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Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon the Logic of Sensation (pt 3)
Project: The Total Library
Project: The Total Library
The Elements and Movements in Bacon's Paintings
"There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportions" (Sir Francis Bacon)
Deleuze distinguishes 3 pictorial elements in Bacon's paintings, which together constitute a highly precise system - the field that is the spatializing material structure, the positioned Figure/Figures and their "fact" (In Bacon’s paintings, it is the human body that plays this role of the Figure; it functions as the material support or framework that sustains a precise sensation - Smith), and the "place", the contour (usually a round area) as the limits of the two (but which is also an autonomous element, being as much a surface as it is a line).
Bacon, in order to achieve the break with figuration, rather than escaping to abstraction, isolates the Figure, within the painting (in itself an isolated reality) in the "place" . The rest of the canvas is not a background to the Figure - it is a field of uniform, motionless color, having a structuring and spatializing function. The body of the Figure is produced through a flow of broken tones of color, that creates a sense of time that passes (body as the content of time). And the pure tones, the shores, of the large fields create the sense of time as the eternity of the passage in itself. The Figure and the field are correlated as 2 adjacent sectors on a single plane, equally closeAs in Egyptian art, the model of haptic, where form and ground seem to hover on the same plane, requiring close vision. and in absolute proximity, their coexistence modulated by color. They share limits and contour (provided by the "place"), together constituting an enclosed space. These 3 elements find their effective convergence and communication in color, and the modulation of color creates the relations which are the unity of the whole. We can find here an echo to Riegl's definitions of the Egyptian bas-reliefs, "what separates and unites both the form and the ground is the contour as their common limit."Riegl quoted on p. 85.
The functioning of the painting is defined by a happening which is neither a narrative nor a story - it is a double exchange that happens in the "place", through the contour of the round area. A necessary relationship manifested in a double movement. The 1st movement (or "tension") is that of the spatializing structure/the field toward the Figure, it curls around the "place", moving to envelop, to further imprison and isolate the Figure; the 2nd - a movement of the Figure towards the field. This dynamic echoes the idea of philosophical complementary terms constantly infiltrated by the terms they are trying to exclude, the borders of meaning becoming hazy and thus preventing the creation of philosophical foundationalism (May, 2).
There are three types or levels of movement of the Figure. Though movement in Bacon's paintings is intense and violent, this movement, which is a spasm, is, says Deleuze, the expression of a deeper problem that Bacon deals with, that of the action of invisible forces on the body.
In the simple paintings, those in which we find one figure only, the Figure is waiting for something from the field and for something from itself. Yet, this happening is not to be a "spectacle" thus we find in Bacon's paintings, through the years, a process of elimination of the spectacle and with it the spectators (the Figure is never suchSometimes there are "attendants", but only "as a constant or point of reference in relation to which a variation is assessed" (10), , and the extreme isolation of the Figure in itself excludes spectators). What the Figure awaits from itself is something inside itself, a movement the source of which is the body; for the body to escape itself by means of a spasm. Interestingly, this maybe connected to Deleuze taking the position that body, like mind, is a philosophical problem; it is not "the vehicle of the mind". Deleuze (and Guattari) reconfigure the body as the sum of its capacities, rather than reducing it to its functions (Buchanan, 74-5). Deleuze thus replaces the traditional question of "what is a body?" with the Spinozic one "what can a body do?" Thus we could say that a body can escape itself. To escape so as to rejoin, or dissipate into, the field, "into the wall of the closed (but unlimited) cosmos, to melt into a molecular texture" (20), through a vanishing point in the contour. It escapes by an intense motionless effort, passing either by contracting through a hole (the drain, one of its own organs, or even a scream), or by stretching (through a mirror). These passages are "real, physical, and effective [...] sensations and not imaginings" (13). Could this be compared to the Wolfman mentioned in "A thousand Plateaus" for whom, say Deleuze and Guattari, the wolf is not a metaphor, an analogy or a simile, but designates a threshold of intensity on the Wolfman's body without organs? (Deleuze and Guattari, "A Thousand Plateaus", 239; in Buchanan, 86). The Figure, thus, is not only isolated but is the deformed body that escaped from itself - either contracted or stretched/dilated.Even when the contour in the painting is displaced, the Figure is engaged in exploration/motion inside it (29). This raises the association to that for Deleuze art involves a "moving beyond" the already familiar (our "actual" selves), precisely a kind of "self-overcoming" (O'Sullivan, 51). And in escaping "the body discovers the materiality of which it is composed, the pure presence of which it is made, and which it would not discover otherwise" (39).
It should be noted that Bacon's figures are not tortured (Bacon does not paint the horror), but are ordinary bodies in ordinary situations of discomfort, just as a person forced to sit for hours would inevitably assume contorted postures (Smith in Patton, 43).
In the paintings of couples there is a movement between the Figures themselves, forces of coupling that incorporate the phenomena of isolation, deformation, and dissipation in their own levels. And in paintings with multiple, non-coupled Figures (mostly seen in the triptychs), there is a different kind of movement - it is not the Figure that returns to the field, but the relations between the Figures that are violently projected unto it, to be governed by its uniform color. This unity of color incorporates the relationships between the Figures and the field, creating a force of separation/division very different from the force of isolation previously punctuated. This seems to echo that the one expresses itself in the many, but does not become lost or dispersed in the many. It is within them; they are within it (May, 39). It is a multiplicity that is the affirmation of unity (May, 61).
Could these processes of the Figure/Figures be related to Deleuze's concepet of becoming? The "passage" of the Figure through the hole, the dissipation into the field, these unforseen and non-preexistent motions?
The Figure has a head, which is an integral part of the body, dependent upon the body. It is corporeal. It is "the animal spirit of man" (15). Thus Bacon paints heads, not faces; he dismantles the face (by scrubbing and brushing) and makes the head emerge from beneath it. Deleuze says elsewhere that if human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations, to become imperceptible (Deleuze and Guattari, "A Thousand Plateaus", 171; in O'Sullivan, 60). And that Beyond the face lies an altogether different inhumanity; no longer that of the primitive head, but of “probe-heads”. Here, cutting edges of deterritorialization become operative, forming strange new becomings (Deleuze and Guattari, "A Thousand Plateaus", 190–1; in O'Sullivan, 61). So we can see that Bacon's dismantling of faces echoes Deleuze's concept of escaping facialization, allowing new becomings, which, as said earlier can maybe also be seen in the body escaping itself to allow that becoming. And we see yet another plateau of deterritorialization - the contour, the Figure as a deterritorialization of the figurative, the dismantling of face.
Bacon's paintings are "a zone of indiscernibility or undecidability between man and animal" (16); the two are coupled. This remind of Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of how a concept might be transformed into something else by the manner in which components of a given concept enter into zones of indiscernibility with other concepts (Patton, 4-5). It is the animal as a trait (sometimes depicted outside the body, as shadow or as a "real" animal in the painting). This zone of indiscernibility is the body, the flesh or meat.The Figure is painted in broken tones to create this affinity of body/flesh with meat. Bacon takes the "logic of sensation" from the quasi-spiritual world of "the flesh" to the violence of "the meat" (Rajchman, 131). "Meat" is what achieves the tension between bone and flesh, bone being the apparatus upon which the flesh is the acrobat, but also from which the flesh descends. "Meat" is the zone of indiscernibility of man and animal, a "fact". Meat is that which suffers (is crucified, is the victim) and that which is pitied by Bacon.Rajchman says that Bacon's Catholicism may be read in terms of his world of "meat-sensation" (rather than the other way around) (p. 138) "The head-meat is the becoming-animal of man" (20), and the scream is the immense pity that the meat evokes, coming from the mouth that "acquires this power of non-localization that turns all meat into a head without a face" (19), and is the hole through which the body escapes.
But becoming-animal is but a stage in the becoming-imperceptible, in the process in which the Figure will succeed in its endeavor to truly dissipate into the field, the creation of a space that is a Sahara, where there is nothing but color or light, a vague trace of the figure as a pure force (a tempest, a jet of water). Similarly, the scream is but a stage to the smile that is beyond it. The smile that functions as the final disappearance of the body, the extreme point of cosmic dissipation (like the smile of Lewis Carroll's cat). At this stage the contour, which was the isolator and territory of the Figure, but also the "deterritorializer" (as through it the field curls around the Figure and through it the figure exerts to escape, thus deforming), becomes that where the Figure finally dissolves into the field, shading off into infinity. Thus, this most closed of worlds is also the most unlimited, and the painting IS this coexistence. The coexistence of all these movements in the painting, the contractions and extensions, are, as will be later elaborated - a rhythm.
Sensation
"art is sensation and nothing else" (Deleuze and Guattari,"What is Philosophy?")
As was already briefly mentioned Deleuze points to two optional ways of going beyond, or escaping, the illustrative and figurative - either toward the abstract, which, he says, acts through the intermediary of the brain, closer to bone, or toward the Figure, which is of the flesh, acting directly on the nervous system. Deleuze borrows the name to the way of the Figure from Cezanne - SENSATION.
