987

Deleuze G Bergsonism Trans Hugh Tomlinsonand Barbara Habberjam New York Zone 1991

Deleuze G Negotiations 1972ndash90 Trans MartinJoughin New York Columbia UP 1992

Deleuze G Difference and Repetition Trans PaulPatton London Athlone 1994

Deleuze G ldquoSpinoza and the Three Ethicsrdquo EssaysCritical and Clinical Trans Daniel W Smith andMichael Greco London Verso 1998

Deleuze G and F Guattari A Thousand PlateausTrans Brian Massumi London Athlone 1988

Deleuze G and F Guattari What is PhilosophyTrans Graham Burchell and Hugh TomlinsonLondon Verso 1994

Foster K ldquoCritical History of Art or aTransfiguration of Valuesrdquo New Literary History(spring 1972) 459ndash70

Guattari F ldquoPragmaticMachinerdquo Interview withCharles J Stivale lthttpwwwdcpeacnetedu~mnuesguattarihtmgt (1985)

Guattari F ldquoOn Machinesrdquo ComplexityArchitectureArtPhilosophy Trans VivianConstantinopoulos Ed Andrew BenjaminLondon Academy 1989

Guattari F Chaosmosis An Ethico-AestheticParadigm Trans Julian Pefanis and Paul BainsSydney Power Institute 1995

Lyotard J-F The Postmodern Condition A Report onKnowledge Trans Geoff Bennington and BrianMassumi Manchester Manchester UP 1984

Lyotard J-F Peregrinations Law Form Event NewYork Columbia UP 1988

1 3 4

orsquosullivan

Lyotard J-F ldquoThe Tensorrdquo Trans Sean Hand TheLyotard Reader Ed Andrew Benjamin OxfordBlackwell 1989

Lyotard J-F ldquoPhilosophy and Painting in the Ageof Their Experimentation Contribution to an Ideaof Postmodernityrdquo Trans Maria Minich Brewerand Daniel Brewer The Lyotard Reader EdAndrew Benjamin Oxford Blackwell 1989

Lyotard J-F ldquoCritical Reflectionsrdquo Trans WGJNiesluchawski Artforum 248 (1991) 92ndash93

Massumi B ldquoThe Autonomy of Affectrdquo Deleuze ACritical Reader Ed P Patton Oxford Blackwell1996

Melville S ldquoNotes on the Reemergence ofAllegory the Forgetting of Modernism theNecessity of Rhetoric and the Conditions ofPublicity in Art and Art Criticismrdquo October 19(1981) 55ndash92

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoIn Violence Three Case StudiesAgainst the Stratumrdquo Parallax 15 (summer 2000)104ndash09

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoWriting on Art (Case Study TheBuddhist Puja)rdquo Parallax 21 (forthcoming)

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoArt as Text RethinkingRepresentationrdquo Art History (forthcoming)

Owens C ldquoThe Allegorical Impulse Towards aTheory of Postmodernismrdquo October 12 (1980)67ndash86

Rajchman J ldquoAbstractionrdquo ConstructionsCambridge MA MIT P 1988

Simon OOtildeSullivanDepartment of Historical and Critical StudiesGoldsmiths CollegeNew CrossLondonSE14 6NWUKE-mail soOtildesullivangoldacuk

Page 6: THE AESTHETICS OF AFFECT: thinking art beyond …simonosullivan.net/articles/aesthetics-of-affect.pdfaesthetics of affect origin under erasure. First aesthetics fell foul of Marxism

aesthetics of affect

milieu in which a work of art exists Indeedconceptual art might have more in common withwhat Deleuze and Guattari call philosophy (prob-lem solving) Installation art on the other handmight be a paradigmatic case of art as accesspoint to other worlds Julia Kristeva arrives atprecisely this conclusion (here she is writingabout contemporary installations at the VeniceBiennale)

In an installation it is the body in its entiretywhich is asked to participate through its sensa-tions through vision obviously but also hear-ing touch on occasions smell As if theseartists in the place of an OgraveobjectOacute sought toplace us in a space at the limits of the sacredand asked us not to contemplate images but tocommunicate with beings I had the impres-sion that [the artists] were communicating thisthat the ultimate aim of art is perhaps whatwas formerly celebrated under the term ofincarnation I mean by that a wish to make usfeel through the abstractions the forms thecolours the volumes the sensations a realexperience (Quoted in Bann 69)

For Kristeva art (in this case installation) is abloc of sensations made up of abstractionsforms colours and volumes This art is also asacred space whose aim it is to give us a real (inthis case multi-sensory) experience Kristevatalks about these installations not in terms ofrepresentation but in terms of their function afunction of incarnation For Kristeva thisaesthetic function is the Ograveultimate aim of artOacuteThis is in a sense to move to a post-mediumnotion of art practice in that it is not so impor-tant what the specifics of a medium might be (noGreenbergian truth to materials no more askingOgravewhat is artOacute Ogravewhat is paintingOacute and thus nomore deconstructions) rather what becomesimportant is what a particular art object can doIn relation to aesthetics and affects this functionmight be summed up as the making visible of theinvisible of the making perceptible of the imper-ceptible or as Deleuze and Guattari would say asthe harnessing of forces24 Another way of sayingthis is that art is a deterritorialisation a creativedeterritorialisation into the realm of affects

Art then might be understood as the namefor a function a magical an aesthetic function

of transformation Art is less involved in makingsense of the world and more involved in explor-ing the possibilities of being of becoming in theworld Less involved in knowledge and moreinvolved in experience in pushing forward theboundaries of what can be experienced25 Finallyless involved in shielding us from death butindeed precisely involved in actualising the possi-bilities of life Paradoxically the notion of anOgraveaesthetic functionOacute might well return us to aproductive utilisation of the term OgravevisualcultureOacute But this will be a return marked by itspassage through aesthetics through Adorno andDeleuze especially In a sense this passage ETH thischampioning of art as an autonomous aestheticpractice ETH was only the first moment the secondbeing a detachment of the aesthetic from itsapparent location within (and transcendentattachment to) certain objects (the canonicalobjects of art history) This immanent aestheticas function can now be thought in relation to avariety of objects and practices So yes perhapswe can speak of a kind of visual culture after allnot through the notion of a general semiotics butrather through the notion of a general aesthetics

How might this effect the practice of arthistory A certain kind of art history mightdisappear that which attends only to artOtildes signi-fying character that which understands art posi-tions art work as representation Indeed theselatter functions might be placed alongside artOtildesother asignifying functions ETH artOtildes affective andintensive qualities (the molecular beneathwithin the molar) In this place art becomes amore complex and a more interesting objectAnd the business of art history changes from ahermeneutic to a heuristic activity art history asa kind of parallel to the work that art is alreadydoing rather than as an attempt to fix and inter-pret art indeed art history as precisely a kind ofcreative writing So I end this paper this skir-mish against representation with the outline of anew project the thinking of specific art worksthe writing on specific art works as explorationof artOtildes creative aesthetic and ethical function26

This will involve attending to the specificity of anart work and the specificity of the milieu inwhich the art object operates This is not a retreatfrom art history but a reconfiguration of its prac-

1 3 0

orsquosullivan

tice ETH a reconfiguration which might well involveas one of its strategies a return to those writerswho have always seen theaesthetic as the function of artand to those writers who mightnot be art historians but whoare nevertheless attuned to theaesthetics of affect

notes

My thanks to Angelakirsquos reviewers

1 Indeed there is a ldquotraditionrdquo of positioning crit-ical art history as a form of ideological critiqueand specifically as a critique of aesthetics See forexample Kurt Fosterrsquos polemical essay ldquoCriticalHistory of Art or a Transfiguration of Valuesrdquo

2 Jacques Derrida performs precisely this decon-struction of aesthetics in ldquoThe Parergonrdquo in hisThe Truth in Painting 37ndash82

3 For a more affirmative mapping of Derridarsquoscontribution towards thinking the art object seemy ldquoArt as Text Rethinking Representationrdquo

4 They can be described as extra-discursive in thesense that they are ldquooutsiderdquo discourse under-stood as structure (they are precisely what is irre-ducible to structure) They can be described asextra-textual in the sense that they do notproduce ndash or do not only produce ndash knowledgeAffects might however be understood as textualin that they are felt as differences in intensity

5 For Brian Massumi in ldquoThe Autonomy ofAffectrdquo affects are likewise understood asmoments of intensity ndash which might resonate withlinguistic expression but which strictly speakingare of a different and prior order For Massumi asfor myself ldquoapproaches to the image in its relationto language are incomplete if they operate only onthe semantic or semiotic level however that levelis defined (linguistically logically narratologicallyideologically or all of these combinations as aSymbolic) What they lose precisely is the event ndashin favour of structurerdquo (ibid 220)

Massumi identifies the realm of affect as one ofincreasing importance within ldquomedia literary andart theoryrdquo but points out the problem that thereis ldquono culturalndashtheoretical vocabulary specific toaffectrdquo indeed our ldquoentire vocabulary has derivedfrom theories of signification that are still weddedto structurerdquo (ibid 221) From one perspective

Massumi is right there is no vocabulary of affectHowever it is not so simple as inventing one Toinvent a language forof affect is to bring the latterinto representation ndash and hence to invite decon-struction In a sense there is no way out of thispredicament except to acknowledge it as a prob-lem ndash and move beyond it Which is what thispaper attempts to do

