All 5 entries tagged Logic Of Sense

Difference and Repetition, Nietzsche and the creative turn

Follow-up to Freeing the concept of creativity from the concept of possession from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

The answer, for Deleuze at least, is yes. Or rather, the concept of the new or difference (in its composite with repetition), is one of these 'helper concepts' – Nietzsche's best friend, saving him from the interminable closed cycle of Cartesian recognition or Kantian good-sense.

The Image of Thought chapter in Difference and Repetition states it quite plainly. The really big question for philosophy is not how recognition (clear, distinct, true or otherwise) is possible - that's trivial. Rather it is the question of how we break out of the everyday, the familiar. It is the question of how difference is possible. But not in some abstract sense, but genuinely how we go beyond the algorithms of our constitution. So it is the case that Deleuze is not Kantian (or as Keith Robinson has said, perhaps he is re-activating a pre-Kantianism). He was out to engineer a creative turn rather than fixing the critical turn.

In Difference and Repetition, as in Logic of Sense, we see Deleuze dealing with the metaphysical question of how creativity, difference, is metaphysically possible: what is its ontology? In this domain the question concerns the possibility of time itself.

Nietzsche's distinction between the creation of new values and the recognition of established values should not be understood in a historically relative manner… In fact it concerns a difference which is both formal and in kind. Difference and Repetition p.136

But it takes an involvement with Guattari to give Deleuze a chance to answer the really useful problem of creativity. Guattari the psychotherapist involved on a daily basis with dislodging people from the viscious circle. This engagement combines with Deleuze's fascination with painting and with cinema to establish, following on from the ontology of difference and repetitiion, a practical approach to creativity.

Robert O'Toole : 04 Mar 2005 08:26 |  Tags: Creative Turn Creativity Critique Deleuze Deleuze And Philosophy Difference Difference And Repetition Good-Sense Guattari Helper Concept Image Of Thought Kant Keith Robinson Logic Of Sense Nietzsche Ontology Philosophy Research Psychotherapy Recognition Transversality Transversality |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Aion

Aion is the past-future, which in an infinite subdivision of the abstract moment endlessly decomposes itself in both directions at once and forever sidesteps the present. Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 77

Robert O'Toole : 13 Nov 2004 06:22 |  Tags: Aion Deleuze Logic Of Sense Philosophy Definitions Reversibility |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Chronos

Chronos is the present which alone exists. It makes of the past and future its two oriented dimensions, so that one goes always from the past to the future… Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 77

Robert O'Toole : 13 Nov 2004 06:21 |  Tags: Chronos Deleuze Ireversibility Logic Of Sense Philosophy Definitions |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Excellent David Burrows exhibition at the Mead – New Life

Writing about web page http://www.warwickartscentre.co.uk/?page=mead.html

It is rare for an artist to produce a work that is both stunning visually, having effect beyond the visual, and philosophically fascinating. In his exhibition New Life, currently installed in the Mead Gallery at the University of Warwick (ends 4th December 2004), Dave Burrows has done just that.

The artwork is stunning:

Firstly, what does this exhibition feel like? Stepping inside the large white room, taking up half of the Mead's extensive gallery space, you are quickly drawn past a manifesto-like statement of propositions and into a three dimensional, immersive work that explodes space and compresses time. Across the room debris is strewn, both in concentrations around remnants of building, and between the concentrations. You are in what appears to be a children's bedroom, filled with brightly coloured almost familiar items: flip-flops, toys etc. Between the concentrations, and extending out to the edges of the exhibition, fragments and dense layers of grey crunchy dust (as if from things or persons vapourised) are everywhere. You have to walk through the work itself to see it. You have to enter its moment. Illustrations of the aftermath hang on the walls, including opposing images of a girl and a boy. They act to extend the work out beyond the walls of the gallery. It is spatially a vast and unbounded work.

And philosophically powerful:

We are familiar with, conditioned to, artworks that are spatially constrained. Containment is a powerful mechanism in painting, as in Francis Bacon, who as Deleuze says, confines his subjects spatially (the pope in his chair). But this work seems, at first, to be uconcerned with spatial limits. There are concentrations within it, repetitions and rhythms. There is an entire cartography of intensity. But it seems more unbounded than any painting. We sense that the repetitions could extend out infinitely: the same moment but different again and again.

Narrative usually acts within a work to extend it temporally. A common rule of art is: spatially limited, temporally extended. Landscape is often used to fade out the containment to infinity. But the problem has always been that definition decreases as the distance increases. David Burrows has an interest in mirrors, and the way in which they can, if used correctly, break out of containment without a loss of detail. Perhaps the paintings at the boundary of this work are really mirrors? It certainly feels more extensive than any painting. This combines with repetition to extend the work to infinity. If there is no spatial containment, can there be narrative?

