Art as Abstract Machine

Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari

Stephen Zepke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415890069
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135465834
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

The aim of this book is to understand what Deleuze and Guattari mean by art. Stephen Zepke argues that art, in their account, is an ontological term and an ontological practice that results in a new understanding of aesthetics. For Deleuze and Guattari understanding what art is means understanding how it works, what it does, how it becomes, and finally, how it lives. This book illuminates these philosophers' discussion of ontology from the viewpoint of art-and vice versa-in a thorough questioning of aesthetic criteria as they are normally understood.

Chapter One

The Artist-Philosopher: Deleuze, Nietzsche, and the Critical Art of Affirmation

The notion of a “beyond” is the death of life.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist.

It is not without profound sorrow that one admits to oneself that in their highest flights the artists of all ages have raised to heavenly transfiguration precisely those conceptions which we now recognise as false: they are the glorifiers of the religious and philosophical errors of mankind.

—Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human.

Our religion, morality and philosophy arc decadent forms of man. The countermovement: art.

—Nietzsche, Will to Power.

NIETZSCHE, DELEUZE AND THE NEW

Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche is in the spirit of Zarathustra's words to his disciples: “One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.”¹ Nietzsche does not wan! followers, he wants those capable of creating something new. He wants to produce, in other words, artists, Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche is therefore artistic; in the spirit of Nietzsche he creates a new Nietzsche. This practice of creative interpretation affirms an important element of Nietzsche's aesthetics, that art is not representational, but is an experimental process by which the form of representation is overcome, and through which something new emerges. The emergence of the new is, for Nietzsche as for Deleuze, nothing less than the movement of life, the genetic process of life expressing itself. Consequently, Nietzsche's aesthetic is inseparable from the ontology that animates it. The creative movement of life is “entirely different,” Deleuze writes, “from the imaginary movement of representation or the abstract movement of concepts that habitually takes place among words and within the mind of the reader. Something leaps up from die book [or artwork] and enters a region completely exterior to it. And this, I believe, is the warrant for legitimately misunderstanding the whole of Nietzsche's work.”²

Misunderstanding before representation! This cry sounds strange to philosophical ears, although perhaps not so strange to artistic ones. Creative misunderstanding (what, as we shall see, Nietzsche calls affirmation) overcomes the old to produce something new, a creative process inseparable from art and an art inseparable from life. This onto-aesthetic ecology inspires Nietzsche to introduce another odd conjunction as its agent: the artist-philosopher” (Nietzsche's emphasis). Artist-philosophers practice a creative life, a practice— common to thought and the plastic arts—by which they “survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fir them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art.”³ Art, embodied by the artist-philosopher, is first of all a process of self-creation, an ethical and ontological practice as much as an aesthetic one. This, Nietzsche claims, is a “Higher concept of art”⁴ that no longer simply describes an object, nor a subjective process, bur the mechanism by which the creativity of life, the “will to power” as Nietzsche calls it, is expressed in a life.

The problem for the artist-philosopher—the same problem for art and for philosophy—is how to express the will to power despite the forces of a human, all too human culture that seeks to deny it? How, in other words, is it possible to live as the affirmation of will to power, or, more simply, how can lire create art? The answer is found in Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche's method of critique. Critique is a “higher concept of art,” a vital practice or evaluation and selection through which life is returned to us in a radically revalued art-work, what we shall see Deleuze call a “simulacrum.” The simulacrum is produced by critique as an expression of will to power, and will to power lives as this expression.

CRITIQUE

Will to power is an ontological energy, the living power of everything; it is, Nietzsche writes, “the unexhausted procreative will of life” (Z, “Of Self-Overcoming”). This living will seeks to increase its power, to grow, and doing so means overcoming whatever resists it. “Every living thing,” Nietzsche claims, “does everything it can not to preserve itself but to become more” (WtP, 688). The will to power is therefore essentially creative, but this creation involves the necessary destruction or whatever seeks to oppose and negate it. To create means to become more powerful and requires an affirmation of will to power, but, and it's sadly obvious, most people are not creative and prefer to protect their banality by denying will to power's violent vitality. Will to power, Nietzsche argues, is embodied along these two trajectories of expression: “Every individual may be regarded as representing the ascending or descending line of life. When one has decided which, one has thereby established a canon for the value of his egoism.”⁵ The point is two-fold. Humans gain or lose power, ascend or descend depending on whether they live an affirmative or negative life. But these values are neither p re-given nor fixed, and are themselves the product of an evaluation (“when one has decided …”) by which will to power is expressed in and as our life. This “notion of value,” Deleuze argues, “implies” a “critical reversal” (NP, 1/1). Our values are no longer derived from pre-existing transcendent truths and metal laws, but are instead created by our own evaluations, our own affirmations and negations of will to power. This leads to another reversal: for Nietzsche the problem of critique is no longer to criticise given values, but is to create them (NP, 1/1). Critique is the art of creating values as the direct expressions or “symptoms” of will to power.

“Critical philosophy,” Deleuze writes, “has two inseparable moments: the referencing back of all things and any kind of origin to values, but also the referencing back of these values to something which is, as it were, their origin and determines their values” (NP, 2/2). The first moment is “interpretation,” which establishes the “meaning” of things according to whether they have an active or reactive value, according to whether the forces they embody overcome their limits to become something new, or react against this power to confirm things within their limits. Interpretation analyses things as symptoms of force, and requires, as Nietzsche famously puts it, a physician of culture. Force, Nietzsche writes, “requires first a physiological investigation and interpretation, rather than a psychological one; and everyone of them needs a critique on the part of medical science.”⁶ We will examine this physiological aspect of interpretation a little later, bur staving with medical metaphors we can say that interpretation, by producing a thing's value, is a creative “symptomatology),” and as such, Deleuze writes, “is always a question of art.”⁷

Interpretation however, is inseparable from the second moment of critique, for a forces value only emerges through an evaluation that creates it. This second moment is a “re-valuation of value” that makes of the individual's interpretation of forces an affirmation or negation of the will to power. Evaluation is therefore pre-individual, and expresses will to power in “perspectives of appraisal,” (NP, 1 /1) perspectives which reveal the individual as a resentful human negating will to power, or as the human overcome, an Übermensch whose values arc alive with joy. This is the extraordinary value of the artist-philosopher; their evaluative perspective—the value of their values—is affirmative. Affirmation is the Nietzschean condition for the creation of art, and affirmative evaluation defines the perspective of the artist-philosopher, who creates (that is interprets) active things or forces. This is a new critical art which encompasses both an affirmative process and the active things it creates. Art is procreative for Nietzsche, it is a critical practice by which things increase their power, by which things become new, and as such is indiscernible horn life. “Art and nothing but an!” he writes, “It is the great means of malting life possible, the great seduction to life, the great stimulant or lire” (WtP, 853, ii). We have quickly reached the necessary immanence of ontology and aesthetics in Nietzsche's philosophy of art, for, as Deleuze puts it, “Nietzsche demands an aesthetics of creation” (NP, 102/116).

For Deleuze, as for Nietzsche, the ascending line of critique embodies an “artistic will,” because its creative power is “always opening new ‘possibilities’” (C2, 141/185).⁸ On the descending line however, there is a completely different method or evaluation. Here “ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values” (CM, I, 10). This resentful creation, Nietzsche writes, is “the other origin of the ‘good,’ of the good as conceived by the man of ressentiment” (GM, I, 13). These resentful men and women interpret the strength required to overcome as evil, so that they, the weak and overcome, will appear good. Thus their evaluation negates the creative energy of will to power, and establishes a truth and moral system that transcends and judges the life or will to power. Nietzsche pours scorn on all such evaluations, based as they are on “the belief that the strongman is free to be weak and the bird of prey to be a lamb—for thus they make the bird of prey accountable for being a bird of prey” (GM, 1, 13). This morality of good and evil requires the fallacy or understanding physiological strength according to a psychological cause. The man of ressentiment imagines that the eagle chooses to kill the lamb, when in fact that is its function and necessity, its strength and active force.⁹ In judging the eagle to be evil the sweet little lambs justify the “goodness” of their own impotent negations of will to power. These moral judgements are symptoms of an evaluation based on different ontological assumptions to those of the artist-philosopher. The ontology of sheep, of the “herd” as Nietzsche calls them, projects “ascetic ideals” to justify their moral judgements, ascetic because they are removed from life and attributed to a transcendent God, a divine “beyond.” This moralistic and mortified metaphysics justifies the ressentiment of the herd by privileging the negation of will to power over its active strength. Here it is not will to power that lives, but God.

Nietzsche assumes an immanent will to power as the genetic condition of life, but its ascending and descending lines of valuation give different ontological expressions of its vitality. Depending on the perspective, evaluation produces values (interpretations) that either affirm or deny lire. To negate will to power means to deny life and results in nihilism, whereas to affirm is to create, and so participate in lire's vital becoming. Whichever way we took at it, there is no extra dimension in which our evaluations and actions are judged. We are what we do, arid we get the life — and the art—we deserve depending on our perspective. Nietzsche explains it this way, “popular morality,” he writes, “separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there was a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not to do so. But there is no such substratum; there is no “being” behind doing, effectuating, becoming; the “doer” is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything” (GM, I, 13). I he strong man or woman, the artist-philosopher, is defined by [heir act, an action that overcomes human nihilism and the delicate ego it seeks to protect, just as it overcomes the herd's resentful morality. Man overcome, or the Overman, is no longer made in God's image, for God—the ultimate nihilist— is dead, and with him the moral laws that judge man's actions from “beyond.” The art of critique frees life from its divine judgement, from its human limitations and moral determinations, and affirms (that is embodies) the will to power as creative life. As a result, art must be critical because it is only through the cri-tique of man and his values that something new and truly beautiful can be created. No creation without destruction, as Nietzsche put it, “whoever must be a creator in good and evil, verily, he must first be an annihilator and break values. Thus the highest evil belongs to the highest goodness: but this is creative” (Z, “Of Self-Overcoming”). Neither Nietzsche nor Deleuze can be understood apart from this fundamental aggression.¹⁰

The artist-philosopher, and the art he or she creates, affirms will to power in the face of everything—God, man, culture, morality—that tries to negate it. This is the difficult critical affirmation by which ascetic ideals, as the determining truths the “good” man represents, are destroyed and an active “perspective” of will to power emerges. To understand how, we must enter further into Deleuze's reading of the Nietzschean world of force. The universe, Deleuze argues, is made up of forces. But a force exists only through its difference to other forces, these forces themselves existing through differences, their ramifying relations encompassing, at their limit, everything. A forces quality (the object it constitutes) therefore appears as active or reactive, noble or base, good or bad, according to the qiamtotatove differences between the forces that constitute it. “Forces,” Deleuze writes, “express their difference in quantity by the quality which is due to them” (Nil 53/60). It is interpretation that fixes a force's quality, and so gives meaning lo an event, but it is the evaluative perspective of will to power that has first put the forces into contact and established their quantitative relation. As Deleuze puts it: “The relation or force to force is called ‘will.’”¹¹ In critique “force is what can, land] will to power is what wills” (NP, 50/57). Force and will (the qualities and quantities of interpretation and evaluation) are therefore inseparable, the interpretation of forces expressing the will to powers “fluent, primordial and seminal qualitative elements” (NP, 53/60) of affirmation or negation. But a quality is never fixed once and for all, because a force's constitutive quantitative relation is rising and falling as it overcomes other forces, or is overcome. In other words, a force is a quantitative becoming before it is a quality, a (human) being or a fact. Differential relations of force embody ascending or descending lines of evaluation (affirmation and negation), becomings active or reactive, and these give rise to interpretations of qualities and their accompanying actions or reactions. The rise and fall of will to power, its becoming, therefore develops through the linked operations of interpretation and evaluation in critique. Critique is either “artistic” in affirming the differential becoming of forces as will to power, and produces something new, or it negates a force's becoming, giving it an identity, a being, in order to “arrive at a semblance of affirmation,”¹² in mans nihilist affirmations of a moral truth. As Deleuze rather dramatically puts it, reversing the Christian trajectories Nietzsche attacks: “Affirmation takes us into the glorious world of Dionysus, the being of becoming and negation hurls us down into the disquieting depths from which reactive forces emerge”(NP, 54/61).

PERSPECTIVES

The will to power appears as a force's quality because appearance (quality) necessarily implies an interpretation of a quantity or force as active or reactive, and this interpretation in turn requires an evaluation—the affirmation or negation—of and by will to power. Each quality therefore embodies a perspective, an affirmation or negation of will to power that encompasses the differential infinity that makes it up. In this way interpretations are perspectives constituting the processes of life. Critique is therefore the expression of will to power, and life is nothing if not critical. Consequently, we cannot interpret by comparing forces to outside (transcendental, moral) criteria, and critique cannot give a judgment that stands as a “true fact.” Interpretation cannot be conceptually distinguished from the becoming chat gives it value, for the evaluation it embodies, as the becoming active or reactive of will to power, is its real and immanent condition. Will to power is what constructs meaning and value, at the same time as meaning and value express its ‘elements.’¹³This has radical epistemological consequences, for the world as will to power is the permanent becoming of ideas as much as things. Knowledge, as Nietzsche put it, is “Interpretation, the introduction of meaning—not ‘explanation’… There are no facts” (WtP, 604). An understanding of the world is always...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Studies in Philosophy
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Art as Abstract Machine
• Chapter One The Artist-Philosopher: Deleuze, Nietzsche, and the Critical Art of Affirmation
• Chapter Two Spinoza: Mystical Atheism and the Art of Beatitude
• Chapter Three We Need New Signs: Towards a Cinematic Image of Thought
• Chapter Four A Freedom for the End of the World: Painting and Absolute Deterritorialisation
• Chapter Five Songs of Molecules: The Chaosmosis of Sensation
• Chapter Six The Agitations of a Convulsive Life: Painting the Flesh
• Conclusion A Break, a Becoming, and a Belief
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index