I’ll continue summarizing Gilles Deleuze’s newly published seminar On Painting. Anyone who has read more than a few pages by Deleuze knows that his work is unusually resistant to summary, as it includes a unique mixture of sustained philosophical analysis, highly idiosyncratic technical terminology, brief treatments of a range of unusual figures from Lewis Carroll to Baron Sacher-Masoch, an immense tolerance for obscurity, and a style that is equal parts plain-spoken and paradoxical. And a reader of the previous post might well have already thrown up her hands in exasperation at Deleuze’s manner of proceeding through seemingly arbitrary and unmotivated stipulation of characteristics or marks of his concepts. I have a good deal of sympathy for the exasperated reader, but contact with Deleuze’s evident philosophical power and rich inventiveness seem to me to greatly reward the effort of following him. One passage in the book helps explain, though perhaps not justify, Deleuze’s methods. At one point he is discussing the anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s famous paper of cetacean communication, and says: “He [Bateson] starts by going over very basic things, because that’s the American style. They aren’t familiar with our European-style process. They start with extremely simple terms, whereas we make deductions . . . they [the ‘Americans’] invent so many concepts; they invent a lot more concepts than we do because, for us, the invention of concepts is a very deductive process. . . [our process] is deduction occurring in confinement. For us, we do philosophy on an easel, in the end. Our easel is the history of philosophy” (pp. 129-30). One way of putting Deleuze’s point might be that the ‘Americans’, like Aristotle, begin by surveying the phenomena, so as in part to delimit the range of the topic. So if we ‘Americans’ wish to discuss artistic painting, we would consider (as I do in my work) a range that includes Giotto, Titian, Mu Qi, Jackson Pollock, and Cai Guo-Qiang. But Deleuze does not think that there are any limits to the phenomena discussed. There are only events, and further events, and so there is always something self-deceiving, self-limiting, and self-impoverishing about surveying the phenomena and then imagining that one has circumscribed something actual. So instead, one ‘creates a concept’ that one thinks addresses something interesting, important, and worth thinking about, and the relevant evidential basis is whatever grips one. For Deleuze in philosophy that’s especially the Stoics, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Lewis Carroll, Bergson, and Antonin Artaud; in artistic painting its painters discussed in the seminar. Deleuze is pleased if you just make of it what you will.
In my previous post I attempted to summarize the first fifty pages as presenting a novel conception and characterization of the creative process constitutive of artistic painting. On Deleuze’s account the painter begins by confronting an indeterminate range of clichés, attacks those clichés and so produces a ‘catastrophe, and then creates and deploys something he calls a ‘diagram’, out of which emerges what he calls pictorial facts. Although Deleuze does not use the term ‘creative process’, he seems to endorse at least something like my reconstruction in saying “I don’t think of a painting as a spatial reality; I really look at it temporally via the synthesis of time proper to painting: the before, the diagram, and the after.” (p. 82) He gives the concept of a diagram a surprisingly strong emphasis (while acknowledging that he’s not sure what a diagram is, and further whether the term ‘diagram’ is the right word for what he’s trying to get at (!) (p. 70)).
In his most sustained discussion of the distinctively pictorial diagram, he stipulates what he calls its five characteristics (pp. 70-82), its two ‘tendencies’ (pp. 84-5), and its three ‘positions’ (pp. 88-91). (Again, I’ll present Deleuze’s thoughts with minimal explication and return to them in the fourth part of this review for some analysis and reflection). The five characteristics are a mixed bag of qualities, function, and effects, and go like this (pp. 70-82): 1. The diagram presents a necessary intersection between two fundamentally linked ideas, ‘chaos’ and ‘germ’, both of which he had introduced earlier in the seminar. Roughly, ‘chaos’ is the effect of the attack on clichés, and ‘germ’ indicates that something emerges from the chaos; and, crucially, the painter establishes “a necessary relationship” (p. 70) between the two. 2. The diagram is “fundamentally manual” in that “[o]nly an unfettered hand can trace it” (p. 71). Surprisingly (to me), Deleuze does not go on to explicate this characteristic in relation to painting-qua-artifact, but rather immediately introduces the thought that painting involves a necessary relationship between the (unfettered) hand and the eye, and indeed one wherein “a hand [is] freed from all submission to the eye.” (p. 72) 3. A diagram is a “manual stroke-patch” that is “not yet line and color” but from which “pictorial lines and pictorial colors” emerge (p. 78). Deleuze asserts that pictorial lines are visual and made up of strokes, and puzzlingly adds that the strokes and the kind of lines they involve have “no visual reality” because the stroke involves a kind of line “that at no moment bears a constant direction” (p. 79). 4. The diagram functions “to get rid of any resemblance”, unmaking it “for the sake of a deeper resemblance” (ibid). Alternatively put, this deeper resemblance is a ‘presence’ or ‘presence-image’ (p. 80). Deleuze briefly explicates this point with reference to the Christian idea of an icon as something does not ‘resemble’ the divine person but rather presents a (non-resembling) image of the divine. Yet another way of putting this point is that the diagram “establishes a possibility of fact”, which if produced is a “pictorial fact, that is, the set of lines and colors”, something that simultaneously produces a new way of seeing, which Deleuze calls the ‘third eye’ (p. 82; earlier on p. 50 he also called this the ‘pictorial eye’). 5. The diagram must be ‘in place’. Deleuze contrasts being ‘in place’ with “just be[ing] in the painter’s head, and so seems to be indicating the point often made against R. G. Collingwood’s claim that a picture can be (ideally) complete in the mind of the painter before or aside from its actually being painted. But, again perhaps surprisingly, Deleuze’s emphasis is not on the material or spatial character of the painting, but rather that it has arisen in the right way, that is, in a temporal process constitutively involving the diagram. As he puts it: “I don’t think of a painting as a spatial reality. I really look at it temporally via the synthesis of time proper to painting: the before, the diagram, and the after.” (p. 82)
The two ‘tendencies’ (or ‘risks’ (ibid)) are characterized as kinds of failure, where something uninteresting or unachieved results from the (use of) the diagram. One tendency is that “the diagram takes over” which (somehow) allows nothing to emerge, resulting in a “pure chaos” (p. 83), variously characterized as everything being scrambled (p. 82), everything is blurred (p. 83), when the various planes making up the picture “fall on top of each other” (p. 84), or “the colors mix together, and this mixture is nothing but greyness” (ibid). The second tendency for failure involves the minimization of the diagram’s potential, which tends to result in the resultant picture being maximally tied to a (pre-existing) ‘pictorial order’. When this happens, the diagram loses its productive potentials and forces, and becomes “a sort of code” (p. 85).
In discussing the three ‘positions’ of the diagram, Deleuze seems, at least initially, to restrict himself to modern painting, which for him seems to range from the post-Impressionists Gauguin and Van Gogh (or perhaps starting earlier with Turner) to the present, which for him prominently includes the practitioners of art informel, the abstract painters discussed and favored by Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, and above all Francis Bacon. The distinctively modern artistic painting that matters is one that “confront[s] chaos up close in order to extract from it . . . a possible modern order” (p. 88). The first position is abstract painting, at least in the hands of Kandinsky, who minimizes chaos within the painting in the service of heralding “the spiritual life to come” (ibid):
The second position is Expressionism, whose “formula would be: let’s keep adding to chaos precisely this particle almost exceeding its limit in order for something to emerge from it” (ibid). Expressionism’s additions to chaos are in the service of increasing the likelihood that some rhythm might emerge from it:
The third position is ‘Figure’ (or ‘figural’, but not figuration), by which Deleuze understands the painter’s attempt to ‘measure’ chaos by “imposing a kind of limitation to its dimensions” (p. 90). This position includes most of the modern artists discussed here, including Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cézanne.
In the next post I’ll consider Deleuze’s use of art history to flesh out the diagram’s three positions, especially as it involves the different and historically varying hand-eye relations.
References and Works Consulted:
R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (1938)
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (1990)
--Difference and Repetition (1994)
--‘On Philosophy’, in Negotiations, 1972-1990 (1997)
---Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2003)
--On Painting (2025)
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (1994)
Michael Fried, ‘Three American Painters’, in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (1998)
Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture (1965)