What, then, is sensation??
Sensation is the opposite of the ready-made, the cliche, but also of the "sensational". Sensations are not to be confused with subjective states or with "sensibilia" or "sensationalism" (Rajchman, 134). It turns simultaneously, indissolubly, both towards the subject (the nervous system) and toward the object (the "fact", the "place", the event). It is a unity of the sensing and the sensed. "[...] at one and the same time I become in the sensation and something happens through the sensation [...] it is the same body which, being both subject and object, gives and receives the sensation" (25). It is through this simultaneous turning of sensation toward subject and object that Deleuze's reference to hysteria can be understood. Deleuze describes painting as hysteria, or as converting hysteria, by making presence immediately visible. Subjectively - the eye (of the observer) is liberated from its fixed character as organ to see "pure presence", and objectively - we are shown a body freed from organic representation (the concepts of organic and organ are further elaborated below). Simultaneously "the pure presence of the body becomes visible at the same time that the eye becomes the destined organ of this presence" (37).
Sensation is in the things themselves, not in the observer, and it is in the body (of the thing, which is not necessarily a human), and what is painted is the body experienced as sustaining this sensation. As Smith emphasizes "sensation is not in the 'free' or disincamate play of light and colour; it is in the body, and not in the air" (Smith in Patton, 45). Thus what Bacon does (and Cezanne) is painting the sensation, recording the "fact".
Sensation is transmitted directly, thus avoiding the telling of a story; thus as the Figure is of sensation while the figuration is representation, also the violence of sensation is opposed to the violence of the represented.
Sensation is what passes from one "order"/"level"/"area" to another, (figurative and abstract painting remain at one level thus they do not attain the sensation and do not liberate the body). These "orders" of sensation are not a sequence, or series, of sensations, rather, each sensation exists at diverse levels; there are different orders of the same sensation. Each sensation envelops a plurality of levels/domains; thus it is, in itself, a "coagulated" sensation. Thus "[...] the irreducible synthetic character of sensation [...with a] sensing or sensed unity" (37). This somewhat reminds of Deleuze and Guattari's definition of concepts as so many intensive ordinates arranged in "zones of neighbourhood or indiscernibility that produce passages from one to the other and constitute their inseparability" (Deleuze and Guattari, "What Is Philosophy?", 25; in Patton, 4). This unity is not in the figured thing (as the Figure is opposed to figuration), neither is it an ambivalence of feelings. The "levels" of sensation are not snapshots of motion, composing the movement in its continuity, for beyond movement there is immobility, movement "in-place", the spasm. Movement does not explain sensation but is explained by sensation's elasticity. It is the levels of sensation that explain what remains of movement and not vice-versa. The levels of sensation do not refer to the different sense organs, for there is an independent communication between the levels/domains and each is "[...] in direct contact with a vital power that exceeds every domain and traverses them all". This power is rhythm "[... and thus] what is ultimate is the relation between sensation and rhythm, which places in each sensation the levels and domains through which it passes" (30). This unity of rhythm can be found only on the point of chaos, where the differences of levels are mixed. Sensation is vibration - elsewhere Deleuze says: “What, in fact, is a sensation? It is the operation of contracting trillions of vibrations onto a receptive surface” (Deleuze, "Bergsonism", 74; in May, 51). And it has an intensive reality. It is with the notion of intensity, Deleuze writes, that "sensation ceases to be representative and becomes real "[...] intensity is both the unsensible and that which can only be sensed" ("Difference and Repetition", 230; in Smith in Patton, 37). “Intensity is the form of difference" (Deleuze, "Difference and Repetition", 221; in May, 87).
Sensation is itself constituted by the “vital power” of rhythm, and it is in rhythm that Deleuze locates the “logic of sensation” indicated in his subtitle, a logic that is neither cerebral nor rational (Smith).
The rhythmic unity of the senses demands going beyond the organism (for organism is what imprisons life). An organism is a self-regulating whole. Each of its parts supports others, and the whole is the harmony of those parts. But there is always more to the parts than their balance, a more that can express itself in other directions, with other balances, or with no balance at all. There can be a different balance among the same parts (May, 122). The body is never an organism, it is the "body without organs".Here Deleuze borrows on Artaud's term. Interestingly, and i find relevantly to how this concept is here used, Artaud claimed that only when Man is made a body without organs, will he be delievered from his automatic reactions and restored to his true freedom (Buchanan, 78). It is not that the body without organs lack organs, what it lacks is the organism, the particular organization of organs. This is an intense and intensive body, having levels or thresholds, and a wave flows through this body's levels, a wave with a variable amplitude, tracing zones according to the variation of amplitude. This wave meets external forces acting on the body and thus sensation appears. And depending on the force the wave encounters a temporary and provisional organ will be determined (and change once the force or the level change). The organism is neutralized and the "body without organs" is present under it. This reality of transitory organs, changing at the transfer of levels or the change of force encountered, Deleuze calls "the hysterical reality of the body", proceeding to give an account of the psychiatric phenomena through the description of the body without organs, comparing it to the Figures in Bacon's paintings.
Thus Bacon's Figure is the body, but without the organization we call "organism". Thus we are reminded again of the dismantling of faces, as facialisation can be understood as precisely a, if not the, system of human organisation, and so is representation par excellence (O'Sullivan, 60). Bacon's Figure is flesh and nerves, with levels and zones, the intensive fact of the body.
The Figure escapes from itself, as mentioned earlier, and this escaping is the body's escape from the organism. And the excessive presence in the paintings, that presence which acts directly on the nervous system and makes representation impossible - Deleuze suggests to be hysteric. Deleuze proposed to extract clinical categories such as hysteria from their legal and psychiatric contexts and make them a matter of experimentation in modes of life in art and philosophy (Rajchman, 132). He finds that there is a special relation between painting and hysteria. With painting, he says, hysteria becomes art, as painting converts hysteria in making presence immediately visible (while both figurative and abstract art manage, each in its own way, to avoid this hysteria).
Two sensations, each with its levels/zones, can confront each other and create a communication between these levels. This is no longer a simple vibration, but a resonance. A resonance which indeed already exists by the fact that the variations of each sensation through the levels create vibrations that produce resonance. In Bacon's paintings this can be seen in the fact of two simultaneous Figures, entangled, indiscernible (without merging), having the same "matter of fact" without creating a story/narrative. It is a struggle of sensations, a confrontation that is a resonance. But there is a further development of the complex sensation, the one that can be seen in Bacon's triptychs (but also when there is more than one Figure on the same canvas, but they are not coupled), where a "common fact" must be produced for diverse, non-coupled, separated Figures, their relation being neither narrative nor logical. Could this be related to that our world consists of moments of becoming, the mingling of bodies, the meeting of forces, a constant interpenetration and interconnection of all phenomena? (O'Sullivan, 56).
This is where Deleuze introduces the concept of 3 rhythms, the triptych being their distribution.
As was said, sensation is rhythm. In the simple sensation rhythm is the vibration that flows through the body without organs, being the vector of the sensation, making it pass from one level to another. In the coupling of sensations rhythm is liberated and is now resonance, confronting and uniting the diverse levels of the two sensations. In the state of complex forces (such as the triptych), with multiple, non-coupled sensations, rhythm reaches its autonomy. The limits of sensation are broken, rhythm itself becomes sensation, creating the impression of time. Sensation is no longer dependent upon a Figure per se, but rather the intensive rhythm of force itself becomes the Figure of the triptych (Smith in Patton, 47). Through recomposition and redistribution it creates its own separate directions, the 3 fundamental rhythms, the active (diastolic), the passive (systolic), and the attendant. Through Bacon's triptychs these rhythms, their complexity and the mobility/circulation between them, may be explored. The active and the passive rhythms stand in opposition/tension (descending-rising, contraction-dilation, augmentation-diminution)It should be noted that these diverse oppositions are not equivalent. There is a combinatorial freedom. Everything can coexist and the opposition can vary or be reversed, depending on viewpoint and value. , each the "retrogradation" of the other, while the attendant rhythm (retrogradable in itself) keeps the common and constant value and is the measure of the two.
The active rhythm, asserts Deleuze, is always the fall, as the descent stands for the passage of sensation, as the difference in level contained in it, the difference in intensity. Sensation develops through the fall, in which all tension is experienced, for the sensation's intensive reality is a descent in depth, an inward movement. This fall is a positive and active reality, everything that develops is a fall, "it is what is most alive in the sensation, that through which the sensation is experienced as living" (58).
The sensation produced by the painting is something that can only be felt or sensed (Smith in Patton, 41-42). And its primary element is the encountered sign. As Francis Bacon says, it acts directly on the nervous system, rather than passing through the detour of the brain. Deleuze is pointing, objectively, to a science of the sensible freed from the model of recognition and, subjectively, to a use of the faculties freed from the ideal of common sense (Smith in Patton, 32-3).