6 See Deleuzersquos ldquoSpinoza and the Three Ethicsrdquowhere ldquoaffectrdquo is defined as the effect affectionshave on the bodyrsquos duration the ldquopassagesbecomings rises and falls continuous variations ofpower (puissance) that pass from one state toanother We will call them affects strictly speak-ing and no longer affections They are signs ofincrease and decrease signs that are vectorial (ofthe joyndashsadness type) and no longer scalar like theaffections sensations or perceptionsrdquo (139)

7 As Feacutelix Guattari observes in an interview

The same semiotic material can be function-ing in different registers A material can beboth caught in paradigmatic chains of produc-tion chains of signification hellip but at the sametime can function in an a-signifying registerSo what determines the difference In onecase a signifier functions in what one mightcall a logic of discursive aggregates ie a logicof representation In the other case it func-tions in something that isnrsquot entirely a logicwhat Irsquove called an existential machinic a logicof bodies without organs a machinic ofbodies without organs (ldquoPragmaticMachinerdquo15)

8 For Guattari affects can be understood preciselyas what makes up life They establish a kind ofcentre or ldquoself-affirmationrdquo that occurs parallel tothe discursive (what Guattari terms ldquolinearrdquo)elements of subjectivity For Guattari this affec-tive element is present in Freudrsquos theory of thedrives but has been overlooked by ldquothe struc-turalistsrdquo (Guattari has Lacan in mind) (ldquoOnMachinesrdquo 10) Guattari writes

I consider that limiting ourselves to this coor-dinate [ie linearity] is precisely to lose theelement of the machinic centre of subjectiveautopoiesis and self-affirmation Whetherlocated at the level of the complete individualor partial subjectivity or even at the level ofsocial subjectivity this element undergoes apathic relationship by means of the affectWhat is it then that makes us state phenom-

1 3 1

aesthetics of affect

enologically that something is living It isprecisely this relation of affect This is not adescription nor a kind of propositional analy-sis resulting from a sense of hypotheses anddeductions ndash ie it is a living being thereforeit is a machine rather an immediate pathicand non-discursive apprehension occurs ofthe machinersquos ontological autocompositionrelationship (Ibid)

Interestingly in ldquoOn Machinesrdquo Guattari developsthe notion of a non-discursive affective foyerwhich has much in common with Bergsonrsquos notionof living beings as affective ldquocentres of indetermi-nationrdquo (28ndash34)

9 Lyotard addresses this double functioning of thesign in ldquoThe Tensorrdquo Like Guattari (see noteabove) Lyotardrsquos point of departure is Freudrsquostheory of the drives Lyotard merely points outthat the sign can operate within two (or presum-ably even more) economies metonymic andmetaphoric systems but also affective ones ldquoIt isat once a sign that creates meaning through diver-gence and opposition and a sign that createsintensity through strength and singularityrdquo (11)

10[T]he work of art is hellip a bloc of sensationsthat is to say a compound of percepts andaffects Percepts are no longer perceptionsthey are independent of a state of those whoexperience them Affects are no longer feel-ings or affections they go beyond thestrength of those who undergo themSensations percepts and affects are beingswhose validity lies in themselves and exceedsany lived (What is Philosophy 164)

In their chapter on art in What is PhilosophyDeleuze and Guattari map out a theory andlanguage of art outside of representation I want tonote here an interesting dovetailing of their theorywith a kind of aporia which ldquoThe Social History ofArtrdquo and in particular TJ Clark finds itselfhimselfin Suffice to say that Deleuze and Guattarirsquoslanguage ndash of movement materials and matter ndash isprecisely the object of art historyrsquos secret desireand fear a language of art which is no longer to dowith signifiers and signifieds (poached as Clarkhimself remarks from film theory) Unfortunatelyall materialist art historians (ldquoThe Social History ofArtrdquo) eventually and inevitably hit an aporiawhich very briefly goes like this how to attend tothe material object behind the ideological veils(the cultural readingsmeanings) whilst still attend-

ing to the objectrsquos history The problem arisesbecause ideology and history are here synony-mous In a sense ldquoThe Social History of Artrdquo andart history in general could not cannot put thislanguage together they are working within thehorizon of signification A language of material andmatter would for them be a fetishisation ndash anemptying out of meaning or of that trope of mean-ing history They would be guilty of the very ideo-logical mystification of which they are against It isonly within a different model or paradigm that alanguage of materials and matter makes sense

11 Massumi is useful in rethinking the relationshipbetween the event as intensity and experience

Although the realm of intensity thatDeleuzersquos philosophy strives to conceptualiseis transcendental in the sense that it is notdirectly accessible to experience it is nottranscendent it is not exactly outside experi-ence either It is immanent to it ndash always in itbut not of it Intensity and experience accom-pany one another like two mutually presup-posing dimensions or like two sides of a coinIntensity is immanent to matter and toevents to mind and to body and to everylevel of bifurcation composing them andwhich they compose (226)

Hence intensity for Massumi is indeed experi-enced ldquoin the proliferations of levels of organisa-tion it ceaselessly gives rise to generates andregenerates at every suspended momentrdquo (226)

12 For a tracking through of this oscillation seethe debates around allegory in the visual artscarried out in October in particular Craig OwensrsquoldquoThe Allegorical Impulse Towards a Theory ofPostmodernismrdquo and most impressive StephenMelvillersquos ldquoNotes on the Reemergence ofAllegory the Forgetting of Modernism theNecessity of Rhetoric and the Conditions ofPublicity in Art and Art Criticismrdquo

13 See for example Andrew Benjaminrsquos The PluralEvent For another interesting take on this prob-lematic especially in relation to Deleuzersquos projectof thinking multiplicity see Alain Badioursquos DeleuzeThe Clamor of Being

14 For Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophyart is a zone ldquoa zone of indetermination of indis-cernibility as if things beasts and persons hellipendlessly reach that point that immediatelyprecedes their natural differentiation This is what

1 3 2

orsquosullivan

is called an affect hellip Life alone creates such zoneswhere living beings whirl around and only art canreach and penetrate them in its enterprise of co-creationrdquo (173)

15 In general Lyotard tends to configure thisunknown event in Kantian terms specifically inrelation to the sublime As we shall see thereneed not be a recourse to the transcendent inorder to allow for the possibility of a beyond toeveryday experience

16 John Rajchman has also written on this notionof the abstract and on its difference to the moretypical one might say Greenbergian notion ofabstraction as reduction and purity For Rajchmanabstraction must be understood as a realm ofpossibilities of potentialities prior to figuration Inorder to paint ldquoone must come to see the surfacenot so much as empty or blank but rather asintense where lsquointensityrsquo means filled with theunseen virtuality of other strange possibilitiesrdquo(Rajchman 61) The question of how to ldquopaintoutside forcerdquo is according to Rajchmanrsquos readingof Deleuze ldquothe basic question of modernityrdquo (60)

17 This insight can be experienced Throughdrugs through meditation through anything thatif only for a moment dissolves the molar aggre-gate of our subjectivity

18 As Deleuze and Guattari remark in ldquo587BCndashAD 70 On Several Regimes of Signsrdquo theldquoprincipal strata binding human beings are theorganism signifiance and interpretation andsubjectification and subjectionrdquo (A ThousandPlateaus 134) It is the function of the next chapterldquoHow to Make Yourself a Body without Organsrdquoto offer strategies for destratification This chaptermight also be considered as a mapping through ofa series of experimental strategies for accessingthe realm of affect It is worth noting Deleuze andGuattarirsquos warning here against ldquowildly destratify-ingrdquo (A Thousand Plateaus 160) ndash this can endmerely in empty botched bodies without organs(or worse) In fact ldquoyou have to keep enough ofthe organism for it to reform each dawn and youhave to keep small supplies of signifiance andsubjectification if only to turn them against theirown systems when circumstances demand it hellipand you have to keep small rations of subjectivityin sufficient quantity to enable you to respond tothe dominant realityrdquo (ibid) See also my ldquoInViolence Three Case Studies Against theStratumrdquo

19 For a thorough working through of this logic ofthe real and the possible the virtual and the actualsee Deleuzersquos Bergsonism 96ndash98

20 As do philosophy science and as we have seenprosthetic technologies By altering our temporaland spatial registers new technology opens worldspreviously invisible to us but not worlds non-exis-tent We might say something similar about puremathematics abstract equations as a way of actu-alising events and processes which cannot berepresented (indeed this actualisation is a form ofproblem solving)

21 As Massumi remarks ldquoIt is the edge of thevirtual where it leaks into the actual that countsFor that seeping edge is where potential actuallyis foundrdquo (236)

22 For Deleuze and Guattari philosophy is not autopian pursuit in the sense of positing transcen-dent (and thus authoritarian) utopias Howeverphilosophy might be figured as utopian if weunderstand by this term immanent revolutionaryutopias Indeed for Deleuze and Guattari politicalphilosophy is this kind of utopian practice whichinvolves a ldquoresistance to the presentrdquo and acreation of concepts which in itself ldquocalls for afuture form for a new people that do not yetexistrdquo (What is Philosophy 108) Although notwithin the scope of this paper a reading ofFrankfurt school utopias via Deleuze andGuattarirsquos notion of immanence would be an inter-esting and productive project Deleuze andGuattari themselves seem to have this in mindwhen they footnote the writings of Ernst Bloch inWhat is Philosophy (224)

23 A good example of rethinking art away fromthe horizon of instrumental reason (and of thelatterrsquos critique) is Ronald Boguersquos ldquoArt andTerritoryrdquo Bogue taking his lead from Deleuzersquosnotion of the refrain argues that bird song as akind of art practice involves processes and move-ments of territorialisation deterritorialisationand reterritorialisation Which is to say that art isnot here involved in a logic of the possible but isto do with function a function of deterritorialisa-tion

24 Ronald Bogue has outlined this ldquoaesthetics offorcerdquo as he calls it in relation to painting andmore interestingly in relation to music (seeldquoGilles Deleuze The Aesthetics of Forcerdquo) Boguereads Deleuze as offering an ldquoopen systemrdquo of the

1 3 3

aesthetics of affect

arts where at stake is less a definition of art or anydemarcation between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic but rather a general function of art aswhat ldquoharnesses forcesrdquo (ibid 268) This is partic-ularly the case with painting and of courseDeleuze outlines this theory in relation to thepaintings of Francis Bacon However the functionof music is also involved in forces As Bogueremarks ldquoThe basic function of the refrain is toterritorialise forces to regularise control andencode the unpredictable world in regularpatterns But the refrain never remains purelyclosed and stable Its emergence from the chaoticflux is only provisional and its rhythms always issueforth to the cosmos at largerdquo (ibid 265)

This larger function of deterritorialisation isprecisely a ldquoline of flightrdquo into the molecular It isthis ndash an affective line (and I would argue anaesthetic one) ndash that defines art

25 This is precisely Lyotardrsquos point in ldquoPhilosophyand Painting in the Age of Their ExperimentationContribution to an Idea of PostmodernityrdquoldquoTodayrsquos art consists in exploring things unsayableand things invisible Strange machines are assem-bled where what we didnrsquot have the idea of sayingor the matter to feel can make itself heard andexperiencedrdquo (190)

26 I attempt such a project albeit briefly in thispaperrsquos companion piece ldquoWriting on Art (CaseStudy The Buddhist Puja)rdquo

bibliography

Adorno A Minima Moralia Trans EFN JephcottLondon Verso 1978

Adorno A Aesthetic Theory Trans C LenhardtLondon Routledge 1984

Badiou A Deleuze The Clamor of Being TransLouise Burchill Minneapolis U of Minnesota P1999

Bann S ldquoThree Images for Kristeva From Bellinito Proustrdquo Parallax 8 (autumn 1998) 65ndash79

Bataille G Prehistoric Painting Lascaux or the Birth ofArt Trans Austryn Wainhouse LondonMacmillan 1980

Benjamin A The Plural Event London Routledge1993

Bergson H Matter and Memory Trans NM Pauland WS Palmer New York Zone 1991

Bogue R ldquoGilles Deleuze The Aesthetics ofForcerdquo Deleuze A Critical Reader Ed Paul PattonOxford Blackwell 1996

Bogue R ldquoArt and Territoryrdquo A Deleuzian CenturyEd Ian Buchanan Durham Duke UP 1999

Burgin V ldquoThe End of Art Theoryrdquo The End of ArtTheory London Macmillan 1986

de Man P ldquoLiterary History and LiteraryModernityrdquo Blindness and Insight LondonRoutledge 1989

Derrida J The Truth in Painting Trans GeoffBennington and Ian McCleod Chicago U ofChicago P 1987

Deleuze G Bergsonism Trans Hugh Tomlinsonand Barbara Habberjam New York Zone 1991

Deleuze G Negotiations 1972ndash90 Trans MartinJoughin New York Columbia UP 1992

Deleuze G Difference and Repetition Trans PaulPatton London Athlone 1994

Deleuze G ldquoSpinoza and the Three Ethicsrdquo EssaysCritical and Clinical Trans Daniel W Smith andMichael Greco London Verso 1998

Deleuze G and F Guattari A Thousand PlateausTrans Brian Massumi London Athlone 1988

Deleuze G and F Guattari What is PhilosophyTrans Graham Burchell and Hugh TomlinsonLondon Verso 1994

Foster K ldquoCritical History of Art or aTransfiguration of Valuesrdquo New Literary History(spring 1972) 459ndash70

Guattari F ldquoPragmaticMachinerdquo Interview withCharles J Stivale lthttpwwwdcpeacnetedu~mnuesguattarihtmgt (1985)

Guattari F ldquoOn Machinesrdquo ComplexityArchitectureArtPhilosophy Trans VivianConstantinopoulos Ed Andrew BenjaminLondon Academy 1989

Guattari F Chaosmosis An Ethico-AestheticParadigm Trans Julian Pefanis and Paul BainsSydney Power Institute 1995

Lyotard J-F The Postmodern Condition A Report onKnowledge Trans Geoff Bennington and BrianMassumi Manchester Manchester UP 1984

Lyotard J-F Peregrinations Law Form Event NewYork Columbia UP 1988

1 3 4

orsquosullivan

Lyotard J-F ldquoThe Tensorrdquo Trans Sean Hand TheLyotard Reader Ed Andrew Benjamin OxfordBlackwell 1989

Lyotard J-F ldquoPhilosophy and Painting in the Ageof Their Experimentation Contribution to an Ideaof Postmodernityrdquo Trans Maria Minich Brewerand Daniel Brewer The Lyotard Reader EdAndrew Benjamin Oxford Blackwell 1989

Lyotard J-F ldquoCritical Reflectionsrdquo Trans WGJNiesluchawski Artforum 248 (1991) 92ndash93

Massumi B ldquoThe Autonomy of Affectrdquo Deleuze ACritical Reader Ed P Patton Oxford Blackwell1996

Melville S ldquoNotes on the Reemergence ofAllegory the Forgetting of Modernism theNecessity of Rhetoric and the Conditions ofPublicity in Art and Art Criticismrdquo October 19(1981) 55ndash92

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoIn Violence Three Case StudiesAgainst the Stratumrdquo Parallax 15 (summer 2000)104ndash09

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoWriting on Art (Case Study TheBuddhist Puja)rdquo Parallax 21 (forthcoming)

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoArt as Text RethinkingRepresentationrdquo Art History (forthcoming)

Owens C ldquoThe Allegorical Impulse Towards aTheory of Postmodernismrdquo October 12 (1980)67ndash86

Rajchman J ldquoAbstractionrdquo ConstructionsCambridge MA MIT P 1988

Simon OOtildeSullivanDepartment of Historical and Critical StudiesGoldsmiths CollegeNew CrossLondonSE14 6NWUKE-mail soOtildesullivangoldacuk

Page 7: THE AESTHETICS OF AFFECT: thinking art beyond …simonosullivan.net/articles/aesthetics-of-affect.pdfaesthetics of affect origin under erasure. First aesthetics fell foul of Marxism

orsquosullivan

tice ETH a reconfiguration which might well involveas one of its strategies a return to those writerswho have always seen theaesthetic as the function of artand to those writers who mightnot be art historians but whoare nevertheless attuned to theaesthetics of affect

notes

My thanks to Angelakirsquos reviewers

1 Indeed there is a ldquotraditionrdquo of positioning crit-ical art history as a form of ideological critiqueand specifically as a critique of aesthetics See forexample Kurt Fosterrsquos polemical essay ldquoCriticalHistory of Art or a Transfiguration of Valuesrdquo

2 Jacques Derrida performs precisely this decon-struction of aesthetics in ldquoThe Parergonrdquo in hisThe Truth in Painting 37ndash82

3 For a more affirmative mapping of Derridarsquoscontribution towards thinking the art object seemy ldquoArt as Text Rethinking Representationrdquo

4 They can be described as extra-discursive in thesense that they are ldquooutsiderdquo discourse under-stood as structure (they are precisely what is irre-ducible to structure) They can be described asextra-textual in the sense that they do notproduce ndash or do not only produce ndash knowledgeAffects might however be understood as textualin that they are felt as differences in intensity

5 For Brian Massumi in ldquoThe Autonomy ofAffectrdquo affects are likewise understood asmoments of intensity ndash which might resonate withlinguistic expression but which strictly speakingare of a different and prior order For Massumi asfor myself ldquoapproaches to the image in its relationto language are incomplete if they operate only onthe semantic or semiotic level however that levelis defined (linguistically logically narratologicallyideologically or all of these combinations as aSymbolic) What they lose precisely is the event ndashin favour of structurerdquo (ibid 220)

Massumi identifies the realm of affect as one ofincreasing importance within ldquomedia literary andart theoryrdquo but points out the problem that thereis ldquono culturalndashtheoretical vocabulary specific toaffectrdquo indeed our ldquoentire vocabulary has derivedfrom theories of signification that are still weddedto structurerdquo (ibid 221) From one perspective

Massumi is right there is no vocabulary of affectHowever it is not so simple as inventing one Toinvent a language forof affect is to bring the latterinto representation ndash and hence to invite decon-struction In a sense there is no way out of thispredicament except to acknowledge it as a prob-lem ndash and move beyond it Which is what thispaper attempts to do

6 See Deleuzersquos ldquoSpinoza and the Three Ethicsrdquowhere ldquoaffectrdquo is defined as the effect affectionshave on the bodyrsquos duration the ldquopassagesbecomings rises and falls continuous variations ofpower (puissance) that pass from one state toanother We will call them affects strictly speak-ing and no longer affections They are signs ofincrease and decrease signs that are vectorial (ofthe joyndashsadness type) and no longer scalar like theaffections sensations or perceptionsrdquo (139)

7 As Feacutelix Guattari observes in an interview

The same semiotic material can be function-ing in different registers A material can beboth caught in paradigmatic chains of produc-tion chains of signification hellip but at the sametime can function in an a-signifying registerSo what determines the difference In onecase a signifier functions in what one mightcall a logic of discursive aggregates ie a logicof representation In the other case it func-tions in something that isnrsquot entirely a logicwhat Irsquove called an existential machinic a logicof bodies without organs a machinic ofbodies without organs (ldquoPragmaticMachinerdquo15)

