All entries for Wednesday 17 May 2006

May 17, 2006

Research Notes: Concepts and monuments, philosophers and artists

Follow-up to Review: Naked Punch (versus Collapse) – first thoughts from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

A correction on the matter of 'concepts speed and judgement'.

I recently wrote that repetition and difference are governed by "filters", and that:

some of these filters privelige speed and scope of judgement over care and novelty. These filters render the fine detail of events redundant (in the cybernetic sense), so as to cover more ground more quickly. Concepts are such filters.

Actually I think that D&G, in What Is Philsoophy?, try to rescue philosophy and its concepts from this, aligning philosophical concepts more closely with artistic monuments in the way in which they capture, decelerate and recirculate matter through a network of actual conceptual components. The philosopher (or conceptual personae), following Nietzsche, is then a kind of artist.

At some point in WiP, they attack marketing, the communications business, opinions, etc – all the traditional enemies of philosophy, and all responsible for the priveliging of speed and scope of judgement over care.


Robert O'Toole : 17 May 2006 13:25 |  Tags:     |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

Research Notes: The concept of recirculation

The concept of recirculation (repetition/rehearsal and difference) is the key to unfolding Kant, Bergson, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Guattari and T.E. Lawrence.

From an entry on Seven Pillars of Wisdom

The nomads were thus capable of becoming an abstract machine, self–motivated, self–positing, independent but at the same time forming a genuinely connected response to every and any possible experience. The nomad, for example, finds the continuation of the journey as a way of life itself. The journey is the purpose of the journey. The narrower objective being to merely keep circulating within a space that encourages the continuation of the journey, making sedimentation impossible.

And another

This was then a new movement, breaking out of the timeless circulation of peoples and their livestock into and across the desert – a sudden and unprecedented mass carrying with it bodies from the diverse geophysical and social distributions of people into places.

On the will to power

Genetic – quality – affirmative/negative – feedback loops – continuous multiplicity – virtuality

On art and collapse

Art is missing, but why do we need it? My conjecture is this (following, I think, Deleuze and Guattari): 1. That events are organized; this is to say, their repetition and differentiation is controlled by filters of selection. 2. That some of these filters privelige speed and scope of judgement over care and novelty. These filters render the fine detail of events redundant (in the cybernetic sense), so as to cover more ground more quickly. Concepts are such filters. 3. However there is always a side–effect of speed: a loss of feeling (subtle detail). 4. On the contrary, there are filters that amplify detail by taking a set of events and promoting their re–occurrence, emphasing different aspects of the events with each repetition. Artists create such filters. The effect of art is deceleration, or perhaps carefully controlled speed. Art may then prevent the dissociation from the world that is inherent in conceptual activity.

On painting

reduce the world and its vast circuits to a small repetitive loop. In the case of Cezanne, the loop circulates and re–circulates between Mont Saint Victoire, the palette and its oils (themselves reduced to a few greens and blues), the hand, the brush or knife, and the canvas. In this way the artwork is built up over time through a kind of mangrove effect not disimilar to that described by Andy Clark.
Everything is invested – "the artist is already in the canvas" (Deleuze, Logic of Sensation). Then make each run of the circuit entirely dependent upon the last, each time applying a filter modulated by the results of the previous passage (Cezanne, Van Gogh, Bacon and others replace an optical filter with a haptic filter). The circuit carves out an escape route within the imprisonment of actuality. The loops are repetitions, movements between points, but across different virtualities or the infinite and irreducible but necessary slices of reality. This opening up of new degrees of movement is the experiment of the diagram.

On art as monument

The suggestion is that the monument encapsulates a rhythm of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, of pleats of matter rising and falling relative to each other, forming tonalities, a whole music of matter that penetrates substance and carries it away into the plane. The monument is then not a static edifice, it is a continual circulation of matter, captured at some point in history, relative to a virtuality which otherwise disappears. It captures a slice of reality, holds it, and then releases it again in the future, in our aesthetic encounter.
Deleuze and Guattari go further: artworks are monuments. All artworks? What does, for example, Cezanne's painting of Mont Saint Victoire commemorate? In paint it captures a circulation of matter ever connected with the mountain. The rhythm of brush strokes is, as Cezanne claimed, the rhythm of the mountain, of nature as he lived it. His method always struggled to capture the tension, the pattern of connections of those rhythms, to make them permanent in a monument.

Next I must relate this to 'the refrain'; the 'journey' of the nomad and its singular rhythm; dematerialization and virtualization; the clock and the rape scene in Seven Pillars; the movement of the camel; and the clockwork running of the engine in Jupiter's Travels.


Robert O'Toole : 17 May 2006 13:07 |  Tags:            |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

Virtuality and character

On my iTunes right now: Mrs Potter's Lullaby by Counting Crows. Not the kind of music that I usually listen to, but quite up-beat and fun, which is useful.

Anyhow, one line is, for me, particularly good, as it reminds me of how my best friend Mari (or Maria as she sometimes liked to be called), her unique and powerful character, is always present in everything that I do:

There's a piece of Maria in every song that I sing.

That I suppose is the "virtuality" that Deleuze and Bergson describe.


Robert O'Toole : 17 May 2006 10:14 |  Tags:  |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem