Joseph Surber

Creativity in Deleuze:An Experiential Reading

Any reader of Deleuze is familiar with the peculiar way in which he constructs his philosophy and expresses his ideas. Without pausing, Deleuze often launches into philosophical constellations, abstract mathematical imagery, and grotesque bodily images that constitute the culmination of some concept or another. Likewise, Deleuze famously describes his textual interactions with other philosophers (especially in the monographs on Kant, Spinoza, etc.) as “a sort of buggery…or immaculate conception,”1 which produces a new, “monstrous” idea from within the philosophy of his subject. In these distinct rhetorical, metaphysical and philosophical movements, Deleuze manages to generate an ultimately creative philosophy focused as much on the imaginative process as reality. In this paper, I will outline different aspects of Deleuze's creative philosophy in an attempt to understand his project more thoroughly. First, I will catalogue and consider Deleuze's use of images to develop his concepts, focusing especially on bodily and chthonic images. From here, I will move to his interpretations of other philosophers, and conclude by thinking about the nature of his “constellations.”

More often than not, Deleuze's images are explored over a series of chapters, if not texts, constantly taking shape like statue carved bit by bit over a lifetime. Sometimes, however, they emerge suddenly, as a phantom which slowly fades away as one continues through the text. The former image, that which slowly takes shape over time, I shall call the concept-image; the latter shall be the hallucination. Keep in mind, though, that these two Deleuzian images are not entirely separate and function with a macrocosm-microcosm relationship. (On one hand, the concept-image can actually be constructed as a piece of visual art, following Deleuze's unintentional directions; on the other, the hallucinations merely crops up, allowing much more freedom and imagination in its representation.)

First, let us consider the concept-image. This category contains some of Deleuze's most well known and important concepts, such as the Body without Organs, the Refrain, schizophrenia, the Event, etc. While these concepts are indeed ideas (conceptions and authorizations of the world), they are also images, given distinct depictions. Taking one of these concepts, say the body without organs (BwO), we should be able to find not only a history, but a corresponding set of sketches as well. The BwO first appears in the Logic of Sense as at a most a notion used to describe a certain state, viz. a disorganized body: “on the one hand, the body of hatred, the parceled-out body sieve: 'head without a neck…'; but on the other hand, we encounter the glorious body without organs: 'formed in one piece,' without limbs, with neither voice nor sex…Dionysus dismembered, but also Dionysus the impenetrable.”2 Here, Deleuze provides the first set of sketches for the BwO: the sieve, the grotesquely inhuman “head without a neck,” and

1 Deleuze, Gilles et al. Negotiations: 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York; Columbia University Press, 1995: 6.

2 Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990: 129.

Dionysus. Like the images of some bizarre metaphysical collage, these sketches begin to form a rhetoric specific to the BwO.

From these three images, Deleuze (along with Guattari, when applicable) will develop not just a collage of disparate sketches, but a sculpture out of the BwO, enriching it in each subsequent text, particularly Capitalism and Schizophrenia3 and Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation.4 Looking at the chapter, “The Subject and Employment” from Anti-Oedipus, for example, Deleuze begins to carve a more distinct shape for the BwO, in which “[t]he body without organs is an egg: it is crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes”5. In this particular excerpt, Deleuze both adds to a previous image, and reveals a new one within it; these new lines and axes are simply the “sieve” restated, and the egg is the body upon which they exist. Further still, these crisscrossed lines are “traversed by gradients marking the transitions and the becomings, the destinations of the subject developing along these particular vectors.”6 With this subtle movement, the BwO finds its third dimension: its “axes and thresholds” are merely the representation of becomings, and the realization of certain, variable vectors within the virtual space. The BwO, then, is privileged with a distinctly virtual aura, especially within the visual space.

In the next major work on the BwO, the chapter “November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?”, the concept-image is not only further enhanced, but connected to other concepts within Deleuze's philosophical framework (as it already has been to becomings). First, the BwO incorporates a number of different bodies, namely hypochondriac bodies, paranoid bodies, schizo bodies, drugged bodies, and masochist bodies–all of which have “had enough of organs and wants to slough them off, or loses them.”7 Within Deleuze's oeuvre, each of these bodies has a certain connotation and connection with other concepts. The schizo body specifically is already part of a larger concept-image (schizophrenia), which even morphs into the field (schizoanalysis)8 that is continued in Deleuze and Guattari's independent work.

Beyond this connection to schizophrenia, the BwO takes on a new shape when mapped onto biological bodies, which are typically organized (a specific number of organs in specific arrangements). Quoting Burroughs, Deleuze asserts, “The organ changes when it crosses a threshold…'No organ is constant as regards either function or position,…sex organs sprout anywhere…the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments,'”9

which creates a rather unsettling imagine if imagined literally. Here Deleuze begins connecting

3 I'm using the two volumes: Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. London and New York: Continuum, 2004; and Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum, 2004.

4 After all, what begins in the Sense must end in Sensation. See Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

5 Anti-Oedipus, 21.6 Ibid., 21.7 A Thousand Plateaus, 150. 8 Schizoanalysis is even given its own section in Anti-Oedipus, “Introduction to Schizoanalysis,” covering its

foundation as a new field of both psychological and philosophical thought (though the latter also occurs partial in “Introduction: Rhizome” in A Thousand Plateaus).

9 Ibid., 152. Note, I have condensed his quotation of Burroughs.

virtuality and physicality within a biological model: an amorphous being (like an egg) with tiny axes and thresholds covering its exterior, growing different organs whenever necessary to respond to different intensities (pain, cold, etc.). These fluid organs, which actualize themselves according to intensities are precisely the vectors discussed above, and represent Deleuze's virtual in a physical (rather than abstract) dimension. Burroughs' virtual organs, however, begin to depart from the original basis for the concept-image (BwO), bordering on our next image–the hallucination.10

Moving from A Thousand Plateaus to Francis Bacon, one can see the shift from concept-images to hallucination; for, while Deleuze succinctly rehashes the BwO, he does not delve any develop the concept any further than he already has, using it instead to address Bacon's paintings. In discussing Bacon's work, however, Deleuze forges variations on aspects of the concept-image, often employing other non-distinct elements of language, art, or ideas. One these moments develops in “Hysteria,” as Deleuze builds off of Burroughs notion that the BwO simply sprouts organs in reaction to various amplitudes of intensities, disregarding organization. “Painting gives us eyes all over,” he asserts, “in the ear, in the stomach, in the lungs (the painting breathes),”11

distorting the human body to fit within the BwO subjected to art. Moreover, the final parenthetical note creates a unique connection between painting and certain type of BwO that the hallucination (the person covered in eyeballs) reproduces. Thus, instead of furthering the BwO, the hallucination materializes to illustrate the “hysterical body,” within the BwO. Likewise, in this hallucination, Deleuze creates an abstract analogue to Bacon's paintings in words. Instead of the various BwO organs found throughout Bacon's work (also known as Meat) are recreated in the viewer via the BwO. Therefore, Deleuze astutely asks, “Even in the meat, is there not a very distinct mouth, recognizable through its teeth, which cannot be confused with organs?”.12

Through my inspection of the BwO, then, we can see the varying levels of images at work in Deleuze. They are, to employ a Deleuzian phrase, a dual movement: the concept-image is like the singularity that forms a concept, the machine the cuts across the assemblage; the hallucination, though, is akin to the surface effect. Moreover, concept-images function as symbols or representations of the concept itself, but in a descriptive or visual sense. As can be seen above, however, the distinction between the two types of images is not a science, but an experiential strategy for consider Deleuze's use of imagery to create concept; philosophy, after all, is a creative task.

Keeping Francis Bacon in mind, it is now time to consider that infamous “buggery” for which Deleuze is either lauded or scorned.13 If read as not just “the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts,”14 but also a way of recreating and fabricating the concepts of others, all philosophy could be considered the sort of “buggery” Deleuze describes in Negotiations;

10 Who else but Burroughs could take us to the hallucination?11 Francis Bacon, 44.12 Ibid., 42.13 Strong scholarly reaction for and against Deleuze are both abundant and well known (especially those against,

such as Žižek's and Badiou's). 14 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy?. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New

York: Columbia University Press, 1994: 3.

Aristotle, for example, reacts to Plato, Marx to Plato, and so on. Indeed, unless a philosophy is developed exclusively ab intra, it relies on (or resists, disjoints, or perverts) foundational concepts, even if they are those accepted in the “common sense.” With that, I will investigate what Deleuze means by “buggery…or immaculate conception,” by looking at his words (Negotiations) and his work (Francis Bacon, Foucault).

In his “Letter to a Harsh Critic,” Deleuze outlines his thoughts on the history of philosophy, and the role of his monographs quite clearly. According to him, “[t]he history of philosophy plays a patently repressive role in philosophy,”15 that tells thinkers that they cannot even begin to form concepts unless they have read essentially everything on the topic. And, although he seemingly advocates for new “methods and new rules, a new approach,” he also admits readily to “[“doing”] history of philosophy.”16 In order to cope with this repressive pressure, Deleuze sought two projects: first, he “[concentrated]…on authors who challenged the rationalist tradition in history,” which I will consider later on; and second, by “taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous.”17 Thus, it is clear that Deleuze intends to use an author's own concepts, in his own way, to produce something new, or rather reveal something hidden. Perhaps this project should be renamed from “buggery” to productive analysis–analysis that is not simply an assessment or exegesis, but a creative probing.

How, then, does he probe his subjects in the monographs to produce such monstrous offspring? Let us consider two rather sympathetic monographs, Foucault and Francis Bacon. In the former, Deleuze attends not only to a philosophy, but to the memory and vindication of a colleague. Thus, at least partially, any monstrous child produced through Foucault also belongs to Deleuze, by association.18 Nevertheless, in the text, Deleuze meticulously works through the catalogue of Foucault's ideas (statements, power-relations, knowledge), ultimately culminating in a proclamation of life before moving to the fold. But why life? Perhaps, in the sections prior to “Foldings,” Deleuze attempts not to recreate or fabricate, but to reveal Foucault–to bestow him a new role in the world of ideas. In other words, Foucault is stripped of his old title, “The Theoretician of Power,”19 and presented a number of new ones: ergo “A New Archivist,” “A New Cartographer,” or “The New Vitalist.” This final title, I assert is where Deleuze is truly doing something creative with and through Foucault, repositioning the “death of man” as an affirmation of life.

Commenting on the creation of bio-power and -politics, Deleuze notes that abolition of the death penalty and the rise of the holocaust “grow 'for the same reason,' testifying all the more

15 Negotiations, 5.16 Ibid., 5-6.17 Ibid., 6. My italics.18 In fact, in “Postscript on Control Societies,” for example, Deleuze uses Foucault (among other “allies”) as the

basis for his own ideas. 19 This title given to him in Habermas, Jürgen. “Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present” in Kelly, Michael (ed.)

Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994: 152. This assessment of Foucault represents many of the critiques mention in Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006: 1.

effectively for the death of man.”20 Yet, in order to move from this point (one often used against Foucault), Deleuze must perform a theoretical about-face, much as Foucault does to reveal power-relations within history. Deleuze proceeds:

“But when power in this way takes life as its aim or object, then resistance to power already puts itself on the side of life, and turns life against power: 'life as a political object was in a sense taken at face value and turned back against the system that was bent on controlling it'.”21

In other words, the death of man (the politicization of life, and the creation of a bio-politics), signifies a new vital force: resistance. Furthermore, resistance is just life's force, but one unique to life, one that “cannot be confined.”22

Here, Deleuze recaptures something in Foucault, but not anything monstrous; rather, Foucault's definition of life (according to Deleuze) is beautiful and affirmative: it does not impound man within the walls of power (pouvoir), but provides him with the power (puissance) to stand up. In this conception of life, the hierarchical structure often thought of as power-relations is flattened by the force of life. More importantly, though, life/living is contrasted with man/men, “since man himself is a form of imprisonment for man.”23 Instead, Foucault/Deleuze offers us life as pure immanence: man is a subject, lifeis a presence.