8 For Guattari affects can be understood preciselyas what makes up life They establish a kind ofcentre or ldquoself-affirmationrdquo that occurs parallel tothe discursive (what Guattari terms ldquolinearrdquo)elements of subjectivity For Guattari this affec-tive element is present in Freudrsquos theory of thedrives but has been overlooked by ldquothe struc-turalistsrdquo (Guattari has Lacan in mind) (ldquoOnMachinesrdquo 10) Guattari writes

I consider that limiting ourselves to this coor-dinate [ie linearity] is precisely to lose theelement of the machinic centre of subjectiveautopoiesis and self-affirmation Whetherlocated at the level of the complete individualor partial subjectivity or even at the level ofsocial subjectivity this element undergoes apathic relationship by means of the affectWhat is it then that makes us state phenom-

1 3 1

aesthetics of affect

enologically that something is living It isprecisely this relation of affect This is not adescription nor a kind of propositional analy-sis resulting from a sense of hypotheses anddeductions ndash ie it is a living being thereforeit is a machine rather an immediate pathicand non-discursive apprehension occurs ofthe machinersquos ontological autocompositionrelationship (Ibid)

Interestingly in ldquoOn Machinesrdquo Guattari developsthe notion of a non-discursive affective foyerwhich has much in common with Bergsonrsquos notionof living beings as affective ldquocentres of indetermi-nationrdquo (28ndash34)

9 Lyotard addresses this double functioning of thesign in ldquoThe Tensorrdquo Like Guattari (see noteabove) Lyotardrsquos point of departure is Freudrsquostheory of the drives Lyotard merely points outthat the sign can operate within two (or presum-ably even more) economies metonymic andmetaphoric systems but also affective ones ldquoIt isat once a sign that creates meaning through diver-gence and opposition and a sign that createsintensity through strength and singularityrdquo (11)

10[T]he work of art is hellip a bloc of sensationsthat is to say a compound of percepts andaffects Percepts are no longer perceptionsthey are independent of a state of those whoexperience them Affects are no longer feel-ings or affections they go beyond thestrength of those who undergo themSensations percepts and affects are beingswhose validity lies in themselves and exceedsany lived (What is Philosophy 164)

In their chapter on art in What is PhilosophyDeleuze and Guattari map out a theory andlanguage of art outside of representation I want tonote here an interesting dovetailing of their theorywith a kind of aporia which ldquoThe Social History ofArtrdquo and in particular TJ Clark finds itselfhimselfin Suffice to say that Deleuze and Guattarirsquoslanguage ndash of movement materials and matter ndash isprecisely the object of art historyrsquos secret desireand fear a language of art which is no longer to dowith signifiers and signifieds (poached as Clarkhimself remarks from film theory) Unfortunatelyall materialist art historians (ldquoThe Social History ofArtrdquo) eventually and inevitably hit an aporiawhich very briefly goes like this how to attend tothe material object behind the ideological veils(the cultural readingsmeanings) whilst still attend-

ing to the objectrsquos history The problem arisesbecause ideology and history are here synony-mous In a sense ldquoThe Social History of Artrdquo andart history in general could not cannot put thislanguage together they are working within thehorizon of signification A language of material andmatter would for them be a fetishisation ndash anemptying out of meaning or of that trope of mean-ing history They would be guilty of the very ideo-logical mystification of which they are against It isonly within a different model or paradigm that alanguage of materials and matter makes sense

11 Massumi is useful in rethinking the relationshipbetween the event as intensity and experience

Although the realm of intensity thatDeleuzersquos philosophy strives to conceptualiseis transcendental in the sense that it is notdirectly accessible to experience it is nottranscendent it is not exactly outside experi-ence either It is immanent to it ndash always in itbut not of it Intensity and experience accom-pany one another like two mutually presup-posing dimensions or like two sides of a coinIntensity is immanent to matter and toevents to mind and to body and to everylevel of bifurcation composing them andwhich they compose (226)

Hence intensity for Massumi is indeed experi-enced ldquoin the proliferations of levels of organisa-tion it ceaselessly gives rise to generates andregenerates at every suspended momentrdquo (226)

12 For a tracking through of this oscillation seethe debates around allegory in the visual artscarried out in October in particular Craig OwensrsquoldquoThe Allegorical Impulse Towards a Theory ofPostmodernismrdquo and most impressive StephenMelvillersquos ldquoNotes on the Reemergence ofAllegory the Forgetting of Modernism theNecessity of Rhetoric and the Conditions ofPublicity in Art and Art Criticismrdquo

13 See for example Andrew Benjaminrsquos The PluralEvent For another interesting take on this prob-lematic especially in relation to Deleuzersquos projectof thinking multiplicity see Alain Badioursquos DeleuzeThe Clamor of Being

14 For Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophyart is a zone ldquoa zone of indetermination of indis-cernibility as if things beasts and persons hellipendlessly reach that point that immediatelyprecedes their natural differentiation This is what

1 3 2

orsquosullivan

is called an affect hellip Life alone creates such zoneswhere living beings whirl around and only art canreach and penetrate them in its enterprise of co-creationrdquo (173)

15 In general Lyotard tends to configure thisunknown event in Kantian terms specifically inrelation to the sublime As we shall see thereneed not be a recourse to the transcendent inorder to allow for the possibility of a beyond toeveryday experience

16 John Rajchman has also written on this notionof the abstract and on its difference to the moretypical one might say Greenbergian notion ofabstraction as reduction and purity For Rajchmanabstraction must be understood as a realm ofpossibilities of potentialities prior to figuration Inorder to paint ldquoone must come to see the surfacenot so much as empty or blank but rather asintense where lsquointensityrsquo means filled with theunseen virtuality of other strange possibilitiesrdquo(Rajchman 61) The question of how to ldquopaintoutside forcerdquo is according to Rajchmanrsquos readingof Deleuze ldquothe basic question of modernityrdquo (60)

17 This insight can be experienced Throughdrugs through meditation through anything thatif only for a moment dissolves the molar aggre-gate of our subjectivity

18 As Deleuze and Guattari remark in ldquo587BCndashAD 70 On Several Regimes of Signsrdquo theldquoprincipal strata binding human beings are theorganism signifiance and interpretation andsubjectification and subjectionrdquo (A ThousandPlateaus 134) It is the function of the next chapterldquoHow to Make Yourself a Body without Organsrdquoto offer strategies for destratification This chaptermight also be considered as a mapping through ofa series of experimental strategies for accessingthe realm of affect It is worth noting Deleuze andGuattarirsquos warning here against ldquowildly destratify-ingrdquo (A Thousand Plateaus 160) ndash this can endmerely in empty botched bodies without organs(or worse) In fact ldquoyou have to keep enough ofthe organism for it to reform each dawn and youhave to keep small supplies of signifiance andsubjectification if only to turn them against theirown systems when circumstances demand it hellipand you have to keep small rations of subjectivityin sufficient quantity to enable you to respond tothe dominant realityrdquo (ibid) See also my ldquoInViolence Three Case Studies Against theStratumrdquo

19 For a thorough working through of this logic ofthe real and the possible the virtual and the actualsee Deleuzersquos Bergsonism 96ndash98

20 As do philosophy science and as we have seenprosthetic technologies By altering our temporaland spatial registers new technology opens worldspreviously invisible to us but not worlds non-exis-tent We might say something similar about puremathematics abstract equations as a way of actu-alising events and processes which cannot berepresented (indeed this actualisation is a form ofproblem solving)

21 As Massumi remarks ldquoIt is the edge of thevirtual where it leaks into the actual that countsFor that seeping edge is where potential actuallyis foundrdquo (236)

22 For Deleuze and Guattari philosophy is not autopian pursuit in the sense of positing transcen-dent (and thus authoritarian) utopias Howeverphilosophy might be figured as utopian if weunderstand by this term immanent revolutionaryutopias Indeed for Deleuze and Guattari politicalphilosophy is this kind of utopian practice whichinvolves a ldquoresistance to the presentrdquo and acreation of concepts which in itself ldquocalls for afuture form for a new people that do not yetexistrdquo (What is Philosophy 108) Although notwithin the scope of this paper a reading ofFrankfurt school utopias via Deleuze andGuattarirsquos notion of immanence would be an inter-esting and productive project Deleuze andGuattari themselves seem to have this in mindwhen they footnote the writings of Ernst Bloch inWhat is Philosophy (224)

23 A good example of rethinking art away fromthe horizon of instrumental reason (and of thelatterrsquos critique) is Ronald Boguersquos ldquoArt andTerritoryrdquo Bogue taking his lead from Deleuzersquosnotion of the refrain argues that bird song as akind of art practice involves processes and move-ments of territorialisation deterritorialisationand reterritorialisation Which is to say that art isnot here involved in a logic of the possible but isto do with function a function of deterritorialisa-tion

24 Ronald Bogue has outlined this ldquoaesthetics offorcerdquo as he calls it in relation to painting andmore interestingly in relation to music (seeldquoGilles Deleuze The Aesthetics of Forcerdquo) Boguereads Deleuze as offering an ldquoopen systemrdquo of the

