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THE AESTHETICS OF AFFECT:Thinking art beyondrepresentationSimon O'SullivanPublished online: 09 Jun 2010.

To cite this article: Simon O'Sullivan (2001) THE AESTHETICS OF AFFECT: Thinking artbeyond representation, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 6:3, 125-135

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09697250120087987

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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 destination,anthropologically speaking, undergoes consid-erable modification depending on whether theartwork 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 thecontemporary work that it is obviouslydestined for the museum (collection, conserva-tion, exhibition) and for the museum audience.This approach is implied in any ÒtheoryÓ 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 too.It harbours within it an excess, a rapture, apotential of associations that overflows all thedeterminations of its ÒreceptionÓ and Òproduc-tion.Ó

Jean-Fran�ois Lyotard,ÒCritical ReflectionsÓ 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 Ð 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 Òfantasies ofrealismÓ (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 apartness,however it is theorised, is what constitutes artÕsimportance.

In this paper I want to think a little about thisapartness; this ÒexcessÓ or ÒraptureÓ which, asLyotard remarks above, constitutes artÕs 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 Ðthrough 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 ÒThe Social History ofArtÓ) and the propensity to explain art histori-cally, through recourse to its moment of produc-tion. Second, deconstruction (or ÒThe New ArtHistoryÓ) 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

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simon o’sullivan

THE AESTHETICS OFAFFECTthinking art beyond representation

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

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/01/030125-11 © 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of AngelakiDOI: 10.1080/09697250120087987

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origin under erasure. First aesthetics fell foul ofMarxism. A disinterested beauty? A transcendentaesthetic? Ideological!1 Then it fell foul of decon-struction. The apparatus of capture that is decon-struction: Derrida neatly reconfiguring thediscourse of aesthetics as a discourse of/on repre-sentation. Aesthetics is deconstructed, and artbecomes a broken promise.2 Both Marxism anddeconstruction were, still are, powerful critiques.However, 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 theÒnatureÓ of affects, and can they be decon-structed? Affects can be described as extra-discursive and extra-textual.4 Affects aremoments of intensity, a reaction in/on the bodyat the level of matter.5 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 bodyÕs duration.6) Assuch, affects are not to do with knowledge ormeaning; indeed, they occur on a different, asig-nifying register.7 In fact this is what differenti-ates art from language Ð although language, too,can and does have an affective register; indeed,signification 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 Òunderstood,Ó can be figured, asalways already a representation of what we mightcall the Ur or originary affect Ð the latter posi-tioned as an unreachable (and unsayable) origin;again, so much for deconstruction. And yetaffects are also, and primarily, affective. There is

no denying, or deferring, affects. They are whatmake up life, and art.8 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 Ð and to move theregister away from deconstruction and away fromrepresentation Ð the molecular ÒbeneathÓ themolar. The molecular understood here as lifeÕs,and artÕs, intensive quality, as the stuff that goeson beneath, beyond, even parallel to significa-tion.9

But what can one say about affects? Indeed,what needs to be said about them? Certainly,in a space such as art history where deconstruc-tive Ð let alone semiotic Ð approaches to art arebecoming, indeed have become, hegemonic, theexistence of affects, and their central role in art,needs asserting. For this is what art is: a bundleof affects or, as Deleuze and Guattari would say,a bloc of sensations, waiting to be reactivated bya spectator or participant.10 Indeed, you cannotread affects, you can only experience them.Which 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: ÒIt 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 futureÓ (148Ð49).