(continued in pt 4)
"There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportions" (Sir Francis Bacon)
Deleuze distinguishes 3 pictorial elements in Bacon's paintings, which together constitute a highly precise system - the field that is the spatializing material structure, the positioned Figure/Figures and their "fact" (In Bacon’s paintings, it is the human body that plays this role of the Figure; it functions as the material support or framework that sustains a precise sensation - Smith), and the "place", the contour (usually a round area) as the limits of the two (but which is also an autonomous element, being as much a surface as it is a line).
Bacon, in order to achieve the break with figuration, rather than escaping to abstraction, isolates the Figure, within the painting (in itself an isolated reality) in the "place" . The rest of the canvas is not a background to the Figure - it is a field of uniform, motionless color, having a structuring and spatializing function. The body of the Figure is produced through a flow of broken tones of color, that creates a sense of time that passes (body as the content of time). And the pure tones, the shores, of the large fields create the sense of time as the eternity of the passage in itself. The Figure and the field are correlated as 2 adjacent sectors on a single plane, equally closeAs in Egyptian art, the model of haptic, where form and ground seem to hover on the same plane, requiring close vision. and in absolute proximity, their coexistence modulated by color. They share limits and contour (provided by the "place"), together constituting an enclosed space. These 3 elements find their effective convergence and communication in color, and the modulation of color creates the relations which are the unity of the whole. We can find here an echo to Riegl's definitions of the Egyptian bas-reliefs, "what separates and unites both the form and the ground is the contour as their common limit."Riegl quoted on p. 85.
The functioning of the painting is defined by a happening which is neither a narrative nor a story - it is a double exchange that happens in the "place", through the contour of the round area. A necessary relationship manifested in a double movement. The 1st movement (or "tension") is that of the spatializing structure/the field toward the Figure, it curls around the "place", moving to envelop, to further imprison and isolate the Figure; the 2nd - a movement of the Figure towards the field. This dynamic echoes the idea of philosophical complementary terms constantly infiltrated by the terms they are trying to exclude, the borders of meaning becoming hazy and thus preventing the creation of philosophical foundationalism (May, 2).
There are three types or levels of movement of the Figure. Though movement in Bacon's paintings is intense and violent, this movement, which is a spasm, is, says Deleuze, the expression of a deeper problem that Bacon deals with, that of the action of invisible forces on the body.
In the simple paintings, those in which we find one figure only, the Figure is waiting for something from the field and for something from itself. Yet, this happening is not to be a "spectacle" thus we find in Bacon's paintings, through the years, a process of elimination of the spectacle and with it the spectators (the Figure is never suchSometimes there are "attendants", but only "as a constant or point of reference in relation to which a variation is assessed" (10), , and the extreme isolation of the Figure in itself excludes spectators). What the Figure awaits from itself is something inside itself, a movement the source of which is the body; for the body to escape itself by means of a spasm. Interestingly, this maybe connected to Deleuze taking the position that body, like mind, is a philosophical problem; it is not "the vehicle of the mind". Deleuze (and Guattari) reconfigure the body as the sum of its capacities, rather than reducing it to its functions (Buchanan, 74-5). Deleuze thus replaces the traditional question of "what is a body?" with the Spinozic one "what can a body do?" Thus we could say that a body can escape itself. To escape so as to rejoin, or dissipate into, the field, "into the wall of the closed (but unlimited) cosmos, to melt into a molecular texture" (20), through a vanishing point in the contour. It escapes by an intense motionless effort, passing either by contracting through a hole (the drain, one of its own organs, or even a scream), or by stretching (through a mirror). These passages are "real, physical, and effective [...] sensations and not imaginings" (13). Could this be compared to the Wolfman mentioned in "A thousand Plateaus" for whom, say Deleuze and Guattari, the wolf is not a metaphor, an analogy or a simile, but designates a threshold of intensity on the Wolfman's body without organs? (Deleuze and Guattari, "A Thousand Plateaus", 239; in Buchanan, 86). The Figure, thus, is not only isolated but is the deformed body that escaped from itself - either contracted or stretched/dilated.Even when the contour in the painting is displaced, the Figure is engaged in exploration/motion inside it (29). This raises the association to that for Deleuze art involves a "moving beyond" the already familiar (our "actual" selves), precisely a kind of "self-overcoming" (O'Sullivan, 51). And in escaping "the body discovers the materiality of which it is composed, the pure presence of which it is made, and which it would not discover otherwise" (39).
It should be noted that Bacon's figures are not tortured (Bacon does not paint the horror), but are ordinary bodies in ordinary situations of discomfort, just as a person forced to sit for hours would inevitably assume contorted postures (Smith in Patton, 43).
In the paintings of couples there is a movement between the Figures themselves, forces of coupling that incorporate the phenomena of isolation, deformation, and dissipation in their own levels. And in paintings with multiple, non-coupled Figures (mostly seen in the triptychs), there is a different kind of movement - it is not the Figure that returns to the field, but the relations between the Figures that are violently projected unto it, to be governed by its uniform color. This unity of color incorporates the relationships between the Figures and the field, creating a force of separation/division very different from the force of isolation previously punctuated. This seems to echo that the one expresses itself in the many, but does not become lost or dispersed in the many. It is within them; they are within it (May, 39). It is a multiplicity that is the affirmation of unity (May, 61).
Could these processes of the Figure/Figures be related to Deleuze's concepet of becoming? The "passage" of the Figure through the hole, the dissipation into the field, these unforseen and non-preexistent motions?
The Figure has a head, which is an integral part of the body, dependent upon the body. It is corporeal. It is "the animal spirit of man" (15). Thus Bacon paints heads, not faces; he dismantles the face (by scrubbing and brushing) and makes the head emerge from beneath it. Deleuze says elsewhere that if human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations, to become imperceptible (Deleuze and Guattari, "A Thousand Plateaus", 171; in O'Sullivan, 60). And that Beyond the face lies an altogether different inhumanity; no longer that of the primitive head, but of “probe-heads”. Here, cutting edges of deterritorialization become operative, forming strange new becomings (Deleuze and Guattari, "A Thousand Plateaus", 190–1; in O'Sullivan, 61). So we can see that Bacon's dismantling of faces echoes Deleuze's concept of escaping facialization, allowing new becomings, which, as said earlier can maybe also be seen in the body escaping itself to allow that becoming. And we see yet another plateau of deterritorialization - the contour, the Figure as a deterritorialization of the figurative, the dismantling of face.
Bacon's paintings are "a zone of indiscernibility or undecidability between man and animal" (16); the two are coupled. This remind of Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of how a concept might be transformed into something else by the manner in which components of a given concept enter into zones of indiscernibility with other concepts (Patton, 4-5). It is the animal as a trait (sometimes depicted outside the body, as shadow or as a "real" animal in the painting). This zone of indiscernibility is the body, the flesh or meat.The Figure is painted in broken tones to create this affinity of body/flesh with meat. Bacon takes the "logic of sensation" from the quasi-spiritual world of "the flesh" to the violence of "the meat" (Rajchman, 131). "Meat" is what achieves the tension between bone and flesh, bone being the apparatus upon which the flesh is the acrobat, but also from which the flesh descends. "Meat" is the zone of indiscernibility of man and animal, a "fact". Meat is that which suffers (is crucified, is the victim) and that which is pitied by Bacon.Rajchman says that Bacon's Catholicism may be read in terms of his world of "meat-sensation" (rather than the other way around) (p. 138) "The head-meat is the becoming-animal of man" (20), and the scream is the immense pity that the meat evokes, coming from the mouth that "acquires this power of non-localization that turns all meat into a head without a face" (19), and is the hole through which the body escapes.
But becoming-animal is but a stage in the becoming-imperceptible, in the process in which the Figure will succeed in its endeavor to truly dissipate into the field, the creation of a space that is a Sahara, where there is nothing but color or light, a vague trace of the figure as a pure force (a tempest, a jet of water). Similarly, the scream is but a stage to the smile that is beyond it. The smile that functions as the final disappearance of the body, the extreme point of cosmic dissipation (like the smile of Lewis Carroll's cat). At this stage the contour, which was the isolator and territory of the Figure, but also the "deterritorializer" (as through it the field curls around the Figure and through it the figure exerts to escape, thus deforming), becomes that where the Figure finally dissolves into the field, shading off into infinity. Thus, this most closed of worlds is also the most unlimited, and the painting IS this coexistence. The coexistence of all these movements in the painting, the contractions and extensions, are, as will be later elaborated - a rhythm.
Sensation
"art is sensation and nothing else" (Deleuze and Guattari,"What is Philosophy?")
As was already briefly mentioned Deleuze points to two optional ways of going beyond, or escaping, the illustrative and figurative - either toward the abstract, which, he says, acts through the intermediary of the brain, closer to bone, or toward the Figure, which is of the flesh, acting directly on the nervous system. Deleuze borrows the name to the way of the Figure from Cezanne - SENSATION.
What, then, is sensation??