1 3 3

aesthetics of affect

arts where at stake is less a definition of art or anydemarcation between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic but rather a general function of art aswhat ldquoharnesses forcesrdquo (ibid 268) This is partic-ularly the case with painting and of courseDeleuze outlines this theory in relation to thepaintings of Francis Bacon However the functionof music is also involved in forces As Bogueremarks ldquoThe basic function of the refrain is toterritorialise forces to regularise control andencode the unpredictable world in regularpatterns But the refrain never remains purelyclosed and stable Its emergence from the chaoticflux is only provisional and its rhythms always issueforth to the cosmos at largerdquo (ibid 265)

This larger function of deterritorialisation isprecisely a ldquoline of flightrdquo into the molecular It isthis ndash an affective line (and I would argue anaesthetic one) ndash that defines art

25 This is precisely Lyotardrsquos point in ldquoPhilosophyand Painting in the Age of Their ExperimentationContribution to an Idea of PostmodernityrdquoldquoTodayrsquos art consists in exploring things unsayableand things invisible Strange machines are assem-bled where what we didnrsquot have the idea of sayingor the matter to feel can make itself heard andexperiencedrdquo (190)

26 I attempt such a project albeit briefly in thispaperrsquos companion piece ldquoWriting on Art (CaseStudy The Buddhist Puja)rdquo

bibliography

Adorno A Minima Moralia Trans EFN JephcottLondon Verso 1978

Adorno A Aesthetic Theory Trans C LenhardtLondon Routledge 1984

Badiou A Deleuze The Clamor of Being TransLouise Burchill Minneapolis U of Minnesota P1999

Bann S ldquoThree Images for Kristeva From Bellinito Proustrdquo Parallax 8 (autumn 1998) 65ndash79

Bataille G Prehistoric Painting Lascaux or the Birth ofArt Trans Austryn Wainhouse LondonMacmillan 1980

Benjamin A The Plural Event London Routledge1993

Bergson H Matter and Memory Trans NM Pauland WS Palmer New York Zone 1991

Bogue R ldquoGilles Deleuze The Aesthetics ofForcerdquo Deleuze A Critical Reader Ed Paul PattonOxford Blackwell 1996

Bogue R ldquoArt and Territoryrdquo A Deleuzian CenturyEd Ian Buchanan Durham Duke UP 1999

Burgin V ldquoThe End of Art Theoryrdquo The End of ArtTheory London Macmillan 1986

de Man P ldquoLiterary History and LiteraryModernityrdquo Blindness and Insight LondonRoutledge 1989

Derrida J The Truth in Painting Trans GeoffBennington and Ian McCleod Chicago U ofChicago P 1987

Deleuze G Bergsonism Trans Hugh Tomlinsonand Barbara Habberjam New York Zone 1991

Deleuze G Negotiations 1972ndash90 Trans MartinJoughin New York Columbia UP 1992

Deleuze G Difference and Repetition Trans PaulPatton London Athlone 1994

Deleuze G ldquoSpinoza and the Three Ethicsrdquo EssaysCritical and Clinical Trans Daniel W Smith andMichael Greco London Verso 1998

Deleuze G and F Guattari A Thousand PlateausTrans Brian Massumi London Athlone 1988

Deleuze G and F Guattari What is PhilosophyTrans Graham Burchell and Hugh TomlinsonLondon Verso 1994

Foster K ldquoCritical History of Art or aTransfiguration of Valuesrdquo New Literary History(spring 1972) 459ndash70

Guattari F ldquoPragmaticMachinerdquo Interview withCharles J Stivale lthttpwwwdcpeacnetedu~mnuesguattarihtmgt (1985)

Guattari F ldquoOn Machinesrdquo ComplexityArchitectureArtPhilosophy Trans VivianConstantinopoulos Ed Andrew BenjaminLondon Academy 1989

Guattari F Chaosmosis An Ethico-AestheticParadigm Trans Julian Pefanis and Paul BainsSydney Power Institute 1995

Lyotard J-F The Postmodern Condition A Report onKnowledge Trans Geoff Bennington and BrianMassumi Manchester Manchester UP 1984

Lyotard J-F Peregrinations Law Form Event NewYork Columbia UP 1988

1 3 4

orsquosullivan

Lyotard J-F ldquoThe Tensorrdquo Trans Sean Hand TheLyotard Reader Ed Andrew Benjamin OxfordBlackwell 1989

Lyotard J-F ldquoPhilosophy and Painting in the Ageof Their Experimentation Contribution to an Ideaof Postmodernityrdquo Trans Maria Minich Brewerand Daniel Brewer The Lyotard Reader EdAndrew Benjamin Oxford Blackwell 1989

Lyotard J-F ldquoCritical Reflectionsrdquo Trans WGJNiesluchawski Artforum 248 (1991) 92ndash93

Massumi B ldquoThe Autonomy of Affectrdquo Deleuze ACritical Reader Ed P Patton Oxford Blackwell1996

Melville S ldquoNotes on the Reemergence ofAllegory the Forgetting of Modernism theNecessity of Rhetoric and the Conditions ofPublicity in Art and Art Criticismrdquo October 19(1981) 55ndash92

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoIn Violence Three Case StudiesAgainst the Stratumrdquo Parallax 15 (summer 2000)104ndash09

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoWriting on Art (Case Study TheBuddhist Puja)rdquo Parallax 21 (forthcoming)

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoArt as Text RethinkingRepresentationrdquo Art History (forthcoming)

Owens C ldquoThe Allegorical Impulse Towards aTheory of Postmodernismrdquo October 12 (1980)67ndash86

Rajchman J ldquoAbstractionrdquo ConstructionsCambridge MA MIT P 1988

Simon OOtildeSullivanDepartment of Historical and Critical StudiesGoldsmiths CollegeNew CrossLondonSE14 6NWUKE-mail soOtildesullivangoldacuk

Page 8: THE AESTHETICS OF AFFECT: thinking art beyond …simonosullivan.net/articles/aesthetics-of-affect.pdfaesthetics of affect origin under erasure. First aesthetics fell foul of Marxism

aesthetics of affect

enologically that something is living It isprecisely this relation of affect This is not adescription nor a kind of propositional analy-sis resulting from a sense of hypotheses anddeductions ndash ie it is a living being thereforeit is a machine rather an immediate pathicand non-discursive apprehension occurs ofthe machinersquos ontological autocompositionrelationship (Ibid)

Interestingly in ldquoOn Machinesrdquo Guattari developsthe notion of a non-discursive affective foyerwhich has much in common with Bergsonrsquos notionof living beings as affective ldquocentres of indetermi-nationrdquo (28ndash34)

9 Lyotard addresses this double functioning of thesign in ldquoThe Tensorrdquo Like Guattari (see noteabove) Lyotardrsquos point of departure is Freudrsquostheory of the drives Lyotard merely points outthat the sign can operate within two (or presum-ably even more) economies metonymic andmetaphoric systems but also affective ones ldquoIt isat once a sign that creates meaning through diver-gence and opposition and a sign that createsintensity through strength and singularityrdquo (11)

10[T]he work of art is hellip a bloc of sensationsthat is to say a compound of percepts andaffects Percepts are no longer perceptionsthey are independent of a state of those whoexperience them Affects are no longer feel-ings or affections they go beyond thestrength of those who undergo themSensations percepts and affects are beingswhose validity lies in themselves and exceedsany lived (What is Philosophy 164)

In their chapter on art in What is PhilosophyDeleuze and Guattari map out a theory andlanguage of art outside of representation I want tonote here an interesting dovetailing of their theorywith a kind of aporia which ldquoThe Social History ofArtrdquo and in particular TJ Clark finds itselfhimselfin Suffice to say that Deleuze and Guattarirsquoslanguage ndash of movement materials and matter ndash isprecisely the object of art historyrsquos secret desireand fear a language of art which is no longer to dowith signifiers and signifieds (poached as Clarkhimself remarks from film theory) Unfortunatelyall materialist art historians (ldquoThe Social History ofArtrdquo) eventually and inevitably hit an aporiawhich very briefly goes like this how to attend tothe material object behind the ideological veils(the cultural readingsmeanings) whilst still attend-

ing to the objectrsquos history The problem arisesbecause ideology and history are here synony-mous In a sense ldquoThe Social History of Artrdquo andart history in general could not cannot put thislanguage together they are working within thehorizon of signification A language of material andmatter would for them be a fetishisation ndash anemptying out of meaning or of that trope of mean-ing history They would be guilty of the very ideo-logical mystification of which they are against It isonly within a different model or paradigm that alanguage of materials and matter makes sense

11 Massumi is useful in rethinking the relationshipbetween the event as intensity and experience

Although the realm of intensity thatDeleuzersquos philosophy strives to conceptualiseis transcendental in the sense that it is notdirectly accessible to experience it is nottranscendent it is not exactly outside experi-ence either It is immanent to it ndash always in itbut not of it Intensity and experience accom-pany one another like two mutually presup-posing dimensions or like two sides of a coinIntensity is immanent to matter and toevents to mind and to body and to everylevel of bifurcation composing them andwhich they compose (226)

Hence intensity for Massumi is indeed experi-enced ldquoin the proliferations of levels of organisa-tion it ceaselessly gives rise to generates andregenerates at every suspended momentrdquo (226)

12 For a tracking through of this oscillation seethe debates around allegory in the visual artscarried out in October in particular Craig OwensrsquoldquoThe Allegorical Impulse Towards a Theory ofPostmodernismrdquo and most impressive StephenMelvillersquos ldquoNotes on the Reemergence ofAllegory the Forgetting of Modernism theNecessity of Rhetoric and the Conditions ofPublicity in Art and Art Criticismrdquo