As with Derrida, so with de Man: present expe-rience Ð the moment, the event Ð is inaccessibleto consciousness. All we ever have is its trace (weexperience ÒpassingÓ moments). If the affect ÒisÓprecisely present experience, it could be said,following 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)? Or,rather, 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

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Òwhat is an affect?Ó 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. Indeed,this 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 ManÕs temporal predicament(a name for which is representation). This hasoften been the way in the West Ð in modernismand in postmodernism. Indeed, we might say,following Michael Fried and his detractors, thatthis oscillation between aesthetics and its decon-struction has animated the discourse of arthistory up to today.12 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 Ð 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, transcendent,aesthetic? Indeed, how might we think art asevent? This is a slippery area Ð and much recentphilosophy has been written on how to think theevent.13 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 unexpected.Importantly, 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 Ð art work Ð is no longer

an object as such, or not only an object, butrather a space, a zone14 or what Alain Badioumight call an Òevent siteÓ: Òa point of exile whereit is possible that something, finally, mighthappenÓ (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 ÒplanesÓ of reality to be perceivable (anopening up to the world beyond utilitarian inter-ests) (101Ð02). 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 traffic;slow-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 art:indeed, 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 ÒoutsideÓyourself; your Òexperimental milieuÓ whicheverywhere accompanies your sense of self (AThousand Plateaus 149Ð66). For Deleuze andGuattari this is a pragmatic project: you do notjust read about the body without organs Ð 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 BatailleÕs under-

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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 paintingsÕ 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 art.Lyotard calls for a practice of patience, of listen-ing Ð a kind of meditative state that allows for,produces an opening for, an experience of theevent, precisely, as the affect. In PeregrinationsLyotard writes:

[One must] become open to the ÒIt happensthatÓ rather than the ÒWhat happensÓ É [andthis] requires at the very least a high degree ofrefinement in the perception of small differ-ences É 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 ÒWhatÓof the ÒIt happensÉÓ The secret of such asce-sis lies in the power to be able to endure occur-rences as ÒdirectlyÓ as possible without themediation of a Òpre-text.Ó 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 Ð the representation of experience tooneself; the self as constituted through represen-tation Ð 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 then,of course, demonstrate that the shield is alwaysalready broken). But in fact art is somethingmuch more dangerous: a portal, an access point,to another world (our world experienced differ-ently), a world of impermanence and interpene-tration, a molecular world of becoming.According to Deleuze and Guattari, this, ulti-mately, is what makes painting abstract: the

ÒsummoningÓ and making visible of forces(What is Philosophy? 181Ð82).16

This world of affects, this universe of forces, isour own world seen without the spectacles ofsubjectivity. But how to remove these spectacles,which are not really spectacles at all but the verycondition of our subjectivity? How, indeed, tosidestep our selves? In fact we do it all thetime Ð we are involved in molecular processesthat go on ÒbeyondÓ our subjectivity. Indeed weÒareÓ these processes.17 We ÒareÓ Ð as well assubjects (bound by strata) Ð bundles of events,bundles of affects (in a constant process ofdestratification).18 At stake here, then, are prac-tices and strategies which reveal this Òother sideÓto ourselves; practices which imaginatively andpragmatically switch the register. After all, whynot try something new? As Deleuze remarks in aninterview: ÒWhat weÕre interested in, you see, aremodes of individuation beyond those of things,persons or subjects: the individuation, say, of atime of day, of a region, a climate, a river or awind, of an event. And maybe itÕs a mistake tobelieve in the existence of things, persons, orsubjectsÓ (Negotiations 26).

This is artÕs 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 Ð through care-ful manoeuvres Ð 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 ÒselvesÓ 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 Òbroaderpicture of representational practices in contem-porary societyÓ (Burgin 147). Indeed, it is toclaim a kind of autonomy for art. But this auton-omy is not the same as, for example, AdornoÕs,although it might appear similar. It is in fact areconfiguration of aesthetics away from Adorno

