All 31 entries tagged Philosophy Research

Research notes in philosophy, from my current PhD work.

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October 31, 2004

What Is Creativity?

Writing about web page http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/elearning/aboutus/robert/projects/creativity/

Over the last few days I have been working on the proposal for my PhD application. My aim is to come up with something that gives me sufficient scope for:

– an explication of the Deleuze and Guattari's method (explicitly stated in What Is Philosophy?);

– an investigation of the role of technology and technological change in that method (relating to Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus);

– an application of that method to a concept that is both of historical significance and currently of increasing power, especially in cultural/educational policy;

– a further development of the work of Deleuze and Guattari and that concept in application to current technological, social and political conditions, and specifically to learning/academic technology.

The concept that I have chosen to investigate is that of creativity. Interestingly, throughout their work on aesthetics, ethics, psychotherapeautic practice, and philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari seem to imply a concept of creativity as a positive force, but very rarely mention it by name. This may have been because they were wary of using a concept that may itself perform the function of a transcendent figure, and hence is best avoided.

The proposal is being developed in this web site


Robert O'Toole : 31 Oct 2004 09:34 |  Tags:         |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

October 10, 2004

Philosophy must be constantly renewed

Writing about an entry you don't have permission to view

And the answer to the original question is: even if all possible 'philosophical' questions had already been posed and answered comprehensively, there would still be major ongoing tasks. The first of these would be interprative, maintaining that philosophical discourse as meaningful in new situations and cultures as they arise. The second task would be pedagogical, in teaching philosophical skills as the best means for encouraging understanding of the arguments, but also to ensure that they can be reconstructed 'without loss' through time. Oh how Platonic!

But of course it is not the case that all possible 'philosophical' questions have already been posed and answered. There are no pure Platonic forms constituting the philosophical questions and answers. There are of course arguments that punctuate the 'history of philosophy', but only as discourses that are creatively reconstituted each time, subject themselves to doubt in relation to their 'original representation' (and why do we need that to rely upon?). It is possibly true that arguments relating to more mechanistic and restricted areas 'formal logic' are more easy to reconstitute through time, as the formal mechanisms over which they operate are themselves easy to reproduce. In this aspect of the discipline philosophy really is closer to science, capable of distinct progress as our abilities to master a fromal domain improves. Or perhaps we should say that logic is more like engineering, in that we are incrementally developing the formal domain to give us more control. At which point philosophy becomes computing. But once you start to consider more compex and less mechanistic subjects, things get a lot less certain and a lot less progressive. And finally you have two options, limit the scope of philosophy, or abandon the idea that it is like a science or like engineering.

Philosophy then, as a means for dealing with complex fundamental issues, is something that must be constantly renewed.


Robert O'Toole : 10 Oct 2004 09:45 |  Tags:    |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

October 04, 2004

Klee and the superiority of painting

Follow-up to Klee and the separation of painting and music from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

Deleuze's claim that there is some kind of superiority of music over painting is perhaps a direct challenge to Klee's well known claim:

Polyphonic painting is superior to music in so far as the temporal element has more of a spatial quality. The sense of simultanaeity emerges in an enriched form. With his choice of an over-sized horizontal format, Delaunay endeavoured to accentuate the temporal dimension of the picture in the manner of a fugue. Painting and Music, Hajo Duchting, 1997, p.28

I suspect that Deleuze sees music as a more powerful, more free-ranging deterritorializing force, and hence calls it superior. For the very same reason, painting being more specific, itself closer to catastrophe, Klee sees it as superior.


Robert O'Toole : 04 Oct 2004 08:22 |  Tags:                |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

Klee and Delaunay

From Duchting's Paul Klee:Painting and Music

Nature is imbued with a rhythm that in its multimplicity cannot be constrained. Art should imitate it in this, in order to purify itself to the same height of sublimity, to raise itself to visions of multiple harmonies, a harmony of colours seperating and coming together again in the same action. The synchronic action is the one, true subject of painting. p.24, taken from an essay by Delaunay translated by Klee

Robert O'Toole : 04 Oct 2004 08:14 |  Tags:              |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

October 03, 2004

George Shaw, Coventry painter

Writing about web page http://blog.urbanomic.com/undercurrent/archives/000440.html

The painter George Shaw, from Tile Hill near the University, was featured on Channel 4's The Art Show a couple of weeks ago. I found this fascinating, and was pleased to read an excellent review of Shaw's work by Undercurrent , also a Warwick graduate (aka Coventry survivor).

Unlike Undercurrent, i've never actually seen any of Shaw's work 'for real', but got enough from the documentary to know that it is very interesting. For a start, it really does express something about childhood in this city (and cities like it). As Undercurrent writes…

The paintings exclude people, both in their content and in the viewer's engagement. They are places where the viewer is forgotten. You can't get into them unless you agree to disappear from the world.

...giving an ever present sense of awkwardness and uncertainty, which I still feel today when I return to such places.

But Shaw isn't a simple one-dimensional painter. There's a lot more to be investigated. For example, i'm thinking at the moment about the relationship between painting and other arts. Undercurrent shows the (difficult) relation between writing and painting…

...perhaps the intensity of his paintings stems from their being a negative artefact of his literary endeavour, the stubbornly inarticulable residue which it is impossible to force into prose.

...and between painting and photography, which is a crucial thing to understand in twentieth century art…

...the very nakedness of the photographic image brought into question…

Most interesting is the concept of "reconfusion" that Undercurrent writes of.

I'm going to think more about this. In the meantime, read Undercurrent's article on Shaw for more insights.


Robert O'Toole : 03 Oct 2004 09:46 |  Tags:    |  Comments (21) |  Report a problem

October 01, 2004

The chaos in Van Gogh

Follow-up to Klee and the separation of painting and music from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

Notice how the painterly diagram, the method of brush-strokes, applied by Van Gogh is applied in the same way to both the figure and the background. The figure emerges from the materiality of the background, and threatens to dissolve back into it. Accentuating the matter of the painting is a deliberate attempt to make this more obvious.

Robert O'Toole : 01 Oct 2004 08:35 |  Tags:           |  Comments (3) |  Report a problem

Klee and the separation of painting and music

Follow-up to Van Gogh and painterly diagrams from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

Note – this is academic work. If you know about Deleuze's aesthetics, Klee, Bacon etc, you are very welcome to comment.

Painting, as with Van Gogh, establishes a rhythmic pattern. Through an additive synthesis, painting intensifies the body, leads it into chaotic relations with the rest of the material world, provides it with a depth of simultaneous connections, nearing chaos.

For some time painters have been concerned with the relationship between the rhythmic essence of painting and that of music. Deleuze, in a consideration of Cezanne and Bacon, attempts to clarify this relation:

Rhythm appears as music when it invests the auditory level, and as painting when it invests the visual level. Francis Bacon:Logic of Sensation, Continuum, 2004, p.44
Certainly music traverses our bodies in profound ways, putting an ear in the stomach, in the lungs, and so on. It knows all about waves and nervousness. But it involves our body, and bodies in general, in another element. It strips bodies of their inertia, of the materiality of their presence: it disembodies bodies. In a sense, music begins where painting ends, and this is what is meant by the superiority of music. It is lodged in lines of flight that pass through bodies, but which find their consistency elsewhere, whereas painting is lodged farther up, where the body escapes from itself. ibid p.54

Music then acts to disembody, make abstract, deterritorialize onto a distinct plane. As if pulling the spirit out of the body . The incessant seriality of music acts to concentrate and overwhelm the body in anticipation of perception.1

Paul Klee was concerned with this distinction. As both an accomplished violinist and a painter it would necessarily be an issue. Duchling seems to claim some connection between Klee and the ideas of Nietzsche and Bergson on rhythm in fine arts. Did Klee read Bergson? Anyhow, in the face of attempts by critics to say that Klee's painting was musical, used the same structure as music, Klee responded strongly by emphasising that both arts are rhythmic, but in entirely different ways. Deleuze also had an interest in Klee (will look into that more).

This is the starting point for Duchling's book on Paul Klee, Painting Music. I've just discovered this, and it seems to be fascinating.

In comparison to the Romantics, Klee sought the actual basis for the analogy in the most inner being of music – rhythm – which in his opinion not only marks the movement of time in music, but also in art. Paul Klee: Painting Music, Hajo Duchting, Pegasus, p.14

Notes:

1Consider here Klee's rejection of Hausenstein's Kantian analysis of finality and purposiveness in Klee - Paul Klee: Painting Music, Hajo Duchting, Pegasus, p.12.


Robert O'Toole : 01 Oct 2004 08:24 |  Tags:                       |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

September 15, 2004

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:         |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

Bergson's intuition and reflection in learning

…negative freedom is the result of manufactured social prejudices where, through social institutions, such as education and language, we become enslaved by 'order-words' that identify for us ready-made problems which we are forced to solve. This is not 'life', and it is not the way life itself has 'creatively' evolved. Therefore, true freedom, which can only be a positive freedom, lies in the power to decide through hesitation and indeterminacy and to constitute problems themselves.

Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life, Routledge 1999, p.23

This 'experimental and ethical pedagogy' (ibid, p.14) employs the Bergsonian method of intuition, which involves a reflection on the difference manifest in creative thought. When one realises that a currently held concept simply could not have existed nor could have been analytically deduced at a previous time in a previous state, one gets a sense of time as pure difference, despatialized. That feeling is creative, and the philosophical method that draws people into this reflection is Bergson's intuition. Only once the reliance on ready-made problems is abandoned can creativity occur.

The word 'implication' has a special meaning in this. Imagine reality as a large sheet of fabric. The fabric is folded to present you with one aspect, which you may grasp at. The fold (French – pli) is an aspect. You struggle to hold onto that fold, and find that you can only do so by holding onto other folds that follow on to it. As you try to grasp other folds, to unfold the folds, to follow the im-pli-cations, your actions on the further folds cause the first fold to be pulled and distorted in your grip. Out of this feedback loop the specific problem of this set of folds emerges. At some point you are able to stabilise the folds in relation to each other, and have a solution.

When you grasp the fact that a new problem has emerged, that the positing of the problem is beyond your control, and that you must evolve in relation to the problem in a way that was previously both unthinkable and impossible, you have intuition in Bergson's sense. Intuition is a reflection on learning, a creative learning.

And that's why Deleuze makes such a big issue out of the role of fabric in baroque art (le Pli, Leibniz and the Baroque), the role of the curtain in the paintings of Bacon (Logic of Sensation), and the relationship between canvas, paint and brush-stroke.


Robert O'Toole : 15 Sep 2004 08:05 |  Tags:                        |  Comments (4) |  Report a problem

September 07, 2004

Capitalism, schizophrenia, the artist

Anti-Oedipus Page 245–255 Capitalism as the relative limit of society, schizophrenia as the absolute limit. The artist stands between them, scrambling the codes.

The 'diagram' introduced by Van Gogh is deliberately a return to the body, rediverts representation through the body, to slow and deflect it away from the blinding imediacy of the camera. Decelerated representation.


Robert O'Toole : 07 Sep 2004 08:36 |  Tags:            |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

Paul Klee on abstraction

In his Bauhaus period, Klee defined abstraction in his pedagogical writings as follows: Abstract? Being abstract as a painter is not the same as abstracting natural objective ways of comparison but, independent of these possible forms of comparison, is based on the extraction of pictorially pure relations…Pictorially pure relations: light to dark, colour to light and dark, colour to colour, long to short, broad to narrow, sharp to blunt, left right – up down – behind before, circle to square to triangle.

Susanna Partsch, Klee, Taschen 2003, p.27

Link this to Deleuze on analogy in Leibniz, The Fold.


Robert O'Toole : 07 Sep 2004 08:19 |  Tags:    |  Comments (4) |  Report a problem

August 29, 2004

Bacon's malerisch, Van Gogh's diagram, and the baroque fold

Follow-up to The artistic diagram and its relation to the statistical diagram from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

Preventing the artistic object from becoming a symbol by expressing its emergence from a common materiality. Van Gogh's swirls and hatchings. Bacon's curtain. Bacons turn against the figural is a turn against the figure becoming symbolic, against the nonsense of a logic of sensation that is seperate from its emergence from materiality.

The baroque material, Deleuze, The Fold. The monad. Composibility.


Robert O'Toole : 29 Aug 2004 08:08 |  Tags:          |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

The artistic diagram and its relation to the statistical diagram

Follow-up to Van Gogh and painterly diagrams from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

Bar chart is an analogy of the world, a projection of relations of force onto another material. Photography is a chemical projection. The artisitic diagram is a projection through the lense of the artists hands into the material of canvas and paint.

Diagrams can sometimes mimic the world (photography), or seek to control it (mathematics). They can also have critical result (painting).


Robert O'Toole : 29 Aug 2004 08:04 |  Tags:         |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

August 24, 2004

Panopticism internalized?

Writing about an entry you don't have permission to view

The Arcadian on blogging: 'I have near on complete control over everything here…'

Foucault, Discipline and Punish: 'Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.'

And the twist is that in the blog space you can be both the inmate and the warder.


Robert O'Toole : 24 Aug 2004 08:25 |  Tags:    |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem

August 18, 2004

Van Gogh and painterly diagrams

Van Gogh's technique was also to apply a diagram to the figure in order to divert it from purposiveness into an unlocking of sensation. You can see in this work just how, as Deleuze says, for the painter the hand becomes a second eye and the canvas becomes a second mind.

The painter sees the figure. Seeing in this case is just the repetition of singular affects on the complex assemblage of planes of the mind. The eyes and their movement overlay a rhythmic action on this repetition of affects. Secondarily, the painter diverts this rhythm (of movement and light) to the hands, which have corresponding ways of moving, characteristic means of applying paint (and other painterly movements). This is what Deleuze calls the diagram. Van Gogh developed new diagrams of his own, of his own hands, which you can see clearly in this painting. With the application of sensation through the diagram and through the material of the painting, the canvas is built up into zones, lines, contours, planes, thicknesses, colours etc. At this point the painting faces a great danger, as described by Cezanne, the danger of becoming chaotic, of the sensations on the canvas failing to form a balanced and self-sustaining resonance: chaos. Adding new sensations to the canvas inevitably pushes it towards chaos. The greatness of the painter, as you can see in Van Gogh, is the ability to push the canvas towards this catastrophe, only to rescue it and restore the balance and resonances.

In this way, as Kant would have agreed, the adventure of painting is an adventure of the kind experienced in thought itself, an engagement with catastrophe and a subsequent return.


Robert O'Toole : 18 Aug 2004 07:09 |  Tags:                 |  Comments (2) |  Report a problem