Sensation is the opposite of the ready-made, the cliche, but also of the "sensational". Sensations are not to be confused with subjective states or with "sensibilia" or "sensationalism" (Rajchman, 134). It turns simultaneously, indissolubly, both towards the subject (the nervous system) and toward the object (the "fact", the "place", the event). It is a unity of the sensing and the sensed. "[...] at one and the same time I become in the sensation and something happens through the sensation [...] it is the same body which, being both subject and object, gives and receives the sensation" (25). It is through this simultaneous turning of sensation toward subject and object that Deleuze's reference to hysteria can be understood. Deleuze describes painting as hysteria, or as converting hysteria, by making presence immediately visible. Subjectively - the eye (of the observer) is liberated from its fixed character as organ to see "pure presence", and objectively - we are shown a body freed from organic representation (the concepts of organic and organ are further elaborated below). Simultaneously "the pure presence of the body becomes visible at the same time that the eye becomes the destined organ of this presence" (37).
Sensation is in the things themselves, not in the observer, and it is in the body (of the thing, which is not necessarily a human), and what is painted is the body experienced as sustaining this sensation. As Smith emphasizes "sensation is not in the 'free' or disincamate play of light and colour; it is in the body, and not in the air" (Smith in Patton, 45). Thus what Bacon does (and Cezanne) is painting the sensation, recording the "fact".
Sensation is transmitted directly, thus avoiding the telling of a story; thus as the Figure is of sensation while the figuration is representation, also the violence of sensation is opposed to the violence of the represented.
Sensation is what passes from one "order"/"level"/"area" to another, (figurative and abstract painting remain at one level thus they do not attain the sensation and do not liberate the body). These "orders" of sensation are not a sequence, or series, of sensations, rather, each sensation exists at diverse levels; there are different orders of the same sensation. Each sensation envelops a plurality of levels/domains; thus it is, in itself, a "coagulated" sensation. Thus "[...] the irreducible synthetic character of sensation [...with a] sensing or sensed unity" (37). This somewhat reminds of Deleuze and Guattari's definition of concepts as so many intensive ordinates arranged in "zones of neighbourhood or indiscernibility that produce passages from one to the other and constitute their inseparability" (Deleuze and Guattari, "What Is Philosophy?", 25; in Patton, 4). This unity is not in the figured thing (as the Figure is opposed to figuration), neither is it an ambivalence of feelings. The "levels" of sensation are not snapshots of motion, composing the movement in its continuity, for beyond movement there is immobility, movement "in-place", the spasm. Movement does not explain sensation but is explained by sensation's elasticity. It is the levels of sensation that explain what remains of movement and not vice-versa. The levels of sensation do not refer to the different sense organs, for there is an independent communication between the levels/domains and each is "[...] in direct contact with a vital power that exceeds every domain and traverses them all". This power is rhythm "[... and thus] what is ultimate is the relation between sensation and rhythm, which places in each sensation the levels and domains through which it passes" (30). This unity of rhythm can be found only on the point of chaos, where the differences of levels are mixed. Sensation is vibration - elsewhere Deleuze says: “What, in fact, is a sensation? It is the operation of contracting trillions of vibrations onto a receptive surface” (Deleuze, "Bergsonism", 74; in May, 51). And it has an intensive reality. It is with the notion of intensity, Deleuze writes, that "sensation ceases to be representative and becomes real "[...] intensity is both the unsensible and that which can only be sensed" ("Difference and Repetition", 230; in Smith in Patton, 37). “Intensity is the form of difference" (Deleuze, "Difference and Repetition", 221; in May, 87).
Sensation is itself constituted by the “vital power” of rhythm, and it is in rhythm that Deleuze locates the “logic of sensation” indicated in his subtitle, a logic that is neither cerebral nor rational (Smith).
The rhythmic unity of the senses demands going beyond the organism (for organism is what imprisons life). An organism is a self-regulating whole. Each of its parts supports others, and the whole is the harmony of those parts. But there is always more to the parts than their balance, a more that can express itself in other directions, with other balances, or with no balance at all. There can be a different balance among the same parts (May, 122). The body is never an organism, it is the "body without organs".Here Deleuze borrows on Artaud's term. Interestingly, and i find relevantly to how this concept is here used, Artaud claimed that only when Man is made a body without organs, will he be delievered from his automatic reactions and restored to his true freedom (Buchanan, 78). It is not that the body without organs lack organs, what it lacks is the organism, the particular organization of organs. This is an intense and intensive body, having levels or thresholds, and a wave flows through this body's levels, a wave with a variable amplitude, tracing zones according to the variation of amplitude. This wave meets external forces acting on the body and thus sensation appears. And depending on the force the wave encounters a temporary and provisional organ will be determined (and change once the force or the level change). The organism is neutralized and the "body without organs" is present under it. This reality of transitory organs, changing at the transfer of levels or the change of force encountered, Deleuze calls "the hysterical reality of the body", proceeding to give an account of the psychiatric phenomena through the description of the body without organs, comparing it to the Figures in Bacon's paintings.