On wandering around the room I was for some time searching for narrative, in fact searching for variables that I could manipulate to play back some kind of narrative implicit in the representation of this explosive event, analysing the phenomenon as if it were the result of some kind of nuclear physics. Variables and functives like those in a scientific experiment: reversible. This is saying something about the limitations of science, and how art deals with the pure event, the event of total loss. There is, fundamentally no "external framing or exoreference" which, as Deleuze and Guattari claim (What Is Philosophy? p.119) is necessary for science. Instead there is the presence of the irreversible Chronos as opposed to the reversible Aion (Deleuze, Logic Of Sense, p.77). Anyhow, David seems to have played upon this desire for narrative sense. Slogans that could lead to some story are graffitied in random locations. The bodies of the children are suggestive of some kind of sick story. But I never got the story. Never grasped the variables. Never worked out how to replay the event. It is, as I think David said in his recent talk at the Mead, an irreversible event (thermodynamics). As described by Deleuze…

Chronos is the present which alone exists. It makes of the past and future its two oriented dimensions, so that one goes always from the past to the future… Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 77

…just the aftermath. Hardly identifiable to discourse. No mythology. The familiarity of the artefacts, and the familialism of the children, is just there to tease us. There are no symbolic figures to transcend this event, its got no papa-mommy (Becket via Deleuze), other than the presence of the event itself: immanent.

But there is more. Two concentratory dispositifs hang from the ceiling of the event. Yet again they reverse the normal artistic relationship between time and space. In this case space is confined, while time is opened out. They pass simulateously into its future and reach back into its past. Mobiles suspending familiar objects, either sucked up in the explosion or collapsing as debris. This is the second dimension of the event, of the moment. An indeterminacy. A dice throw…

Aion is the past-future, which in an infinite subdivision of the abstract moment endlessly decomposes itself in both directions at once and forever sidesteps the present. Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 77

…the 'time of the artist' as David Burrows called it. The determinacy of the exhibition, with even the movement of the audience within it making little difference, is punctuated by the hand of the artist holding the moment in these two trajectories. And they draw you in to examine the objects in their suspended animation. You begin to notice the constructedness of the objects, the craft in them, the time of their assemblage. And then are opened out onto a second, intersecting line of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, a second line of time/space containments and explosions folded onto the first. A double event.

Robert O'Toole : 07 Nov 2004 19:59 |  Tags: Aion Chronos Concentratory Dispositif David Burrows Deleuze Deleuze And Art Entropy Event Francis Bacon Functives Irreversibility Logic Of Sense Philosophy Research Repetition Rhythm The Fold Transversality Transversality Variables |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Emergent semantics (from Deleuze) and the semantic web

Follow-up to Bergson's intuition and reflection in learning from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

Following from that is the semantic theory developed by Deleuze in the Logic of Sense. Meaning works as follows. There is an emerging 'problem' space constituted by the way in which different foldings work against each other. And there is the 'solution' which is a second layer of articulations that repeatedly succeeds in operating on the problem space. This second level is itself a problem space requiring solutions (and so on). The applicability of one problem space onto another as a solution is the site of meaning. The twin articulations make sense of each other. Of course the articulations are not entirely seperate, transversal interactions occur between them, complicated feedback loops shift the relationships between the articluations, and hence change their formations.

This raises a question about the semantic web, which attempts to move us to a model for linking content that works with these emergent semantic processes. The idea seems to be this. A document is the static representation of a web of meaning (problem spaces and solutions interacting with each other). That web of meaning is seen to come from the author. A so called 'intelligent agent' is capable of drawing out and representing these meanings with some kind of schema that links them up with other documents and makes them accessible to others using the same schema.

Such a system was demonstrated in the key note speech this morning. It was admitted that the information structure into which the documents are mapped is no different to a database schema, the advantage lying in the data harvesting tools that can do the job more efficiently than manual approaches. It should be obvious that, considering Deleuze's work on meaning, this is an extremely pale imitation of the dynamic transversal relationship that actually takes place in semantics, in the creation and interpretation of documents. The semantic web could allow the reader of a document to identify a web of significant elements themselves, and then seek connections outside that work with that web. Instead, such systems are prejudging the significance of words within the text, applying a set schema, and linking only to other documents that can be similarly analysed. Nothing creative can come of this.

Perhaps a better approach would be to allow the reader to create their own conceptual map of the significant elements of a document, and then search for other simlar maps that apply to other documents. That really would be a semantic web.

Robert O'Toole : 15 Sep 2004 16:38 |  Tags: Deleuze Emergent Semantics Logic Of Sense Networks Philosophy Research Semantic Web Transversality Transversality |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem