Narrating the Catastrophe

An Artist's Dialogue with Deleuze and Ricoeur

Jac Saorsa

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781841506562
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

An extraordinary collaboration between contemporary art and critical discourse, Narrating the Catastrophe guides readers through unfamiliar textual landscapes where "being" is defined as an act rather than a form. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur's notion of intersubjective narrative identity as well as the catastrophe theory of Gilles Deleuze, Jac Saorsa establishes an alternative perspective from which to interpret and engage with the world around us. A highly original—and visually appealing—take on a high-profile issue in contemporary critical debate, this book will appeal to all those interested in visual arts and philosophy.

Chapter 1

Act and Form

Introduction: first words – The journey begins –A meaningful psychosis – What is philosophy? – What is art? – The nature of the concept – The concept visualised – What is science? The pre-eminence of the rhizome over the metaphor – Root, stem and rhizome – 1st Articulation – ‘Black 47’ – The rhizome as a conceptual construct: map and tracing.

Introduction: first words

In writing Narrating the Catastrophe my aim is to explore the relation between fine art practice and philosophy, in order to develop an alternative perspective on how, through interpretation, we come to understand our existential reality. As an artist, my point of departure is a fundamental premise that the art object can itself be conceived as a text, and as such, can therefore be contextualised and explored from within the dialogical relation between Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenological hermeneutics, my own experience as expressed in imagery and self-reflexive, autoethnographic account and the conceptual framework constructed by Gilles Deleuze, both alone and with Felix Guattari. Within the pages of the written text you will therefore find its visual counterpart, in reproductions of drawings that are themselves textual entities, and although at first they may seem like mere illustrations, these drawings are, in fact, much more. As separate singularities that make up a Deleuzean assemblage, they contribute to the ‘bilingual’ and multilayered, or stratified whole that is Narrating the Catastrophe.

Unlike Ricoeur, Deleuze never focused specifically on interpretation and hermeneutics, but his work is nevertheless intimately related to interpretation primarily through his emphasis on connectivity. Indeed, it is his fundamental notion of ubiquitous connectivity that is based on the conceptual construct of the rhizome and through which the world and the text become at once both separate and inseparable, that provides the basis for all that follows here.

Narrating the Catastrophe is the exploration of the evolution and chronological momentum of a discernible shift in figurative emphasis in my own creative practice. As the book develops, the drawings provide both subject and context for the interpretation of elements and dimensions of structure and form, content and expression, figuration, representation and resemblance, through the interrelation of philosophical discourse and autoethnographic account, which is embodied in a narrative and analytical text. The dialogue that is built up, chapter by chapter, is further layered and interrelated with sub-themes or ‘Articulations’, which punctuate the chapters. Like spinal vertebrae, these provide a narrative structure that balances and supports the body of this book as a whole.

Ricoeur’s phenomenological hermeneutics, established through his reworking of Gadamer’s theory, provides me with a foundational cornerstone for the conceptual and philosophical framework upon which Narrating the Catastrophe is constructed, and within which figuration in art practice becomes the primary focus. It is most specifically his introduction of structural analysis as a necessary requirement in the process of interpretation that provides a basis for the relation between philosophy and my own creative practice. In accordance with Ricoeur’s emphasis on structure as an interpretative vehicle towards a meaningful understanding of Being, I propose that a focus on the role of visual structure, that which moves abstraction towards figuration in a work of art, is a crucial and indeed foundational element in the interpretative process wherein understanding is ultimately achieved in the active, rather than passive engagement with the work, or the ‘visual text’ being interpreted. Such engagement embodies an interpretation which, in a disavowal of the limitations that figurative representation and the expectations of immediate recognition impose, reaches self-consciously towards an understanding of the ‘true’ resemblance that is encountered only in relation to the figure beyond figuration. The level of understanding that such interpretation achieves therefore is derived from a relation with the ‘Other’ that the figure beyond figuration becomes, and it allows, in turn, a deeper understanding of self.

Such a proposition is indebted of course to Ricoeur’s notion of ‘re-figuration’, but also further extends this conceptual process that is elicited by the text and within which interpretation consists of a restructuring of our stance in ‘front of the text’ according to the invitation that it offers. Such re-figuration ultimately allows us to become profoundly aware of our own Being through a meaningful relation with both the individual text being interpreted, and with the wider context within which that relation is realised.

In terms of kinship, Ricoeur and I share a common ancestry in philosophical orientation, one shared also by Deleuze. Both Ricoeur and Deleuze however, writing eloquently and influentially but nevertheless indirectly about experience, must remain but cousins, at least once removed. The present text is realised at least in part in my own self-reflexive and autoethnographic content, and therefore it must necessarily embody my experiential relation to interpretation both indirectly, as a writer writing about the experience of interpretation in terms of the art and the art process itself, and directly, given that I am myself the artist whose work I am writing about. In this sense, the discourse that is the text as a whole becomes a form of Deleuzean ‘double articulation’, through which I ‘narrate the catastrophe’. In a musty conference hall further on in the text, Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger waits impatiently in his own Articulation, to explain double articulation in more detail, but for now I simply invite you, the reader, to engage with this morphosyntactic synthesis of visual and written language, and to interact with, reflect on and appropriate it on various levels of meaning while you travel in a general direction towards understanding. This is philosophy in practice. Relevant concepts are here put to use in a dynamic, creative dialogue that, through your interpretation, can extend beyond the inevitable limitations of the book that you hold in your hands.

The journey begins

Author’s note: On completing the first draft of this opening chapter it occurred to me that the direction of the text seemed, almost of its own volition, to split into two at a point where the discussion of the rhizome reached an interim climax before continuing. The two parts of the chapter are connected by a commonality in the shape and conceptual form of the humble potato. For this reason, while the rest of the book is developed through ‘external’ articulations between chapters, like the subcutaneous vertebrae of the spinal column, Chapter 1 is articulated internally, just as the Atlas and Axis are embedded in the neck and interact with the cranium.

In the preface to this book I described myself as standing on a high plateau, one very like the plateau that Gregory Bateson (1904–80) describes as a ‘continuous self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end point’ (Deleuze 1999: 22). For Deleuze and Guattari, Bateson’s description translates into a multiplicity, endlessly connected to other multiplicities and, being always in the middle, the plateau has no definite origin and no foreseeable end. It is a point at which circumstances combine to bring an activity to a crucial juncture, but where it is not dissipated in a climax. It is a ‘heightening of energies’ sustained long enough to leave an ‘after-image’ that can be redirected into further activity. Narrating the Catastrophe is a plateau.

A wanderer often moves aimlessly, around, over and through a landscape towards no particular horizon, but a traveller who travels purposefully often carries in his pocket a field guide. A logical and scientific text designed to help identify and distinguish between natural flora or fauna of a particular location, the field guide manifests what Deleuze would call a ‘root-book’, a noble, signifying imitation of the world, and nature in it (1999: 5). The present book also identifies and explores particular themes in terms of its own territory, that of philosophy and visual art practice, but by its inherent nature as a search for understanding that is inescapably based on a subjective world view, it is neither scientific nor conventionally logical, it does not imitate, nor can it be itself truly imitated. The governing conceptual framework of Narrating the Catastrophe is that of the rhizome, which, constituted by serial plateaus and defined by the interconnection of such multiplicities, is infinite and indefinite, the antithesis of the field guide.

Where a field guide is intended to offer authoritative and detailed information, and focuses on differences between singularities, it is illustrative and finite in nature. Animals and plant life however are perpetually negotiating and adapting to their changing environments, and in doing so they render the conventional field guide obsolete. Such obsolescence is never a concern within the shifting parameters of the continually extending rhizome. Incorporating potentiality and the promise of change through constant divergences and deviations, the rhizome is forever extensible while always maintaining a simultaneous continuity of focus, a purposeful direction towards perpetual renewal.

Deleuze assures me that ‘writing is always the measure of something else’ (1999: 4) and that it has nothing to do with signification, but rather has everything to do with surveying and mapping, even of realms that are as yet unexplored. As such, the surveying and the mapping that constitutes my writing this book constitutes in turn the sustained focus, characteristic of the rhizome, that produces the heightening of energies, characteristic of the plateau, that is necessary to produce the after-image from which further surveying and mapping is generated. Simultaneously embracing and denying the literary cliché of the ‘journey’, Narrating the Catastrophe therefore embodies a conceptual map by which the reader can travel through its fragmented whole, guided along both familiar and unfamiliar pathways towards an understanding of the nature of being that eventually becomes a part of the extensive totality contained in the parameters of the text, but never constrained by them. The after-image is never a finite illustration, but rather a working drawing, a crucial aspect of the Deleuzean ‘refrain’ (see Chapter 8) that is characterised in transcendent potentiality. Narrating the Catastrophe as a whole therefore becomes a measure of the creative relation between art practice and philosophy, and the interrelation between visual and conventional written text is no more or less logical, signifying or predetermined than any creative practice can be. This is not a root-book, more a route-book and in following, you, the reader, will travel through a fertile textual landscape that generates a chiasmic intersection between explanation and understanding that must be negotiated through interpretation and choice.

A meaningful psychosis

Choice is a necessary part of Being. Lack of choice can cause confusion, at the very least, and can even threaten sanity as Gregory Bateson demonstrates in the development of his theory that schizophrenia derives from the continuous experience of a ‘double bind’ (Bateson et al. 1956). Double-bind situations occur where the victim receives contradictory injunctions or emotional messages on different levels of communication, where no meta-communication is possible, and where choice is rendered impossible, but where the victim is prevented from leaving the field of communication. The acknowledged symptoms of schizophrenia are, for Bateson et al., purely an expression therefore of the distress induced by such a situation, and as such, they can be understood as a cathartic and potentially transformative experience.

This is a view shared by R. D. Laing, who argues that what we call mental illness can actually be seen as a transformative occurrence, and while never denying the existence of mental illness, he approaches it from a radical and divergent perspective, suggesting that expressed feelings of the individual sufferer should, in fact, be understood as more significant descriptions of lived experience, than as symptoms of some underlying disorder.

Bateson’s ‘double bind’ describes a conflict that cannot be easily resolved, at least without the potential psychological instability that in extreme cases leads to a ‘splitting’ of the personality, and Laing, in developing the hypothesis, arrives at a conceptual framework for the complexities involved in the process of ‘going mad’ (1990). This process could be described as a journey, indeed for Laing it becomes akin to a ‘shamanic journey’, one from which the traveller can gain important insights. Similarly, the interpretation of a text can also constitute a journey, one in which the search for meaning can indeed give rise to insight, and one where meaning itself can be derived at several levels of communication, conventional language being only one. But as Deleuze pertinently asks, ‘what wind of madness, what psychotic breath thereby passes into language as a whole?’ (1998: 71) How far is madness itself then a constant travelling companion of creativity and its effects?

As much as the interpreter of a text must embark on a journey towards meaningful understanding, the artist/writer must travel his or her own way through the creative process, travelling inevitably towards that which Deleuze would describe as a self-induced chaos and catastrophe as every step is translated into a mark on a canvas or a word on a page. Ways around and through the inevitable depend on the level of success or failure in negotiating the pitfalls of creative ambition, and mediating between conflicting desires. The travels of an artist, in this sense at least, are oriented both by and towards a form of madness, a madness perhaps exemplified at an extreme by Antonin Artaud (1896–1948), a French writer and playwright who was continuously subject to mental instability, but whose work has had nevertheless, clear and significant influence on Deleuze in the development of some of his most important concepts, including, and most importantly here, that of the ‘Body Without Organs’, which in terms of Deleuzean theory is itself a plateau in constant and perpetual mutuality with other plateaus on a plane of consistency. We will encounter the Body Without Organs many times in the journey that follows but for now we must stay a while with Artaud, who, infamous and much criticised for his Theatre of Cruelty (Artaud 1958), claimed his work was not intended to advocate sadism, but was rather a physical, often violent, determination to shatter a false reality that smothers our perceptions and prevents us from seeing the raw truth of Being. This view is redolent of the Deleuzean assertion that a predominance of recognition brought about through figurative representation in the interpretation of a visual text must necessarily obstruct the way towards an understanding of the ‘true resemblance’ which, as we have seen, is encountered in the figure beyond figuration, and this is where, for Artaud, the text itself becomes a ‘tyrant’ over meaning. True meaning here lies not in thought or gesture, but rather in the space between the two. True meaning must be sought, through interpretation, in the realms of the relation between content and expression.

The question of madness depends perhaps upon who is asking, and in Vincent Van Gogh (1947), an energetic tirade against established psychiatric discourse, Artaud identifies compulsively with the unfortunate painter who he sees not as mad, but as a true visionary, woefully misunderstood and victimised to the point of suicide by a society that could appreciate him only in terms of accepted ideas of the nature of madness.

In comparison with the lucidity of Van Gogh, which is a dynamic force, psychiatry is no better than a den of apes who are themselves obsessed and persecuted and who possess nothing to mitigate the most appalling states of anguish and human suffocation, but a ridiculous terminology.

(Artaud 1947)

Van Gogh’s ‘lucidity’, could be Lucien Freud’s ‘moment of complete happiness’ that never occurs (Gayford, Wright 1998: 88), even though the promise of it is felt in the creative act. It is perhaps the heightening of intensities that produces the after-image that, as we have seen, never dissipates into a climax but rather promotes further acts. In this sense, artists seem particularly destined to travel towards a pre-determined psychosis in that not only do they have an inescapable susceptibility to the after-image, they in fact provoke it through the very act that defines them. The multilingual domain of the artist is expressed not only through visual language, and all that such a complex dialogue must encompass in the totality of the creative process, but also in the conventional language that must be used by both the artist and by the interpreter, albeit after the ‘fact’ in the case of the latter, to explain and define the work. If Artaud is to be believed however, and madness is rooted in societal convention and terminology rather than in the mind, the artist’s insanity, like the cries of the victim of a double bind, is merely the attempt to avoid suffocation on the road to truth, wherever that road may lead, and regardless of whether there is an end in sight. Indeed, it is the creative process itself that engenders the relation between what the artist sees, in terms of both subject and the progression of the piece, and what he or she feels throughout, and although such a relation can often be conflictual, it nevertheless entails a constant juxtaposition of sight and insight in an endless journey towards meaning.

Back on the plateau, where the cries of the madman therefore only add to the intensity that precipitates the after-image, which itself can serve as a form of direction, we might note an interesting fact about a relevant medical condition, characterised in chronic visual disturbance, and although associated with a physical brain disorder is often the cause of subsequent mental instability in the sufferer. Palinopsia is a form of ‘seeing again’ in which a sufferer’s vision mimics normal phenomena with such great intensity that it precipitates a highly increased susceptibility to seeing after-images. Less time than normal is therefore needed to form an after-image, and once formed it has a longer-than-average duration.

The reader/viewer of a text may at first travel with its creator, according to a mutual understanding based on intention, but the interpreter must soon take responsibility for his or her own volition as what may have originally seemed like a field guide manifestly becomes much more. In the midst of the text individualism takes the lead, and interpretation is held in an embrace between explanation and understanding as objectivity is swept up in a St Vitus’ dance with subjectivity. As I have written, and as you the reader reads, as I have drawn, and as you the viewer sees, we travel together through self-mediated textual complexity and we risk the grip of a double bind in the unresolved conflicts, the forks in the road, that must ensue. In the confusion however, and through the process of interpretation, the possibility of clarity awaits, just as records show that for most young sufferers of Sydenham Chorea, the symptoms abate on maturity. Ultimately then, where Laing and Bateson set the scene, and Robert Frost made his choice, so must we all.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

(Frost 1916)

What is philosophy?

The plateau that is Narrating the Catastrophe is supported by philosophy, but as Deleuze and Guattari ask in Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (1994), their final work together that bears the question itself as its title, what is philosophy? The significance of this question, a logical relation between three (or six) wo...