13 See for example Andrew Benjaminrsquos The PluralEvent For another interesting take on this prob-lematic especially in relation to Deleuzersquos projectof thinking multiplicity see Alain Badioursquos DeleuzeThe Clamor of Being

14 For Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophyart is a zone ldquoa zone of indetermination of indis-cernibility as if things beasts and persons hellipendlessly reach that point that immediatelyprecedes their natural differentiation This is what

1 3 2

orsquosullivan

is called an affect hellip Life alone creates such zoneswhere living beings whirl around and only art canreach and penetrate them in its enterprise of co-creationrdquo (173)

15 In general Lyotard tends to configure thisunknown event in Kantian terms specifically inrelation to the sublime As we shall see thereneed not be a recourse to the transcendent inorder to allow for the possibility of a beyond toeveryday experience

16 John Rajchman has also written on this notionof the abstract and on its difference to the moretypical one might say Greenbergian notion ofabstraction as reduction and purity For Rajchmanabstraction must be understood as a realm ofpossibilities of potentialities prior to figuration Inorder to paint ldquoone must come to see the surfacenot so much as empty or blank but rather asintense where lsquointensityrsquo means filled with theunseen virtuality of other strange possibilitiesrdquo(Rajchman 61) The question of how to ldquopaintoutside forcerdquo is according to Rajchmanrsquos readingof Deleuze ldquothe basic question of modernityrdquo (60)

17 This insight can be experienced Throughdrugs through meditation through anything thatif only for a moment dissolves the molar aggre-gate of our subjectivity

18 As Deleuze and Guattari remark in ldquo587BCndashAD 70 On Several Regimes of Signsrdquo theldquoprincipal strata binding human beings are theorganism signifiance and interpretation andsubjectification and subjectionrdquo (A ThousandPlateaus 134) It is the function of the next chapterldquoHow to Make Yourself a Body without Organsrdquoto offer strategies for destratification This chaptermight also be considered as a mapping through ofa series of experimental strategies for accessingthe realm of affect It is worth noting Deleuze andGuattarirsquos warning here against ldquowildly destratify-ingrdquo (A Thousand Plateaus 160) ndash this can endmerely in empty botched bodies without organs(or worse) In fact ldquoyou have to keep enough ofthe organism for it to reform each dawn and youhave to keep small supplies of signifiance andsubjectification if only to turn them against theirown systems when circumstances demand it hellipand you have to keep small rations of subjectivityin sufficient quantity to enable you to respond tothe dominant realityrdquo (ibid) See also my ldquoInViolence Three Case Studies Against theStratumrdquo

19 For a thorough working through of this logic ofthe real and the possible the virtual and the actualsee Deleuzersquos Bergsonism 96ndash98

20 As do philosophy science and as we have seenprosthetic technologies By altering our temporaland spatial registers new technology opens worldspreviously invisible to us but not worlds non-exis-tent We might say something similar about puremathematics abstract equations as a way of actu-alising events and processes which cannot berepresented (indeed this actualisation is a form ofproblem solving)

21 As Massumi remarks ldquoIt is the edge of thevirtual where it leaks into the actual that countsFor that seeping edge is where potential actuallyis foundrdquo (236)

22 For Deleuze and Guattari philosophy is not autopian pursuit in the sense of positing transcen-dent (and thus authoritarian) utopias Howeverphilosophy might be figured as utopian if weunderstand by this term immanent revolutionaryutopias Indeed for Deleuze and Guattari politicalphilosophy is this kind of utopian practice whichinvolves a ldquoresistance to the presentrdquo and acreation of concepts which in itself ldquocalls for afuture form for a new people that do not yetexistrdquo (What is Philosophy 108) Although notwithin the scope of this paper a reading ofFrankfurt school utopias via Deleuze andGuattarirsquos notion of immanence would be an inter-esting and productive project Deleuze andGuattari themselves seem to have this in mindwhen they footnote the writings of Ernst Bloch inWhat is Philosophy (224)

23 A good example of rethinking art away fromthe horizon of instrumental reason (and of thelatterrsquos critique) is Ronald Boguersquos ldquoArt andTerritoryrdquo Bogue taking his lead from Deleuzersquosnotion of the refrain argues that bird song as akind of art practice involves processes and move-ments of territorialisation deterritorialisationand reterritorialisation Which is to say that art isnot here involved in a logic of the possible but isto do with function a function of deterritorialisa-tion

24 Ronald Bogue has outlined this ldquoaesthetics offorcerdquo as he calls it in relation to painting andmore interestingly in relation to music (seeldquoGilles Deleuze The Aesthetics of Forcerdquo) Boguereads Deleuze as offering an ldquoopen systemrdquo of the

1 3 3

aesthetics of affect

arts where at stake is less a definition of art or anydemarcation between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic but rather a general function of art aswhat ldquoharnesses forcesrdquo (ibid 268) This is partic-ularly the case with painting and of courseDeleuze outlines this theory in relation to thepaintings of Francis Bacon However the functionof music is also involved in forces As Bogueremarks ldquoThe basic function of the refrain is toterritorialise forces to regularise control andencode the unpredictable world in regularpatterns But the refrain never remains purelyclosed and stable Its emergence from the chaoticflux is only provisional and its rhythms always issueforth to the cosmos at largerdquo (ibid 265)

This larger function of deterritorialisation isprecisely a ldquoline of flightrdquo into the molecular It isthis ndash an affective line (and I would argue anaesthetic one) ndash that defines art

25 This is precisely Lyotardrsquos point in ldquoPhilosophyand Painting in the Age of Their ExperimentationContribution to an Idea of PostmodernityrdquoldquoTodayrsquos art consists in exploring things unsayableand things invisible Strange machines are assem-bled where what we didnrsquot have the idea of sayingor the matter to feel can make itself heard andexperiencedrdquo (190)

26 I attempt such a project albeit briefly in thispaperrsquos companion piece ldquoWriting on Art (CaseStudy The Buddhist Puja)rdquo

bibliography

Adorno A Minima Moralia Trans EFN JephcottLondon Verso 1978

Adorno A Aesthetic Theory Trans C LenhardtLondon Routledge 1984

Badiou A Deleuze The Clamor of Being TransLouise Burchill Minneapolis U of Minnesota P1999

Bann S ldquoThree Images for Kristeva From Bellinito Proustrdquo Parallax 8 (autumn 1998) 65ndash79

Bataille G Prehistoric Painting Lascaux or the Birth ofArt Trans Austryn Wainhouse LondonMacmillan 1980

Benjamin A The Plural Event London Routledge1993

Bergson H Matter and Memory Trans NM Pauland WS Palmer New York Zone 1991

Bogue R ldquoGilles Deleuze The Aesthetics ofForcerdquo Deleuze A Critical Reader Ed Paul PattonOxford Blackwell 1996

Bogue R ldquoArt and Territoryrdquo A Deleuzian CenturyEd Ian Buchanan Durham Duke UP 1999

Burgin V ldquoThe End of Art Theoryrdquo The End of ArtTheory London Macmillan 1986

de Man P ldquoLiterary History and LiteraryModernityrdquo Blindness and Insight LondonRoutledge 1989

Derrida J The Truth in Painting Trans GeoffBennington and Ian McCleod Chicago U ofChicago P 1987

Deleuze G Bergsonism Trans Hugh Tomlinsonand Barbara Habberjam New York Zone 1991

Deleuze G Negotiations 1972ndash90 Trans MartinJoughin New York Columbia UP 1992

Deleuze G Difference and Repetition Trans PaulPatton London Athlone 1994

Deleuze G ldquoSpinoza and the Three Ethicsrdquo EssaysCritical and Clinical Trans Daniel W Smith andMichael Greco London Verso 1998

Deleuze G and F Guattari A Thousand PlateausTrans Brian Massumi London Athlone 1988

Deleuze G and F Guattari What is PhilosophyTrans Graham Burchell and Hugh TomlinsonLondon Verso 1994

Foster K ldquoCritical History of Art or aTransfiguration of Valuesrdquo New Literary History(spring 1972) 459ndash70

Guattari F ldquoPragmaticMachinerdquo Interview withCharles J Stivale lthttpwwwdcpeacnetedu~mnuesguattarihtmgt (1985)

Guattari F ldquoOn Machinesrdquo ComplexityArchitectureArtPhilosophy Trans VivianConstantinopoulos Ed Andrew BenjaminLondon Academy 1989

Guattari F Chaosmosis An Ethico-AestheticParadigm Trans Julian Pefanis and Paul BainsSydney Power Institute 1995

Lyotard J-F The Postmodern Condition A Report onKnowledge Trans Geoff Bennington and BrianMassumi Manchester Manchester UP 1984

Lyotard J-F Peregrinations Law Form Event NewYork Columbia UP 1988

1 3 4

orsquosullivan

Lyotard J-F ldquoThe Tensorrdquo Trans Sean Hand TheLyotard Reader Ed Andrew Benjamin OxfordBlackwell 1989

Lyotard J-F ldquoPhilosophy and Painting in the Ageof Their Experimentation Contribution to an Ideaof Postmodernityrdquo Trans Maria Minich Brewerand Daniel Brewer The Lyotard Reader EdAndrew Benjamin Oxford Blackwell 1989

Lyotard J-F ldquoCritical Reflectionsrdquo Trans WGJNiesluchawski Artforum 248 (1991) 92ndash93

Massumi B ldquoThe Autonomy of Affectrdquo Deleuze ACritical Reader Ed P Patton Oxford Blackwell1996

