All i Ez Osborne Adorno Deleuze

7/30/2019 All i Ez Osborne Adorno Deleuze

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Peter Osborne & Eric Alliez38 39An Exchange

PETER OSBORNE & ERIC ALLIEZ

Philosophy andContemporary Art After

Adorno and Deleuze:An Exchange

Peter Osborne: I cannot begin without saying something about these

two cartoons. Eric and I are confronted here with visual parodies of our

assumed masters, so it seems as if it is incumbent upon us to define

ourselves in relation to them. Adorno is looking decidedly anxious, and

one wonders whats going on beneath the table. Whereas Deleuze is very

relaxed, he hasnt a care in the world. This puts me at an immediate disad-

vantage being associated with this anxious, rather guilty figure. What

is he so anxious about?

Perhaps it is the fate of his tradition.

It would be misleading to reduce the kinds of things that Eric and

I are currently writing about art to representations of these two dead

cartoon figures. Nor should it be assumed that the ways in which we

understand these two philosophers are necessarily very close to the

standard pictures of them, particularly in the Anglo-American litera-

ture, which has a tendency to import French and German philosophers,

academic-industrially, as brand names, to identify them with one or two

key thoughts, and then to market them in that way, endlessly repeating

the same few formulae, until their untruth is transparent. Nonetheless, my

thinking about art has certainly been formed in the context of the British

reception of the Frankfurt School in the late 1970s and early 1980s, so I

will begin by saying something about that, and Adorno in particular.When people talk about the Frankfurt School nowadays theres

a tendency for them to be thinking of Habermas, as if he still has some-

thing to do with it. However, the historical presuppositions about critical

theory which underlie most of what I write are, first, that the Benjamin-

Adorno line of thought is critically primary, and second, that this tradition

ends in or around 1968. Habermas belonged to it when he was young, but

from 1968 onwards Habermas can no longer be associated with critical

theory in its classical sense. This is for both philosophical and political rea-

sons, but its primarily politically determined: Adorno was unable to come

to terms with student radicalism and Habermas famously denounced the

left of the German student movement as fascist. So 1968 is a very impor-tant moment for both of the traditions we are going to talk about today.

Obviously, it is vi tal to the way that Eric understands Deleuze 1968 is

very much the beginning of something in the French tradition. But for me,

1968 is the endof the indigenous form of the German critical tradition,

because it was a tradition that could not deal with the radicalism of 1968,

it could not incorporate i t into its thought with the notable exception

of Marcuse, perhaps, but there are complications even there. (By 1968


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was but a passing fad within the self-misrecognition of this Modernism

a reified hypertrophy of one of its historical specifications, like all individu-

al Modernisms, to which this kind of misrecognition has hitherto been

endemic. Now, if the broader coordinates of this tradition (dialectical

reason) enter into crisis in 1968, for essentially political reasons, that is

the time at which the great canon of early-twentieth-century Modernism

is running into the ground as well. Its not the end of Modernism, at least

not for me, but it is the end of a certain Modernism, a certain hegemonic

Modernism, of which Greenbergian Modernism is the paradigmatic

representative in the visual arts. This was also the period of the collapse

of the plausibility of writing about art on the basis of the historical impor-

tance of just a few great artists (Schnberg, Beckett). So there is a multi-

ple break here, in the artistic field, coeval with the political break of 1968.

This is the second thing of importance about Adorno, I think: he

recognised this break although he was not able to understand it other

than negatively. This is perhaps one of the things that Eric and I are going

to disagree about: the artistic significance of this break. I think that there

is a break in the mid-1960s that is artistic as well as political. At the end of

the 1980s, my project became to mediateAesthetic Theory with the history

of contemporary art since the 1960s. This involves rethinking this break

dialectically, in positive as well as negative terms in terms of the produc-tion of new critical concepts and new forms of art. How does the frame-

work ofAesthetic Theory have to change in order to be able to think art

since the 1960s, on the assumption that there is some kind of a rupture or

a break in the 1960s? In some way in the course of the 1960s, however one

is going describe it, something happens to the ontology of art, to what art

is, that makes it different from then onwards.

This has something to do with the generic character of art,

post-medium the fact that medium is no longer an ontological category.

You can no longer be an artist by just being a painter. You can struggle

with the question of how to make art using painting, which is

a difficult and productive enterprise, but just being a painter isnt enoughany more to make an artist. In the course of trying to think this field, I

came to the conclusion that of all the complex and overlapping move-

ments within the art of the 1960s, there is a critical privilege to Concep-

tual Art, by vir tue of the fact that its the art through which one is most

clearly able to articulate this ontological break in the character of art.

It is in this is the sense that tI argue that contemporary art is constitu-

tively Post-Conceptual.

Marcuse was no longer exactly indigenous to the German tradition; nor

was 1968 a new beginning in thought even for Marcuse. It was rather

the occasion for an engagement the positive engagement of an existing

structure of thought with a new socio-political reality which, however

admirable and productive in the short term, did not give rise to a new

theoretical or practical project.)

So, the immediate problem for anybody coming out of the trad-

ition of German critical theory today, philosophically, in relation to politics

or to art theory, is: how can one extend it, develop it and rethink it after

1968 especially if, like me, you believe that Habermas after 1968 is essen-

tially a philosophical version of the Marshall Plan? (It has been Habermass

historical role to introduce American pragmatism into German philoso-

phy, and thereby to domesticate or accommodate its critical tradition to

the post-war consensus of US hegemony.)

There are two things to note about Adornos later work in this

context. The first is that it is largely an attempt to think the post-war

significance of Walter Benjamins thought. In many ways, Adorno is a

rewriting and a rethinking of Benjamin for the post-war period. What

that means in relation to art is that it involves the mediation of Benjamins

thought with the subsequent history of Modernism. For me, the best way

to readAesthetic Theory (which I take to be the most important philosophi-cal work about art written in the twentieth century) is basically as a massive

mediation of Benjamins philosophy with the history of (a musically inflect-

ed) Modernism. Adornos Modernism is also literary, of course, and by the

1960s hes beginning to think about visual art, particularly in the essays

about the convergence and collapse of distinctions between the arts. In

those late essays, his thought begins to resonate with some of the distinc-

tive issues of the post-medium condition of contemporary art. But its

only very late, in the mid-1960s, that he picks up on a sense that medium

is no longer a basic category in the philosophy of art, or rather that

medium is no longer of ontological significance (although he would never

have put it like that of course, given his anti-Heideggerian aversion to theterm ontology).

For me, Adorno represents the project of mediating the trans-

disciplinary post-Kantianism of Benjamins thought with the history of

Modernism, where Modernism is meant in a very broad temporal

sense not in a periodising sense, but in the more basic sense of the tradi-

tion of the new. Modernism is a certain temporal logic of negation. As

such, Modernism carries on. From this point of view, Postmodernism


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this problematic point of view then, I want immediately to pay homage

to Peter Osborne for his sharp and open re-presentation of his trajectory,

and to express my real pleasure at being part of this exchange with him.

But I have to add straight away that the disadvantage here is obviously

and paradoxically mine on two levels.

First, because I essentially share the historico-philosophical diag-

nosis he proposes regarding the Frankfurt Schools endin 1968, as well as

the critical distance he introduces, apropos the 1968 break, in relation to

the historical and philosophical forms under which Conceptual Art proper

defined itself. (But, it might be asked, is it possible properly to divorce

the latter from an ontological interrogation of the specific inaesthetics /

anaesthetics it pretended to develop? I appreciate the impropercharac-

ter of Peters post-conceptual affirmation despite a certain souvenirof

the Lyotardian operation, the motto of which became the Rewriting of

Modernity / Postmodernity: the Post-Modern as always already implied in

the Modern, as its excessive truth, etc.). Consequently, Peter has already

appropriated for himself criticisms I could have developed with regards

to the double tradition he is supposed to belong to. And indeed he does

even better, since his thinking begins from this self-critical axis, focusing his

analysis on the contemporary art that opened up after the 1968 break.

This is my second disadvantage and a highly paradoxical one,if we think about the contrast between the anxious Adorno, the fate

of whose tradition is to end in 1968, and the relaxed Deleuze, whose

philosophy starts over again from 1968 and the subsequent works with

Guattari. A paradox perhaps hinted at by Peter with his mischievous

remark: Deleuze hasnt a care in the world. The issue here is not at all

concerned with the refutation of the re-presentation of Deleuzian thought

as leading us Out of this World (such counter-argumentation would

anyway fall outside the context of the present exchange, since this is not,

I think, exactly Peters position); it is rather how to confront the paradox

determined by the suggestion that the 1968 philosophy par excellence(the

Deleuzian translation of a biophilosophy into a biopolitics, as assembled[agence] between Deleuze and Guattari) hasnt a care in the (contemporary)

art world. Indeed, fromAnti-dipus toA Thousand Plateaus, from Francis

Bacon (the very next book published by Deleuze alone afterA Thousand

Plateaus) to the chapter on art in What is Philosophy?(co-signed with Guat-

tari), there is no immediate trace of a direct investigation into so-called

contemporary art. When the question does emerge explicitly, despite

everything, at the very end of that chapter where art is analysed qua

The problem and well come on to this in more detail later

on, and Im sure well have different views about it is that the historical

difficulty for criticism about conceptual art, and the critical difficulty in

articulating and imposing the idea that contemporary art is constitutively

Post-Conceptual, is that as a historical movement Conceptual Art was

constituted by a philosophical misunderstanding of itself. It was constituted

through an absolutisation of an opposition between concept and aesthetic,

and it pursued the programme of the absolutisation of the anti-aesthetic.

There are a variety of forms of this, the best-known being the Kosuth-

ian version of the reduction of art to propositional form. But there are a

number of different versions of that. One of the critical tasks Ive been try-

ing to undertake in different contexts is to articulate how and in what way

it is that Conceptual Art is this critically privileged moment.

But to disengage the critical understanding of Conceptual Art

from its self-understanding in the writings of people like Kosuth is actu-

ally quite a difficult thing to do, and its because of that that I think it

clearer to call contemporary art Post-Conceptual. The problem with this,

however, is that it might lead people to think that I mean Conceptual Art

was indeed what it thought it was, but now theres something else, which

simply comes after it. I dont mean that. Its a philosophically difficult thing

to say, but ontologically theres a sense in which Conceptual Art is itselfPost-Conceptual. Ontologically, what Conceptual Art did was inaugurate

contemporary art as Post-Conceptual art. But if it did that, the question

is, well then, where is the Conceptual Art, proper? The properly (or as

I would say, strong) Conceptual Art was the philosophical illusion carried

by the self-understanding of the movement of Conceptual Art. So Concep-

tual Art is a fantasy of the critical discourse of a Conceptual Art that was

always already Post-Conceptual, relative to this fantasy.

Maybe this is a good time to let Eric in.

* * *

Eric Alliez: Deleuze oblige, philosophically, I dont really believe in discus-

sion. This is because the natural dialectics of discussion rarely give birth

to dialogues. And I dont say a dialogue, but rather dialogues, accentuating

a plural that could free a play of non- identified multiplicities un jeu de et

entre multiplicits insofar as the two supposed interlocutors are able to

project newinterventions only from and through a hyper-problematisation

of their respective positions in a constitutive relation to the present. From


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I proposed, as an interesting provocation, to submit to this question of

sensation (Every / any sensation is a question, say Deleuze and Guattari)

the supposedly classical sequence of modern art (from Delacroix to

Czanne) in order to show how it has been historically (un-)determined by

a new concept of sensation whose reality condition in terms of new percepts

and affects as well as in terms of percepts and affects of the new itself is

commonly named hallucination. The hallucination identifies itself with the

productive differential force that constructs those operations without which

there would be no expression of the excess of the visible in a logic of sensa-

tion. What I called the Eye-Brain refers to this construction of the sensible

that depends strictly on a denaturalisation and cerebralisation of the gaze,

and which already signifies, through a critical and clinical problematisation

of the very notion of the art-image, a kind of multi-media confrontation and

de-naturation of the painting-form (Manet and Seurat are the major vectors

of this process). In relation to Deleuze, it has been stimulating to practice

in the field of the history of modern art the kind of operations and mise-en-

variations he undertook in relation to the history of philosophy. My goal was

a radicalisation of Deleuzes anti-phenomenological standards (which makes

him say that Presence is an all too pious category), through an examina-

tion of the conceptual components of a plastic thought which, despite com-

ing from outside the concept, captures some of its discursiveand non-discursive forces

By introducing Matisse a new Matisse, with and against

Duchamp into the game, I attempted, as a necessary provocation in

relation to contemporary art, to complexify its archaeology while aiming

for the most radical critique of the aesthetic frame of the painting-image-

form. The question was how to project the vitalist constructivism at stake

in the Deleuzo-Guattarian aisthesic into a historical becoming (Peter would

say a mediation) that could incorporate a critical alternative to the

Duchampian dematerialisation of the art-form reduced to language games

about art in a constructivism of the signifier (the historical nominalist

Duchamp). This was what I called, following the Nietzscheo-Bergsonismwhich (historically and ontologically) gave birth to Fauvism, Matisse-

Thought: an energetic constructivism experimenting with an environmen-

tal decorativity which, in its expansion beyond the site of architecture qua

the first of the arts (Dewey, Deleuze & Guattari), invests the life-space.

Now, one doesnt pass from the last of Matisses installations to,

for example, Gordon Matta-Clarks anarchitecture by an intensification

of the problematics of art and life at the exclusive level of an immanent

a pragmatic experiment with blocs of sensation which seeks to rediscover,

to restore the infinite it is in terms uncompromisingly critical of the

dematerialisation proposed by Conceptual Art and its doxicrematerialisa-

tion in judgements about what is to count as art (a formal game au nom

de lart). In a way, beyond my agreement with this critique, Im tempted

to deduce my whole research programme of the last ten years from a

confrontation with this apparently wholly anachronistic position in which

Romanticism would be taken (quite logically) to be the last (strong) condi-

tion to redeem Modernism. After Deleuze and Guattari, my hypothesis

reads on the contrary: neither(Romanticism) nor(Modernism), precisely

because the question is howto extend intensively and experimentally the

affirmation of a politics of sensation that would undo the most common

conceptual representations of contemporary art. As we know, contem-

porary art is 1) in general, exclusively focused on the Duchampian legacy,

and 2) radically cut off from the long duration of Modernity because the

latter has been de facto abandoned to the modernist / mediumnic teleology

of aesthetic form (with so-called Postmodernism as the most banal version

of this reduction of Modernity to Modernism).

Before pursuing this last point, a methodological remark that

may approximate Peters own: with regard to Deleuze, Deleuze &

Guattari, or Guattari, my approach is not exegetic but constructiveand pro-spective, meaning that this corpus is not itself the object of my

investigation but rather its modulable instrument and horizon a horizon

which does not exclude air pockets and hijackings. It is then precisely not

my intention here to play the role of superior Deleuzian, the one who

would follow for real the lessons of the Master (never writing about

but always in between and with, giving primacy to the use or practice

of thought rather than to describing its exercise, etc.). The aim is rather

to enact constructively a constructivist philosophy that does not cease to

think in terms offorces and not offorms (this, in parenthesis, is the very

first principle of the Deleuzian diversion of the history of philosophy), which

intends to reinvent the knot (nouage) between philosophy and art startingfrom the constitutive relationship between force and sensation, and which

thus figures art as an experimental assemblage of force and sensation

whose deforming logic(a logic of sensation) is vitally aisthesicrather than

aesthetic. (In the visual arts, to put it briefly, I understand by aesthetics,

by the aesthetic image of art, the celebration of the art-form under

the pureform of an image which is ideally reflexive with regard to its

own medium.)


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sensation, but as a constellation of determinate, institutionalisedoppositions,

of conceptual as well as affective significance.

In Britain, art-theoretical Deleuzianism offers a retrospective (intel-

lectual) legitimation of a period of anti-intellectualism in British art since the

late 1980s, and a re-legitimation of certain existential notions

of the artist (Bacon is a really unfortunate paradigm here), via affirmative

categories of affect and force, which are obviously also not unconnected to

the booming market in contemporary art. This is not a comfortable con-

junction and it is unquestionably connected to the valoration of painting. It

is certainly dialectically witty to invest a rethought painting with the force

of life, against what Eric calls art-Form, but I am not sure it is convincing;

not only in practice because one cannot find paintings that exhibit such

force, today, in the context of our cultural present but also theoretically,

because the manoeuvre looks too much like an inverted version of precisely

that kind of play with the signifier painting which you find, and oppose so

strongly, in the historical Duchamp.

For me all of this is connected to a more general phenomenon,

which goes well beyond Deleuze: a certain cultural conservatism that is the

other side of the philosophical and political radicalism of contemporary

French philosophy, or French philosophy after 1968 which would be a

better way of putting it. This is partly to do with philosophy as an institu-tionalised field (which is a trans-national phenomenon), but it is also some-

thing specific to French intellectual life, something to do with the way its

wedded to its national narrative. In art, the moment that mattered was that

moment in the history of painting from the post-revolutionary period at the

beginning of the nineteenth century through to late Matisse. One can see

Deleuze, and in a different way, Erics work, as an attempt to extend and

rewrite rather than destroy that tradition. The dilemma for that tradition

was: where was the French painter of the 1950s who could continue the tra-

dition? That was the moment of Existentialism, so where is the French Exis-

tential painter? There is no French Existential painter (Giaccometis sculpture

is a weak stand-in), so Bacon is given naturalisation papers. Bacon becomes

the great missing French Existential painter. This fits, but its a narrowly na-

tional narrative, extended in competition with another national narrative: the

US narrative, the Greenbergian narrative, which said art could be French (art

could be painting and painting could be French), but only until World War II,

and then it was going to be American. Theres a sense in which French critical

discourse has accepted this narrative by continuing to fixate on its own great

moment, through the nineteenth century to World War II.

becoming of art . To invest the powers of sensation politically in a totally

new practical and theoretical sense of this word requires a direct and

general social expansion of all the matters of expression of art. This 1968

motto, politics of sensation which perhaps expresses 1968 tout court,its

force as event pro-poses art as a sensational problematisation of the

relationships between construction and expression whose first ontologi-

cal effect is to disorganise the whole system of sensible evidence and

discursive recognition in relation to the new forces of subjectivation it

mobilises This is where Deleuze does not proceed without Guattari.

* * *

PO Let me say a couple of things in response to that: first, aboutDeleuze, Deleuzianism and the aesthetic, and second, about some of the

more general philosophical issues. There is a problem in the current Anglo-

American reception of Deleuze into art theory, which is not reducible to,

but which is nonetheless not unrelated to, the structure of Deleuzes

thought. This is that the distinction between Deleuzes notions of affect and

force, on the one hand, and something like aesthetic, on the other hand,

is subordinated to their mutual opposition to the realm of the conceptu-

al at least with regards to the way in which that opposition is constructedin What is Philosophy? This homology makes Deleuzes affect/ force appear

as (because it takes the structural place of) a recoding of aesthetic. And

this appearance is no mere appearance, since it is precisely sensation that is

at issue. It is reinforced by the fact that the other main text at issue here,

the text on art, is the text on Bacon: lets not forget that the logic

of sensation is the logic of paintings by Francis Bacon. As a result, Deleuz-

ianism in contemporary Anglo-American art theory fits perfectly into the

current trend towards a restitution of aesthetics philosophically, art-histor-

ically and art-critically. Indeed, it is the perfect medium for a disavowed

restitution of aesthetics, which presents itself as its opposite, namely some-

thing radically new, something contemporary at least theoretically (in the

domain of theory). It has greater difficulty doing this in relation to art

practice itself, but then theory functions here, increasingly, as a terminologi-

cal mask for practices to which it has very little actual relations. Deleuzian-

ism offers another way of not having to talk about the things people have

been finding difficulty talking about for the last ten or twenty years: critical-

ity in art , in particular, but also the artistic specificity and peculiarity of the

development of the art / non-art relation not within a generalised field of


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through processes of opposition, conflict and struggle that can be

conceptually represented, summarised, in terms of the idea of constitutive

negation. So, if we take your own example of the environmental dimension

of Matisses later painting practice: for me, its initial or first critical

meaning derives from its negation of the canvas, its negation of the limits

of the canvas in your terms, the limits of the prevailing painting-form.

And it is hard for you to avoid presenting it like that yourself. As soon as

you question something historically, you set up the question of its meaning

and value in terms of temporal relations, and you understand it relation-

ally principally via negation. But the determinacy of such negations does

not derive wholly from what is negated, the determinacy is in the rela-

tions, and hence in the relational aspect of its positive, material which

also means its aesthetic / sensational features. To understand it in purely

positive ontological terms as a becoming opposed to (rather than constitu-

tive of) history, insulates it from its own relationality, and mystifies its

becoming, cutting off its construction from any existing relations between

its elements, including its negation of them. I understand modernism as the

collective affirmation of the historical culture of temporal negation. So there

is affirmation here for me too affirmation of and via negation. In my view,

such a culture is pretty much irresistible; it is just a question of how

conceptually self-conscious, and how collective, it is and what it s collec-tives are, of course.

I find a lot to agree with and admire in your critical art-historical

revisionism, but it seems at odds with the parallel post-Nietzschean

discourse of a pure affirmation of forces, affirmation of life. Could there

really be a truly vitalist art history beyond a pure positivism, of course?

Does a vitalist really need a sense of history?

* * *

EA Lets see if I can cut a long story or, more exactly, a counter-

history short, without falling into the usual trap of the discussion-model:

objections, replies to the objections, new objections, etc. In this case, the

first attack is somehow always the good one because it has been launched

from within a totally different problematic which re-codifies and neces-

sarily dis-figures the first position from a superior level. The situation is, if

possible, worse when the difference at stake has been conceived through

a constitutive opposition (and contradiction): the discussion then con-

forms to a dialectical reformatting that forbids from the very beginning

In this respect, Erics work on Matisse is best read as counter to

Greenberg and what Greenbergianism became (with Greenberg no longer

on board) in Minimalism and Conceptual Art. Its a brilliant, perverse prov-

ocation, in all k inds of ways it says that Matisse was already proto-Alan

Kaprow, for example, the inventor of the environmental; and also, more

surprisingly, a Constructivist but it is still a recoding, a wild recoding, of

a body of work and a critical paradigm that belong to the past. Maybe I

am over-playing this point, but personally I think that all these discourses

and practices were destroyed in the 1960s by a multiplicity of different

practices and the different, determinate forms of negation of existing

practices embodied in the new practices. We need to think the field of

contemporary art established during that period in a different and much

more complex way, which can in no way be reduced to Erics attribution

of a general exclusive focus on the Duchampian legacy. The Duchampian

dematerialisation of the art-form reduced to language games about art in

the constructivism of the signifier is by no means the only non-Deleuzian

game in town. Contemporary art is a complex but critically determinate

field, a constellation of negations, which do not submit to philosophical

positions that ignore its history since the beginning of the 1960s.

So there are multiple problems for a proto-Deleuzian art theory,

I think: theres the problem that affect as opposed to concept restoresas much as it rewrites the field of the aesthetic; theres the traditionalism

of the privileging of painting; and because it is France, painting in France,

theres the privileging not just of the past, but a past that has long taken

the form of a national heritage. All this is a long way from the cultural-

political field (not just politics of sensation but also of course sexual

politics and anti-imperialist politics!) established in the wake of 1968.

But perhaps my discourse here is itself too immediately cultural-

political, too forced. There are some basic philosophical issues at stake

here, determining the way we think differently about the ontology of

contemporary art: crudely, post-Hegelian versus post-Nietzschean

thought; dialectical negation versus affirmation, or historical ontology

and judgement versus affirmation/becoming. The opposition is not as

straightforward as it looks those posts carry a complex history of

engagements but it is still a decisive one. One can condense it into a

difference, or a set of differences, about history. For me, history in the

collective singular is the speculative horizon and transcendental condition

of intelligibility of historical events and practices. Ontology is always

historical ontology, dialectical ontology, the production of the new


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the affirmation of a non-dialectical difference, a difference it denatures by

integration into an aufhebung. To get to the heart of the matter in discus-

sion, the issue is not at all one of denying the very notion of opposition

but of affirming, with and afterDeleuze, that it is not difference which

supposes opposition, but opposition, or negation, which supposes constitu-

tive difference. And constitutive difference orconstitutive negation means,

ontologically and politically,becoming before and beyond History (and in no

case without History, and not even opposed to History) orHistory versus

becoming in a more or less sophisticated historicism wherein History

becomes the inner form of the Concept in its dialectical development.

To come back, as simply as possible,to my example of the environmental

dimension in Matisse and the reinterpretation you suggest: despite being

a critical threshold, it is not the negation of the canvas which is rigorously

determinant; it is rather the Matissean energetics which displays the quan-

tification of the forces it invests beyond the limits of the canvas. And it is

from this affirmative expansion that there follows not only the negation

of the canvas-frame, but, after all, a quantitative and processual alterna-

tive to the historical framing through which the painting-form maintained

its aesthetic identity: that museal optics of quality whose common name

is pictorialism. This is not at all Matisse-en-France; this is the American

Matisse already celebrated by Dewey in the 1930s (as an alternative tothe art-form qua Beauty Parlour of Civilisation) and rediscovered still in

America and not in France (because of Existentialism plus Stalinism) some

2030 years later by the artists themselves. (It was via America that,

historically, Matisses new environmental paradigm came back to France,

with Viallat, Buren, etc.). It may be pertinent to emphasise at this point the

Deweyan inspiration of Deleuze and Guattari in those crucial passages of

What is Philosophy?where we read that architecture is the first of the arts

because (contrary to the phenomenology of art) art does not begin with

the flesh but with the house; because life becomes constructive with the

house which architectures the sensation while de-territorialising it. What

emerges in this non-Modernist / anti-phenomenological context i s the en-

igmatic formula of a sensation-house a pure non-sense with regards to

the frenchy-existentialist perspective within which you pretend to include

the very notion of sensation, the better to integrate it into a (disavowed)

restoration of aesthetics. (It would be interesting here to investigate the

American and anti-French alterity affirmed by Deleuze for himself:

it goes further than an appeal to the superiority of Anglo-American

literature and it could turn your so-called national narrative into a very


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his elaboration of an actionist painting radicalised by the prison). Finally,

regarding my own perversion of the history of modern and contemporary

art, beyond the 1968 break Peter and I affirm differently, I would say that my

own post-aestheticmotivation has perhaps been to reintroduce some kind of

untimely becoming and conflict into an all-too teleologico-dialectically-

ordered Contemporary History of Art / Non-Art

* * *

PO Yes, I agree with these final four points, at this level of description.This is why I find your project so interesting. I especially agree with the

last two, more general points. But we think them through in rather differ-

ent ways, which have decisively different implications and consequences.

Let me quickly go back to the question of affirmation, negation

and criticism, because there is more common ground here than has ap-

peared so far, and it is on this common ground that we dif fer we inhabit

it in different ways, but in certain respects we are addressing the same

problems. Its the development and transformation of the problems that

matter; the positions are successful to the extent to which they do that:

generate new problems, or reconfigure the existing problematic. The thing

about Frankfurt critical theory after 1968 was that it stopped doing that.It became reactive. It retreated to defending / repeating positions in a way

that didnt develop its problematic sufficiently, in relation to new forms of

social experience. That is its fundamental weakness. Nonetheless, in my

view, it has the conceptual resources to do it. To prove this, one has to get

on and actually do it.

Let me start with the dialectical reformatting that forbids from

the very beginning the affirmation of non-dialectical difference, the dif-

ference it denatures by integration into an aufhebung Of course, this is

the standard criticism ofHegelian dialectic: ultimate regression to iden-

tity, identity thinking. Adorno would agree, completely. The question

is: what of the various post-Hegelian dialectical forms, developed on the

basis of this criticism Marx, Benjamin and Adorno, in particular? These

are precisely dialectical forms that do not forbid from the very beginning

the affirmation of non-dialectical difference. Rather, they acknowledge

non-dialectical difference as both the basis and limit of the dialectic of

concepts (they call this materialism), and reflect upon its consequences

for the status and uses of dialectical thought in diverse ways. It is inter-

esting, in this respect, that in continuing with the example of the environ-

British over-play between Art and Language.)

A few words, some formulas, about this complex notion of sensa-

tion which depends precisely, ontologically, on the concept of intensive

difference as genesis of the sensible, through which a differential, a dif-

ference of potential, can be extracted from the genesis of the sensation.

The definition of art as a bloc of sensations signifies nothing other than

the construction of an alterity in a matter of expression (Hjemslev). It

happens, following Deleuze and Guattari, that art will be more and more

invested in a (trans-media, following Guattari) power of deframing because

the material passes into sensation (rather than sensation being realisedin thematerial). In this process, as I understand it, the question of the prob-

lematisation of the concept of sensation becomes so determinant that the

sensation may appear operatively for what it is ontologically and non-

aesthetically in relation to contemporary art: as its reality condition in

the constitutive relationship with the becoming-other of an intensive body

which can no longer recognise itself in any kind of corps propre, as well as

the post-philosophical projection in the field of art of a kind of sensuous

heterogenesis of the concept itself in its non-propositional condition. For

sure, this last statement is less Post-Conceptual than Post-Structuralist.

Or, better, Anti-Structuralist in the way it affirms the negation of the

linguistic turn in its strong (Neo-Positivist) or weak version (the conversa-tional community democratising the name of art).

As for my wild recoding of a body of work and a critical paradigm

that belongs to the past, a recoding allegedly designed to maintain a

Deleuzian-conservative valorisation of painting. First, I think that, essen-

tially, Deleuze did with painting what he did with literature: an absolute

deformation of its modernist-formalist motto. Secondly, I dont think that

painting (or Bacon, i.e. Deleuzes Bacon, who is the pretext for a forcedre-

presentation of the history of painting) has in itself an exclusive and para-

digmatic function of exemplifying Deleuzian philosophy (constitutively, such

a function would more naturally belong to his work on cinema, conceived

as an Anti-Structuralist and machinicwar machine that distributes itself

in the historico-ontological caesura between movement-image and time-

image, after World War II). Thirdly, apart from the fact that a post- or

trans-media use of painting is currently practised in many interesting ways,

painting, far from being necessarily regressive, can form part of strategic

dispositifs which tend to hystericise the all too uncritical and fashionable state-

of-affairs in contemporary art (see, for example, Mhls return to painting

in the 1970s against the Happenings he denounces as bourgeois theatre, and


9/15


mentally (ontologically?) non-conceptual. This is what I contest. For me,

fundamentally and in increasingly complex ways, art has both conceptual

and non-conceptual aspects; and its conceptual aspects cannot be linguis-

tically reduced. It is the critical virtue of the episode called Conceptual Art

to have clarified this and reaffirmed it, despite its own initial intentions. At

one level, this is a fairly minimal (and to art historians, entirely unsurpris-

ing) claim. It gains its leverage from the peculiar rush to deny it.

The best way to discuss our differences that is, the differences

between a (broadly, post-)Adornian and a (broadly, post-)Deleuzian

perspective over how to understand ar tssensuous heterogenesis of theconcept in its non-propositional condition is probably via the idea of con-

struction. Construction is a common term between these two traditions.

Construction is also what, for me, decisively distinguishes Erics thinking

from pop Deleuzianism and its crudely naturalistic vitalism: a constant

insistence on construction the construction of assemblages, the construc-

tion of forces, and the relation of construction to expression. The rela-

tion of construction to expression is also the central moment, the central

dialectic of twentieth-century art in Adornos oxymoronically entitled

Aesthetic Theory. (Unfortunately, Adorno did not progress far beyond an

acute self-consciousness of this oxymoron; he struggled unsuccessfully and

often unconsciously with the distinction between art and aesthetic.)So, what does construction mean in these two different traditions?

What is associated with construction, and what are the problems that

construction brings? Returning to our role as representatives of cartoons,

I will answer for Adorno. For Adorno, construction is understood, first,

as the generalisation of the principle of montage and second, and conse-

quently, as the main principle, the dominant of the two principles, which

govern the production of ar t the other one be ing a mimetic-expressive

one. Furthermore, for Adorno, who was following Schnberg here, the

goal of modern art was to bring construction to the point of expression.

Thats a formulation with which Deleuze might well have been happy, I

think, to bring construction to the point of expression. (Perhaps someone

has just said this to him in that cartoon.) It is the principle of construc-

tion (as the generalisation of the principle of montage) that grounds the

distinction between the organic (classical) and the non-organic (early

German Romantic / Modern) work, as a distinction between works with

different structural relations between part and whole. In the organic work,

there is resolution of part or detail into the whole. Classical concepts of

beauty are about different discursivearticulations of that resolution of

mental dimension of Matisse, you accept that its negation of the canvas is

a critical threshold. This is a considerable concession insofar as, for the

post-Hegelian tradition, it is precisely critical meaning (which is always

historico-critical meaning) that is at stake. In apparent contrast, you locate

the basis / determination of this negation / critical threshold in an affirma-

tive expansion of forces beyond the limits of the canvas. Furthermore,

and this is the crucial bit, you affirm this affirmation inits non-dialectical

difference from the negation to which it is presented as giving rise. How-

ever, for me, the affirmative expansion beyond and the negation of are

different aspects of what is actually a single process. There are no groundsfor down-grading the negation to a secondary status, ontologically, when

we are discussing a practice that is, something that is constituted, at least

in part, by social relations; social relations that are themselves constitut-

ed, in part, by recognition, and hence by certain cognitive (that is, concep-

tually mediated) relations.

What is at stake here is the ontological status of thinking (and

re-cognition), in its most extended sense, in human existence: the role of

thinking in mediating the relations between being and doing, or to put it

another way, the role of concepts in constituting the various, infinite ways

of being human. What is at issue between us here is thus not, I think, non-

dialectical difference, but rather its ontological absolutisation as affirma-tion: your philosophical affirmation of affirmation itself as an exhaustive

ontology of the human. But what reasons are there for this philosophical

affirmation of an ontology of affirmation, other than its negation of the

dialectical tradition!

This might seem to have taken us a long way away from Matisse

and the dialectical order versus the non-dialectical disorder of contempo-

rary art (and what of vice versa?: its dialectical disorder and non-dialec-

tical order!), but it is at the heart of how we think them differently. Yet,

at soon as we talk about the field of art (in distinction from something

called painting), we converge onto a kind of sensuous heterogenesis of

the concept itself in its non-propositional condition affirm[ing]the nega-

tion of the linguistic turn in its strong (Neo-Positivist) or weak version

(the conversational community democratising the name of art). For me,

philosophically, this sentence is completely legible within the terms of a

Marxian materialism. Furthermore, art-theoretically (if I have understood

it correctly) it acknowledges the (non-propositional) conceptual aspect

of art albeit, for me confusingly, only in the form of a post-philosophical

projection into the field of art, which thus appears once again as funda-


10/15


introduction of linguistically reductive forms of signification; it was about

installing an infinite plurality and multiplication of materialisations. Dema-

terialisation is a mis-description of the multiplication of materialisations.

Because the work can no longer be identified with a single instantiation,

people thought it might not need instantiating at all (at one point, LeWitt).

This was a confused thought. Within the Post-Conceptual field, there is a

necessary materiality and a necessary plurality a proliferating plurality

of materialisations for any one work of art. There is not a proliferat-

ing multiplicity of materialities for any one painting, of course, because a

painting is materially associated with a single instantiation. That meansthat painting is not a possible form to explore the further development

of this constructive-expressive dialectic of the non-organic work. This has

to do with the fact that art is a social form.

The socio-spatial experience that corresponds to the painting of

the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is the room, the bourgeois

interior. The public gallery was an attempt to render public this private

space. The people who inhabit that space have certain forms of delimited

social experience; they dont travel very much, they dont travel very often,

the number of their social interactions is restricted by their place of resi-

dence the countryside or the city. Today, the spatial form of communica-

tive experiences is completely different: its not limited by buildings and ob-jects; its a non-place. An art of objects in buildings is an art that belongs

to a world in which people live in places and are defined by the places in

which they lived. The subjects of contemporary capitalist societies are not

these kinds of subjects. And the spatialisation of their experience, if its to

be rearticulated and constructed and represented by contemporary art,

has to draw on the spatial forms of social experience. Now, you know, we

still go into rooms and we still have relations to objects and, to the extent

that thats the case, then painting and sculpture continue to relate to

those aspects of our social experience, but theyre not the most critically

important or dominant aspects of our social experience.