Turning briefly to Bacon, the situation is somewhat different, as Bacon himself may also be guilty of “buggery” within the history of art. After all, is his Study After Velásquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X not also a “monstrous child” founded in “all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocation, and hidden emissions”?24 Accordingly, much in the same way Deleuze vindicated Foucault as an affirmative philosopher, he creates an image of Bacon as a fellow “bugger.” Throughout the text, Deleuze differentiates Bacon from other painters by establishing the unique way he approaches movement and the body. In the “Author's Introduction to the English Edition,” Deleuze asserts that, “What fascinates Bacon is not movement, but its effect on an immobile body,” and further that, this is the relationship of “materials and forces; to make these forces visible through their effects on the flesh.”25 In each case, then, Bacon must warp and disfigure his subject (particularly their flesh) in order to make show the nature of material (flesh) and forces (the violence of any and all movement).

Other than “Body, Meat, and Spirit: Becoming-Animal”–which dismantles the body, returning it to its material base (meat)–the chapter “Athleticism” best demonstrates Deleuze's refashioning of Bacon's work. In this chapter, Deleuze describes a “double exchange” between “the material structure and the Figure, and between the Figure and the field,”26 which defines the

20 Foucault, 92. 21 Ibid., 92.22 Ibid., 92.23 Ibid., 92.24 Negotiations, 6.25 Francis Bacon, xxix.26 Ibid., 13.

function of the painting, in lieu of a narrative or external movement. The first movement–from the material to the Figure–is the force of the structure on the figure, which at once attempts to “imprison” the Figure and allows him to move within “the contour” of the “apparatus.” 27 Rather than depicting a gymnast flipping through the air or a toreador flashing his cape, then, Deleuze asserts that Bacon captures the movement of the material structure of an event; say, the wind acting on the cape and the flesh, the individual convulsions that create muscular movement, etc. The second movement–from the Figure to the structure/field–is, on the other hand, “the body that attempts to escape from itself”28 by means of itself, via some exertion or force. Thus, the double movement is some sort of violent blending between the Figure and the field, a constant de- and reterritorialization.

For all that, however, the image is still static–paint on canvas; all movement is accomplished via sensation. In Francis Bacon, therefore, Deleuze develops an interplay between Bacon's concepts and his own to produce a dual-buggery. In the first layer, Bacon draws upon certain other artist as Deleuze does with philosophers, either reframing or distorting their techniques to produce something exciting and new. The second layer, likewise, is where Deleuze uses Bacon's words, work, and concepts to produce something new, namely the logic of sensation. Hence, in Foucault as in Bacon, Deleuze's project is clearly a productive analysis, rather than a straight-forward monograph.

Still, Deleuze does not rely solely on ideological buggery to address and interpret the work of other philosophers. Beside generally privileging Nietzsche, who “gets up to all sorts of things behind your back,”29 he also tends to create connections between philosophers he admires (as mentioned above). How Deleuze creates these connections, however, is another creative task in itself, one much more akin to immaculate conception than buggery. In a parenthetical note, he admits, “I see a secret link between Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza, and Nietzsche, constituted by their critique of negativity, their cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority…the denunciation of power…and so on”30 which creates a historical-philosophical trajectory of concepts, outside of time. This type of history, I assert, resembles Benjamin's Jetztzeit and the “constellation,”31 the basis for an affirmative history outside the organizational confines of linear time. Thus, Benjamin, like Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, strives to reorganize thought and the creation of concepts rhizomatically.

Before moving on to Deleuze's constellatory connections, I must first clarify my understanding of the terms Jetztzeit and constellation. Jetztzeit, according to Benjamin, “is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit],”32 or a heterogeneous time that affirms time itself. Unfortunately, there is no Deleuzian analog to this term, though it is somewhat related to affirmation and immanence, as it is highly positive and

27 Ibid., 14-1528 Ibid., 15: “This is no longer the problem of the place, but rather of the event.”29 Negotiations, 6.30 Negotiations, 6.31 From Benjamin, Walter. “These on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York:

Shocken Books, 2007.32 Illuminations, 261.

flattens time. Constellations, the second term, are a sort of dot-connecting between one's own era and other historical time periods, with a mind towards the future. Benjamin believes constellations are formed when one

“stops telling the sequence of events like beads on a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellations which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus, he establishes a conception of the present as the 'time of the now' which is shot through with chips of messianic time.”33

This aversion to linearity and organization once again recalls the whole project of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, as well as quoted sections of “Letter to a Harsh Critic.” Most interestingly, though, is the notion of messianism, or transcendence. In this conception of history (constellatory history, or simply constellation), there is not one single messianic (transcendent) end point, but infinite transcendences spread throughout time. Hence, Deleuze's “secret links” break certain thinkers free of any historical context and unite them conceptually.

Two such constellations appear in the two volumes Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition. In the former, Deleuze uses the 18th series to consider “Three Images of Philosophers”: ascenders, descenders, and stoics. Here, the constellation of philosophers is not concrete or entirely decipherable, but can be considered generally. In the first group (ascenders), Deleuze references Plato, and other hierarchical philosophers, finding that this is the popular image of philosophy (philosophy of the victors). Generally, Deleuze has more sympathy for the second group (descenders), as they reject, “the philosopher with his head in the clouds,”34

favoring depth, a cthonic philosophy of and for the earth. Here, we have Empedocles, other pre-Socratics, and, to some extent, Nietzsche. The third group, however, holds a special place as the philosopher of the “extraordinary art of surfaces,”35 embodies in the stoics and cynics, such as Diogenes, Antisthenes, Chrysippus, and so on. Yet, although these three images are separated, the latter two are held together through a common thread–Nietzsche. In Nietzsche, the pre-Socratics, Stoics and Cynics are united, via a tunneling “ever deeper” into the depths followed by a resurfacing “from the renewed perspective of an eye peering out from the depths”36 (another excellent bio-cthonic hallucination). Thus, Deleuze constellates Empedocles, Nietzsche, Diogenes, Chrysippus, and even the image of Hercules to re-imagine philosophy and the philosopher's role. Clearly, this fits Benjamin's Jetztzeit, as a 19th century mind unites pre- and post-Socratic philosophies under a common banner.

Similarly, Difference and Repetition offers multiple constellations, most notably the univocal constellation (“Difference in Itself”), and the three syntheses of time (“Repetition for Itself”). Like the “Three Images of Philosophers,” the univocal constellation links different representative thinkers to one another, creating a telescopic view of the history of philosophy that ultimately incorporates Deleuze. Here, the three voices of Duns Scotus, Spinoza, and Nietzsche

33 Ibid., 263.34 Logic of Sense, 127.35 Ibid., 133.36 Ibid., 128.

resonant as one to produce a univocal philosophy. According to Deleuze, there is only “one ontological proposition: being is univocal,” and moreover that, “there has only ever been one ontology, that of Duns Scotus, which gave being a single voice.”37 In terms of Deleuze's argument, Duns Scotus is also important due to his insistence on the subtleties of individuation within the creation and understanding of concepts.38 Spinoza furthers the univocal proposition, by truly demolishing any hierarchy, and allowing beings to become truly expressive and affirmative (certainly “shot through with messianic time”). Likewise, Nietzsche continues Spinoza's work, this time allowing difference within the univocal proposition, through the eternal return: “The wheel in the eternal return is at once both production of repetition on the basis of difference and selection of difference on the basis of repetition.”39 In other words, univocity is not merely “sameness,” but difference, repetition–even subtly–produced via one voice. Here, Deleuze demonstrates univocity not only through his analysis, but in its very structure: the constellation and Jetztzeit are indeed coupled with the univocal proposition, and produce through action. Thus, as as a productive act, constellations are also inventive and creative structures.

Ultimately, so much of Deleuze's philosophy is inherently creative–not just in the sense that he creates concepts, but that he imagines, expresses, and explores concepts rather than simply reproducing the history of philosophy. As I have shown, Deleuze also employs non-philosophical methods to build his concepts, and even to interact with others; he is at once a painter, a historian, a musician, and a author. Most importantly, though, this type of philosophy affirms life through the creative process, breaking philosophy free from the repressive discourses of power.

37 Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994: 35. 38 Ibid., 38.39 Ibid., 42.