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and the whole Kantian heritage. In AestheticTheory Adorno writes: ÒArtÕs utopia, thecounter-factual yet-to-come is draped in Black, itgoes on being a recollection of the possible witha critical edge against the real É It is the possi-ble, as promised by its impossibility. Art is thepromise of happiness, a promise that isconstantly being brokenÓ (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 Ð it prefigures and promises aworld yet-to-come. Art, if you like, operateswithin Walter BenjaminÕs 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 philosophy,for Adorno, operates on the same register: ÒTheonly 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 redemptionÓ(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 utiliseDeleuzeÕs 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 aÒrealisation.Ó 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 Ð 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 universes;20 orat least it opens up a portal onto these other,virtual worlds (we might say that art is situatedon the borderline between the actual and thevirtual).21 This gives art an ethical imperative,because 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 Ònew materials ofexpression,Ó Ònew complexes of subjectivationÓbecome possible; new Òincorporeal universes ofreferenceÓ are opened up which allow for whatGuattari calls a process of resingularisation Ð aprocess of reordering our selves and our relationto the world (Chaosmosis 7). In such a prag-matic, and aesthetic, reconfiguration Òone createsnew modalities of subjectivity in the same way anartist creates new forms from a paletteÓ (ibid.).(For Guattari the La Borde clinic where heworked, understood as a machinic assemblage,was precisely a site of resingularisation. But infact people resingularise themselves every day:academics plant allotments, manual labourersvisit the theatre. Different activities take onaesthetic, deterritorialising, functions.)

This is to take art away from the Frankfurtschool register. For Adorno, artÕs importance lay,at least in one sense, in its uselessness, its irre-ducibility to conceptual thought. Art did notpartake in, and thus provided a critique of,instrumental reason and its accompaniment, theworld commodity system. With Deleuze andGuattari and their allies we have a differentmapping of the world, and of philosophyÕs andartÕs role within it. Philosophy is no longer to beunderstood as a utopian pursuit,22 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 roles.23 These roles or functionsdiffer, depending on the kind of art and the

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milieu in which a work of art exists. Indeed,conceptual art might have more in common withwhat Deleuze and Guattari call philosophy (prob-lem solving). Installation art, on the other hand,might 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 ÒobjectÓ sought toplace us in a space at the limits of the sacred,and asked us not to contemplate images but tocommunicate with beings. I had the impres-sion that [the artists] were communicating this:that 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 abstractions,forms, 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 Òultimate aim of art.ÓThis 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 askingÒwhat is art?,Ó Òwhat is painting?Ó and, thus, nomore deconstructions); rather, what becomesimportant is what a particular art object can do.In 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 forces.24 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 experienced.25 Finally,less involved in shielding us from death, butindeed precisely involved in actualising the possi-bilities of life. Paradoxically the notion of anÒaesthetic functionÓ might well return us to aproductive utilisation of the term Òvisualculture.Ó But this will be a return marked by itspassage through aesthetics, through Adorno andDeleuze especially. In a sense this passage Ð thischampioning of art as an autonomous, aestheticpractice Ð 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 aesthetic,as 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 all,not 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 artÕs signi-fying character, that which understands art, posi-tions art work, as representation. Indeed, theselatter functions might be placed alongside artÕsother asignifying functions Ð artÕs affective andintensive qualities (the molecular beneath,within, the molar). In this place art becomes amore complex, and a more interesting, object.And 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 works,the writing on specific art works, as explorationof artÕs creative, aesthetic and ethical function.26

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-

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

notes

My thanks to Angelaki’s reviewers.

1 Indeed, there is a “tradition” of positioning crit-ical art history as a form of ideological critique,and specifically as a critique of aesthetics. See, forexample, Kurt Foster’s polemical essay, “CriticalHistory of Art or a Transfiguration of Values.”

2 Jacques Derrida performs precisely this decon-struction of aesthetics in “The Parergon,” in hisThe Truth in Painting 37–82.

3 For a more affirmative mapping of Derrida’scontribution towards thinking the art object, seemy “Art as Text: Rethinking Representation.”

4 They can be described as extra-discursive in thesense that they are “outside” 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 – or do not only produce – knowledge.Affects might, however, be understood as textualin that they are felt as differences in intensity.