Melville S ldquoNotes on the Reemergence ofAllegory the Forgetting of Modernism theNecessity of Rhetoric and the Conditions ofPublicity in Art and Art Criticismrdquo October 19(1981) 55ndash92

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoIn Violence Three Case StudiesAgainst the Stratumrdquo Parallax 15 (summer 2000)104ndash09

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoWriting on Art (Case Study TheBuddhist Puja)rdquo Parallax 21 (forthcoming)

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoArt as Text RethinkingRepresentationrdquo Art History (forthcoming)

Owens C ldquoThe Allegorical Impulse Towards aTheory of Postmodernismrdquo October 12 (1980)67ndash86

Rajchman J ldquoAbstractionrdquo ConstructionsCambridge MA MIT P 1988

Simon OOtildeSullivanDepartment of Historical and Critical StudiesGoldsmiths CollegeNew CrossLondonSE14 6NWUKE-mail soOtildesullivangoldacuk

Page 9: THE AESTHETICS OF AFFECT: thinking art beyond …simonosullivan.net/articles/aesthetics-of-affect.pdfaesthetics of affect origin under erasure. First aesthetics fell foul of Marxism

orsquosullivan

is called an affect hellip Life alone creates such zoneswhere living beings whirl around and only art canreach and penetrate them in its enterprise of co-creationrdquo (173)

15 In general Lyotard tends to configure thisunknown event in Kantian terms specifically inrelation to the sublime As we shall see thereneed not be a recourse to the transcendent inorder to allow for the possibility of a beyond toeveryday experience

16 John Rajchman has also written on this notionof the abstract and on its difference to the moretypical one might say Greenbergian notion ofabstraction as reduction and purity For Rajchmanabstraction must be understood as a realm ofpossibilities of potentialities prior to figuration Inorder to paint ldquoone must come to see the surfacenot so much as empty or blank but rather asintense where lsquointensityrsquo means filled with theunseen virtuality of other strange possibilitiesrdquo(Rajchman 61) The question of how to ldquopaintoutside forcerdquo is according to Rajchmanrsquos readingof Deleuze ldquothe basic question of modernityrdquo (60)

17 This insight can be experienced Throughdrugs through meditation through anything thatif only for a moment dissolves the molar aggre-gate of our subjectivity

18 As Deleuze and Guattari remark in ldquo587BCndashAD 70 On Several Regimes of Signsrdquo theldquoprincipal strata binding human beings are theorganism signifiance and interpretation andsubjectification and subjectionrdquo (A ThousandPlateaus 134) It is the function of the next chapterldquoHow to Make Yourself a Body without Organsrdquoto offer strategies for destratification This chaptermight also be considered as a mapping through ofa series of experimental strategies for accessingthe realm of affect It is worth noting Deleuze andGuattarirsquos warning here against ldquowildly destratify-ingrdquo (A Thousand Plateaus 160) ndash this can endmerely in empty botched bodies without organs(or worse) In fact ldquoyou have to keep enough ofthe organism for it to reform each dawn and youhave to keep small supplies of signifiance andsubjectification if only to turn them against theirown systems when circumstances demand it hellipand you have to keep small rations of subjectivityin sufficient quantity to enable you to respond tothe dominant realityrdquo (ibid) See also my ldquoInViolence Three Case Studies Against theStratumrdquo

19 For a thorough working through of this logic ofthe real and the possible the virtual and the actualsee Deleuzersquos Bergsonism 96ndash98

20 As do philosophy science and as we have seenprosthetic technologies By altering our temporaland spatial registers new technology opens worldspreviously invisible to us but not worlds non-exis-tent We might say something similar about puremathematics abstract equations as a way of actu-alising events and processes which cannot berepresented (indeed this actualisation is a form ofproblem solving)

21 As Massumi remarks ldquoIt is the edge of thevirtual where it leaks into the actual that countsFor that seeping edge is where potential actuallyis foundrdquo (236)

22 For Deleuze and Guattari philosophy is not autopian pursuit in the sense of positing transcen-dent (and thus authoritarian) utopias Howeverphilosophy might be figured as utopian if weunderstand by this term immanent revolutionaryutopias Indeed for Deleuze and Guattari politicalphilosophy is this kind of utopian practice whichinvolves a ldquoresistance to the presentrdquo and acreation of concepts which in itself ldquocalls for afuture form for a new people that do not yetexistrdquo (What is Philosophy 108) Although notwithin the scope of this paper a reading ofFrankfurt school utopias via Deleuze andGuattarirsquos notion of immanence would be an inter-esting and productive project Deleuze andGuattari themselves seem to have this in mindwhen they footnote the writings of Ernst Bloch inWhat is Philosophy (224)

23 A good example of rethinking art away fromthe horizon of instrumental reason (and of thelatterrsquos critique) is Ronald Boguersquos ldquoArt andTerritoryrdquo Bogue taking his lead from Deleuzersquosnotion of the refrain argues that bird song as akind of art practice involves processes and move-ments of territorialisation deterritorialisationand reterritorialisation Which is to say that art isnot here involved in a logic of the possible but isto do with function a function of deterritorialisa-tion

24 Ronald Bogue has outlined this ldquoaesthetics offorcerdquo as he calls it in relation to painting andmore interestingly in relation to music (seeldquoGilles Deleuze The Aesthetics of Forcerdquo) Boguereads Deleuze as offering an ldquoopen systemrdquo of the

1 3 3

aesthetics of affect

arts where at stake is less a definition of art or anydemarcation between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic but rather a general function of art aswhat ldquoharnesses forcesrdquo (ibid 268) This is partic-ularly the case with painting and of courseDeleuze outlines this theory in relation to thepaintings of Francis Bacon However the functionof music is also involved in forces As Bogueremarks ldquoThe basic function of the refrain is toterritorialise forces to regularise control andencode the unpredictable world in regularpatterns But the refrain never remains purelyclosed and stable Its emergence from the chaoticflux is only provisional and its rhythms always issueforth to the cosmos at largerdquo (ibid 265)

This larger function of deterritorialisation isprecisely a ldquoline of flightrdquo into the molecular It isthis ndash an affective line (and I would argue anaesthetic one) ndash that defines art

25 This is precisely Lyotardrsquos point in ldquoPhilosophyand Painting in the Age of Their ExperimentationContribution to an Idea of PostmodernityrdquoldquoTodayrsquos art consists in exploring things unsayableand things invisible Strange machines are assem-bled where what we didnrsquot have the idea of sayingor the matter to feel can make itself heard andexperiencedrdquo (190)

26 I attempt such a project albeit briefly in thispaperrsquos companion piece ldquoWriting on Art (CaseStudy The Buddhist Puja)rdquo

bibliography

Adorno A Minima Moralia Trans EFN JephcottLondon Verso 1978

Adorno A Aesthetic Theory Trans C LenhardtLondon Routledge 1984

Badiou A Deleuze The Clamor of Being TransLouise Burchill Minneapolis U of Minnesota P1999

Bann S ldquoThree Images for Kristeva From Bellinito Proustrdquo Parallax 8 (autumn 1998) 65ndash79

Bataille G Prehistoric Painting Lascaux or the Birth ofArt Trans Austryn Wainhouse LondonMacmillan 1980

Benjamin A The Plural Event London Routledge1993

Bergson H Matter and Memory Trans NM Pauland WS Palmer New York Zone 1991

Bogue R ldquoGilles Deleuze The Aesthetics ofForcerdquo Deleuze A Critical Reader Ed Paul PattonOxford Blackwell 1996

Bogue R ldquoArt and Territoryrdquo A Deleuzian CenturyEd Ian Buchanan Durham Duke UP 1999

Burgin V ldquoThe End of Art Theoryrdquo The End of ArtTheory London Macmillan 1986

de Man P ldquoLiterary History and LiteraryModernityrdquo Blindness and Insight LondonRoutledge 1989

Derrida J The Truth in Painting Trans GeoffBennington and Ian McCleod Chicago U ofChicago P 1987

Deleuze G Bergsonism Trans Hugh Tomlinsonand Barbara Habberjam New York Zone 1991

Deleuze G Negotiations 1972ndash90 Trans MartinJoughin New York Columbia UP 1992

Deleuze G Difference and Repetition Trans PaulPatton London Athlone 1994

Deleuze G ldquoSpinoza and the Three Ethicsrdquo EssaysCritical and Clinical Trans Daniel W Smith andMichael Greco London Verso 1998

Deleuze G and F Guattari A Thousand PlateausTrans Brian Massumi London Athlone 1988

Deleuze G and F Guattari What is PhilosophyTrans Graham Burchell and Hugh TomlinsonLondon Verso 1994

Foster K ldquoCritical History of Art or aTransfiguration of Valuesrdquo New Literary History(spring 1972) 459ndash70

Guattari F ldquoPragmaticMachinerdquo Interview withCharles J Stivale lthttpwwwdcpeacnetedu~mnuesguattarihtmgt (1985)

Guattari F ldquoOn Machinesrdquo ComplexityArchitectureArtPhilosophy Trans VivianConstantinopoulos Ed Andrew BenjaminLondon Academy 1989

Guattari F Chaosmosis An Ethico-AestheticParadigm Trans Julian Pefanis and Paul BainsSydney Power Institute 1995

Lyotard J-F The Postmodern Condition A Report onKnowledge Trans Geoff Bennington and BrianMassumi Manchester Manchester UP 1984

Lyotard J-F Peregrinations Law Form Event NewYork Columbia UP 1988

1 3 4

orsquosullivan

Lyotard J-F ldquoThe Tensorrdquo Trans Sean Hand TheLyotard Reader Ed Andrew Benjamin OxfordBlackwell 1989