Thus Bacon's Figure is the body, but without the organization we call "organism". Thus we are reminded again of the dismantling of faces, as facialisation can be understood as precisely a, if not the, system of human organisation, and so is representation par excellence (O'Sullivan, 60). Bacon's Figure is flesh and nerves, with levels and zones, the intensive fact of the body.
The Figure escapes from itself, as mentioned earlier, and this escaping is the body's escape from the organism. And the excessive presence in the paintings, that presence which acts directly on the nervous system and makes representation impossible - Deleuze suggests to be hysteric. Deleuze proposed to extract clinical categories such as hysteria from their legal and psychiatric contexts and make them a matter of experimentation in modes of life in art and philosophy (Rajchman, 132). He finds that there is a special relation between painting and hysteria. With painting, he says, hysteria becomes art, as painting converts hysteria in making presence immediately visible (while both figurative and abstract art manage, each in its own way, to avoid this hysteria).
Two sensations, each with its levels/zones, can confront each other and create a communication between these levels. This is no longer a simple vibration, but a resonance. A resonance which indeed already exists by the fact that the variations of each sensation through the levels create vibrations that produce resonance. In Bacon's paintings this can be seen in the fact of two simultaneous Figures, entangled, indiscernible (without merging), having the same "matter of fact" without creating a story/narrative. It is a struggle of sensations, a confrontation that is a resonance. But there is a further development of the complex sensation, the one that can be seen in Bacon's triptychs (but also when there is more than one Figure on the same canvas, but they are not coupled), where a "common fact" must be produced for diverse, non-coupled, separated Figures, their relation being neither narrative nor logical. Could this be related to that our world consists of moments of becoming, the mingling of bodies, the meeting of forces, a constant interpenetration and interconnection of all phenomena? (O'Sullivan, 56).
This is where Deleuze introduces the concept of 3 rhythms, the triptych being their distribution.
As was said, sensation is rhythm. In the simple sensation rhythm is the vibration that flows through the body without organs, being the vector of the sensation, making it pass from one level to another. In the coupling of sensations rhythm is liberated and is now resonance, confronting and uniting the diverse levels of the two sensations. In the state of complex forces (such as the triptych), with multiple, non-coupled sensations, rhythm reaches its autonomy. The limits of sensation are broken, rhythm itself becomes sensation, creating the impression of time. Sensation is no longer dependent upon a Figure per se, but rather the intensive rhythm of force itself becomes the Figure of the triptych (Smith in Patton, 47). Through recomposition and redistribution it creates its own separate directions, the 3 fundamental rhythms, the active (diastolic), the passive (systolic), and the attendant. Through Bacon's triptychs these rhythms, their complexity and the mobility/circulation between them, may be explored. The active and the passive rhythms stand in opposition/tension (descending-rising, contraction-dilation, augmentation-diminution)It should be noted that these diverse oppositions are not equivalent. There is a combinatorial freedom. Everything can coexist and the opposition can vary or be reversed, depending on viewpoint and value. , each the "retrogradation" of the other, while the attendant rhythm (retrogradable in itself) keeps the common and constant value and is the measure of the two.
The active rhythm, asserts Deleuze, is always the fall, as the descent stands for the passage of sensation, as the difference in level contained in it, the difference in intensity. Sensation develops through the fall, in which all tension is experienced, for the sensation's intensive reality is a descent in depth, an inward movement. This fall is a positive and active reality, everything that develops is a fall, "it is what is most alive in the sensation, that through which the sensation is experienced as living" (58).
The sensation produced by the painting is something that can only be felt or sensed (Smith in Patton, 41-42). And its primary element is the encountered sign. As Francis Bacon says, it acts directly on the nervous system, rather than passing through the detour of the brain. Deleuze is pointing, objectively, to a science of the sensible freed from the model of recognition and, subjectively, to a use of the faculties freed from the ideal of common sense (Smith in Patton, 32-3).
(continued in pt 4)
Thu, Jul 1, 2010 Permanent link
Categories: Deleuze, aesthetics, Francis Bacon, the logic of sensation
Sent to project: The Total Library
Categories: Deleuze, aesthetics, Francis Bacon, the logic of sensation
Sent to project: The Total Library
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