5 For Brian Massumi, in “The Autonomy ofAffect,” affects are likewise understood asmoments of intensity – which might resonate withlinguistic expression but which, strictly speaking,are of a different and prior order. For Massumi, asfor myself: “approaches to the image in its relationto language are incomplete if they operate only onthe semantic or semiotic level, however that levelis defined (linguistically, logically, narratologically,ideologically, or all of these combinations, as aSymbolic). What they lose, precisely, is the event –in favour of structure” (ibid. 220).

Massumi identifies the realm of affect as one ofincreasing importance within “media, literary andart theory” but points out the problem that thereis “no cultural–theoretical vocabulary specific toaffect,” indeed, our “entire vocabulary has derivedfrom theories of signification that are still weddedto structure” (ibid. 221). From one perspective

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

6 See Deleuze’s “Spinoza and the Three Ethics,”where “affect” is defined as the effect affectionshave on the body’s duration, the “passages,becomings, 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 joy–sadness type) and no longer scalar like theaffections, sensations or perceptions” (139).

7 As Félix 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 … but at the sametime can function in an a-signifying register.So what determines the difference? In onecase, a signifier functions in what one mightcall a logic of discursive aggregates, i.e. a logicof representation. In the other case, it func-tions in something that isn’t entirely a logic,what I’ve called an existential machinic, a logicof bodies without organs, a machinic ofbodies without organs. (“Pragmatic/Machine”15)

8 For Guattari, affects can be understood preciselyas what makes up life. They establish a kind ofcentre or “self-affirmation” that occurs parallel tothe discursive (what Guattari terms “linear”)elements of subjectivity. For Guattari, this affec-tive element is present in Freud’s theory of thedrives, but has been overlooked by “the struc-turalists” (Guattari has Lacan in mind) (“OnMachines” 10). Guattari writes:

I consider that limiting ourselves to this coor-dinate [i.e., 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 affect.What is it, then, that makes us state phenom-

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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 – i.e., it is a living being, thereforeit is a machine; rather an immediate, pathicand non-discursive apprehension occurs ofthe machine’s ontological autocompositionrelationship. (Ibid.)

Interestingly, in “On Machines” Guattari developsthe notion of a non-discursive, affective, foyer,which has much in common with Bergson’s notionof living beings as affective “centres of indetermi-nation” (28–34).

9 Lyotard addresses this double functioning of thesign in “The Tensor.” Like Guattari (see noteabove), Lyotard’s point of departure is Freud’stheory 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: “It isat once a sign that creates meaning through diver-gence and opposition, and a sign that createsintensity through strength and singularity” (11).

10[T]he work of art is … a bloc of sensations,that is to say, a compound of percepts andaffects. Percepts are no longer perceptions;they 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 them.Sensations, percepts, and affects are beingswhose validity lies in themselves and exceedsany lived. (What is Philosophy? 164)

In their chapter on art in What is Philosophy?Deleuze 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 “The Social History ofArt,” and in particular T.J. Clark, finds itself/himselfin. Suffice to say that Deleuze and Guattari’slanguage – of movement, materials, and matter – isprecisely the object of art history’s secret desireand fear; a language of art which is no longer to dowith signifiers and signifieds (poached, as Clarkhimself remarks, from film theory). Unfortunately,all materialist art historians (“The Social History ofArt”) eventually, and inevitably, hit an aporiawhich, very briefly, goes like this: how to attend tothe material object behind the ideological veils(the cultural readings/meanings), whilst still attend-

ing to the object’s history. The problem arisesbecause ideology and history are here synony-mous. In a sense “The Social History of Art” 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 – 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 thatDeleuze’s 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 – 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 coin.Intensity 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 “in the proliferations of levels of organisa-tion it ceaselessly gives rise to, generates andregenerates, at every suspended moment” (226).