Lyotard J-F ldquoPhilosophy and Painting in the Ageof Their Experimentation Contribution to an Ideaof Postmodernityrdquo Trans Maria Minich Brewerand Daniel Brewer The Lyotard Reader EdAndrew Benjamin Oxford Blackwell 1989

Lyotard J-F ldquoCritical Reflectionsrdquo Trans WGJNiesluchawski Artforum 248 (1991) 92ndash93

Massumi B ldquoThe Autonomy of Affectrdquo Deleuze ACritical Reader Ed P Patton Oxford Blackwell1996

Melville S ldquoNotes on the Reemergence ofAllegory the Forgetting of Modernism theNecessity of Rhetoric and the Conditions ofPublicity in Art and Art Criticismrdquo October 19(1981) 55ndash92

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoIn Violence Three Case StudiesAgainst the Stratumrdquo Parallax 15 (summer 2000)104ndash09

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoWriting on Art (Case Study TheBuddhist Puja)rdquo Parallax 21 (forthcoming)

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoArt as Text RethinkingRepresentationrdquo Art History (forthcoming)

Owens C ldquoThe Allegorical Impulse Towards aTheory of Postmodernismrdquo October 12 (1980)67ndash86

Rajchman J ldquoAbstractionrdquo ConstructionsCambridge MA MIT P 1988

Simon OOtildeSullivanDepartment of Historical and Critical StudiesGoldsmiths CollegeNew CrossLondonSE14 6NWUKE-mail soOtildesullivangoldacuk

Page 10: THE AESTHETICS OF AFFECT: thinking art beyond …simonosullivan.net/articles/aesthetics-of-affect.pdfaesthetics of affect origin under erasure. First aesthetics fell foul of Marxism

aesthetics of affect

arts where at stake is less a definition of art or anydemarcation between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic but rather a general function of art aswhat ldquoharnesses forcesrdquo (ibid 268) This is partic-ularly the case with painting and of courseDeleuze outlines this theory in relation to thepaintings of Francis Bacon However the functionof music is also involved in forces As Bogueremarks ldquoThe basic function of the refrain is toterritorialise forces to regularise control andencode the unpredictable world in regularpatterns But the refrain never remains purelyclosed and stable Its emergence from the chaoticflux is only provisional and its rhythms always issueforth to the cosmos at largerdquo (ibid 265)

This larger function of deterritorialisation isprecisely a ldquoline of flightrdquo into the molecular It isthis ndash an affective line (and I would argue anaesthetic one) ndash that defines art

25 This is precisely Lyotardrsquos point in ldquoPhilosophyand Painting in the Age of Their ExperimentationContribution to an Idea of PostmodernityrdquoldquoTodayrsquos art consists in exploring things unsayableand things invisible Strange machines are assem-bled where what we didnrsquot have the idea of sayingor the matter to feel can make itself heard andexperiencedrdquo (190)

26 I attempt such a project albeit briefly in thispaperrsquos companion piece ldquoWriting on Art (CaseStudy The Buddhist Puja)rdquo

bibliography

Adorno A Minima Moralia Trans EFN JephcottLondon Verso 1978

Adorno A Aesthetic Theory Trans C LenhardtLondon Routledge 1984

Badiou A Deleuze The Clamor of Being TransLouise Burchill Minneapolis U of Minnesota P1999

Bann S ldquoThree Images for Kristeva From Bellinito Proustrdquo Parallax 8 (autumn 1998) 65ndash79

Bataille G Prehistoric Painting Lascaux or the Birth ofArt Trans Austryn Wainhouse LondonMacmillan 1980

Benjamin A The Plural Event London Routledge1993

Bergson H Matter and Memory Trans NM Pauland WS Palmer New York Zone 1991

Bogue R ldquoGilles Deleuze The Aesthetics ofForcerdquo Deleuze A Critical Reader Ed Paul PattonOxford Blackwell 1996

Bogue R ldquoArt and Territoryrdquo A Deleuzian CenturyEd Ian Buchanan Durham Duke UP 1999

Burgin V ldquoThe End of Art Theoryrdquo The End of ArtTheory London Macmillan 1986

de Man P ldquoLiterary History and LiteraryModernityrdquo Blindness and Insight LondonRoutledge 1989

Derrida J The Truth in Painting Trans GeoffBennington and Ian McCleod Chicago U ofChicago P 1987

Deleuze G Bergsonism Trans Hugh Tomlinsonand Barbara Habberjam New York Zone 1991

Deleuze G Negotiations 1972ndash90 Trans MartinJoughin New York Columbia UP 1992

Deleuze G Difference and Repetition Trans PaulPatton London Athlone 1994

Deleuze G ldquoSpinoza and the Three Ethicsrdquo EssaysCritical and Clinical Trans Daniel W Smith andMichael Greco London Verso 1998

Deleuze G and F Guattari A Thousand PlateausTrans Brian Massumi London Athlone 1988

Deleuze G and F Guattari What is PhilosophyTrans Graham Burchell and Hugh TomlinsonLondon Verso 1994

Foster K ldquoCritical History of Art or aTransfiguration of Valuesrdquo New Literary History(spring 1972) 459ndash70

Guattari F ldquoPragmaticMachinerdquo Interview withCharles J Stivale lthttpwwwdcpeacnetedu~mnuesguattarihtmgt (1985)

Guattari F ldquoOn Machinesrdquo ComplexityArchitectureArtPhilosophy Trans VivianConstantinopoulos Ed Andrew BenjaminLondon Academy 1989

Guattari F Chaosmosis An Ethico-AestheticParadigm Trans Julian Pefanis and Paul BainsSydney Power Institute 1995

Lyotard J-F The Postmodern Condition A Report onKnowledge Trans Geoff Bennington and BrianMassumi Manchester Manchester UP 1984

Lyotard J-F Peregrinations Law Form Event NewYork Columbia UP 1988

1 3 4

orsquosullivan

Lyotard J-F ldquoThe Tensorrdquo Trans Sean Hand TheLyotard Reader Ed Andrew Benjamin OxfordBlackwell 1989

Lyotard J-F ldquoPhilosophy and Painting in the Ageof Their Experimentation Contribution to an Ideaof Postmodernityrdquo Trans Maria Minich Brewerand Daniel Brewer The Lyotard Reader EdAndrew Benjamin Oxford Blackwell 1989

Lyotard J-F ldquoCritical Reflectionsrdquo Trans WGJNiesluchawski Artforum 248 (1991) 92ndash93

Massumi B ldquoThe Autonomy of Affectrdquo Deleuze ACritical Reader Ed P Patton Oxford Blackwell1996

Melville S ldquoNotes on the Reemergence ofAllegory the Forgetting of Modernism theNecessity of Rhetoric and the Conditions ofPublicity in Art and Art Criticismrdquo October 19(1981) 55ndash92

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoIn Violence Three Case StudiesAgainst the Stratumrdquo Parallax 15 (summer 2000)104ndash09

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoWriting on Art (Case Study TheBuddhist Puja)rdquo Parallax 21 (forthcoming)

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoArt as Text RethinkingRepresentationrdquo Art History (forthcoming)

Owens C ldquoThe Allegorical Impulse Towards aTheory of Postmodernismrdquo October 12 (1980)67ndash86

Rajchman J ldquoAbstractionrdquo ConstructionsCambridge MA MIT P 1988

Simon OOtildeSullivanDepartment of Historical and Critical StudiesGoldsmiths CollegeNew CrossLondonSE14 6NWUKE-mail soOtildesullivangoldacuk

Page 11: THE AESTHETICS OF AFFECT: thinking art beyond …simonosullivan.net/articles/aesthetics-of-affect.pdfaesthetics of affect origin under erasure. First aesthetics fell foul of Marxism

orsquosullivan

Lyotard J-F ldquoThe Tensorrdquo Trans Sean Hand TheLyotard Reader Ed Andrew Benjamin OxfordBlackwell 1989

Lyotard J-F ldquoPhilosophy and Painting in the Ageof Their Experimentation Contribution to an Ideaof Postmodernityrdquo Trans Maria Minich Brewerand Daniel Brewer The Lyotard Reader EdAndrew Benjamin Oxford Blackwell 1989

Lyotard J-F ldquoCritical Reflectionsrdquo Trans WGJNiesluchawski Artforum 248 (1991) 92ndash93

Massumi B ldquoThe Autonomy of Affectrdquo Deleuze ACritical Reader Ed P Patton Oxford Blackwell1996

Melville S ldquoNotes on the Reemergence ofAllegory the Forgetting of Modernism theNecessity of Rhetoric and the Conditions ofPublicity in Art and Art Criticismrdquo October 19(1981) 55ndash92

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoIn Violence Three Case StudiesAgainst the Stratumrdquo Parallax 15 (summer 2000)104ndash09

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoWriting on Art (Case Study TheBuddhist Puja)rdquo Parallax 21 (forthcoming)

OrsquoSullivan S ldquoArt as Text RethinkingRepresentationrdquo Art History (forthcoming)

Owens C ldquoThe Allegorical Impulse Towards aTheory of Postmodernismrdquo October 12 (1980)67ndash86

Rajchman J ldquoAbstractionrdquo ConstructionsCambridge MA MIT P 1988

Simon OOtildeSullivanDepartment of Historical and Critical StudiesGoldsmiths CollegeNew CrossLondonSE14 6NWUKE-mail soOtildesullivangoldacuk