12 For a tracking through of this oscillation, seethe debates around allegory in the visual artscarried out in October, in particular Craig Owens’“The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory ofPostmodernism” and, most impressive, StephenMelville’s “Notes on the Reemergence ofAllegory, the Forgetting of Modernism, theNecessity of Rhetoric, and the Conditions ofPublicity in Art and Art Criticism.”

13 See, for example, Andrew Benjamin’s The PluralEvent. For another interesting take on this prob-lematic, especially in relation to Deleuze’s projectof thinking multiplicity, see Alain Badiou’s Deleuze:The Clamor of Being.

14 For Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy?,art is a zone: “a zone of indetermination, of indis-cernibility, as if things, beasts, and persons …endlessly reach that point that immediatelyprecedes their natural differentiation. This is what

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is called an affect … Life alone creates such zoneswhere living beings whirl around, and only art canreach and penetrate them in its enterprise of co-creation” (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 “one must come to see the surfacenot so much as empty or blank but rather asintense, where ‘intensity’ means filled with theunseen virtuality of other strange possibilities”(Rajchman 61). The question of how to “paintoutside force” is, according to Rajchman’s readingof Deleuze, “the basic question of modernity” (60).

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

18 As Deleuze and Guattari remark in “587B.C.–A.D. 70: On Several Regimes of Signs,” the“principal strata binding human beings are theorganism, signifiance and interpretation, andsubjectification and subjection” (A ThousandPlateaus 134). It is the function of the next chapter,“How to Make Yourself a Body without Organs,”to 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 andGuattari’s warning here, against “wildly destratify-ing” (A Thousand Plateaus 160) – this can endmerely in empty, botched bodies without organs(or worse). In fact, “you 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 …and you have to keep small rations of subjectivityin sufficient quantity to enable you to respond tothe dominant reality” (ibid.). See also my “InViolence: Three Case Studies Against theStratum.”

19 For a thorough working through of this logic ofthe real and the possible, the virtual and the actual,see Deleuze’s Bergsonism 96–98.

20 As do philosophy, science and, as we have seen,prosthetic 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: “It is the edge of thevirtual, where it leaks into the actual, that counts.For that seeping edge is where potential, actually,is found” (236).

22 For Deleuze and Guattari philosophy is not autopian pursuit in the sense of positing transcen-dent (and thus authoritarian) utopias. However,philosophy 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 “resistance to the present,” and acreation of concepts which in itself “calls for afuture form, for a new people that do not yetexist” (What is Philosophy? 108). Although notwithin the scope of this paper, a reading ofFrankfurt school utopias via Deleuze andGuattari’s 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 thelatter’s critique) is Ronald Bogue’s “Art andTerritory.” Bogue, taking his lead from Deleuze’snotion of the refrain, argues that bird song, as akind of art practice, involves processes and move-ments of territorialisation, deterritorialisation,and 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 “aesthetics offorce,” as he calls it, in relation to painting and,more interestingly, in relation to music (see“Gilles Deleuze: The Aesthetics of Force”). Boguereads Deleuze as offering an “open system” of the

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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 “harnesses forces” (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: “The 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 large” (ibid. 265).

This larger function of deterritorialisation isprecisely a “line of flight” into the molecular. It isthis – an affective line (and, I would argue, anaesthetic one) – that defines art.

25 This is precisely Lyotard’s point in “Philosophyand Painting in the Age of Their Experimentation:Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity”:“Today’s art consists in exploring things unsayableand things invisible. Strange machines are assem-bled, where what we didn’t have the idea of sayingor the matter to feel can make itself heard andexperienced” (190).

26 I attempt such a project, albeit briefly, in thispaper’s companion piece, “Writing on Art (CaseStudy: The Buddhist Puja).”

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Simon OÕSullivanDepartment of Historical and Critical StudiesGoldsmiths CollegeNew CrossLondonSE14 6NWUKE-mail: s.oÕsullivan@gold.ac.uk

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