My question to you is how, from a Deleuzian point of view, a

Deleuzian concept of construction, does one think the problems of con-

struction and the unity of the work? What is the principle of the unity of

a contemporary work of art, conceived under the general-ontological

conditions of intensive differentiation and multiplication?

* * *

part into whole: a unity of the one and the many, which is resolved into

harmony. The point about the non-organic work, on the other hand, is

that the elements of the work are taken from life. They are cut out of life

and put into art (readymade). They have a relative self-sufficiency, which

derives from their origin. The principle of construction is the principle ac-

cording to which you make a whole out of elements that are not organic-

ally or harmoniously related, but which have their own independence. So

the principle of construction is a particular principle of unity, a principle of

wholeness. In the non-organic work, problematically, unity has to be im-

posed on elements that have an inevitable resistance to one another, andhence to unity itself. Unity here has a quasi-conceptual character; it is the

result of an imposition of a concept of unity. There is a tension between

the self-sufficiency of the element and the construction of unity. Mod-

ern art, as non-organic, is governed by a problematic dominance of the

whole over the parts. This is problematic, for Adorno, ultimately, because

it reflects the social domination of instrumental rationality: the principle

of construction is the appearance of the social principle of instrumental

rationality, immanently, within the work of art. Nonetheless, in order to

be critical, the work of art has to be constructive, since for Adorno the

organic work functions affirmatively (in Marcuses bad sense meaning

as an affirmation of existing society). The practical artistic problem is thus:how to negate the bad instrumentality of the unity of the work, imma-

nently, without regressing to an organic unity?

Adornos theorisation of the solution (found practically in Schnberg)

is: via the dialectic of construction and expression by converting con-

struction itself into expression, and vice versa. But this dialectic has to be

constantly reinvented, constantly constructed anew, as transformations in

social experience render the once non-organic work organic (in much the

same way as they destroy Duchamps aesthetic indifference). A particu-

lar period of Modernism becomes classical. The constructive-expressive

dialectic of the part and the whole thus appears today in ways quite

different to those in which it appeared fifty years ago. The main change

is that construction has been free from the constraints of medium (from

which it derived much of its expressive potential) and returned to the more

nominalistic radicalism of its origins in collage. As you will no doubt have

anticipated, I associate this problematic liberation from medium which is

an infinite expansion of the possible elements of construction critically,

and therefore ontologically, with Conceptual Art.

For me, Conceptual Art was not about dematerialisation or the


11/15


EA I confirm: we agree and disagree on the essentials when both of us

tend to generate new problems which reconfigure the existing problem-

atic. This is quite a rare and precious relationship because in general there

is usually either the former orthe latter and the former is not in itself

necessarily more interesting than the latter. Now, if you agree, or / and if

you dont disagree, Id like to start by picking on up some crucial points in

your highly articulated development, and to react to them quite sponta-

neously, to restitute for the audience and for our future readers the noise

that exists between our respective (post-Adornian and post-Deleuzian)

philosophies on the Expression / Construction topic. My answer to yourfinal questions will perhaps then be all-too indirect and direct (i.e. without

mediation) but I cant see any other way to express the dif ficulty of

the dialogue when it is for real.

First then, a crucial point of agreement / disagreement, concern-

ing your critical deconstruction of the Frankfurt Theory after 1968: You

say that it retreated to defending /repeating positions in a way that

didnt develop its problematic sufficiently, in relation to new forms of social

experience, and you add: Nonetheless, in my view, it has the concep-

tual resources to do it. The first thing that occurs to me is that you are

somehow repeatinghere the Adornian criticism of Hegel, when Adorno

explains, afterMarx, that the lack of clart (the word appears in French,in his extraordinary text Skoteinos, Or How to Read) of the Hegelian phi-

losophy would have been determined by the irruption of the historical

dimension, whose ontological truth will call for a negative dialectic. Now,

the question redoubles in intensity here since we are talking about 1968,

whose character as event (absolutely misunderstood by Adorno) pro-

voked Deleuze into re-starting his whole philosophy (in collaboration with

Guattari). To put it differently, and taking a step further: Deleuze needed

very precisely to problematise the philosophical identity of his conceptual

resources in relation to practice (the first traces of the political emergen-

cy of this question lurgence pressante dun besoin, wrote Artaud appear in

Logic of Sense). It will signify a total reorientation of his thought away from

the notion of (constructive) expression and towards the notion of (expres-

sive) construction, which will immediately identify the coextension of the

social with the assemblages (I hate this English translation of agence-

ment!) of desire (with a subsequent practical redefinition of expression,

explicated in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy). But this also implied going

radically beyond Structuralism as the dominant model of an a-historical

contemporary constructivist philosophy (Foucault was fundamental at this


12/15


physiology of art (Nietzsches locution) is the affirmation of the quantita-

tive expression of the relation of forces as reality condition for a non-com-

positional construction that Matisse calls Fauvism. It must be emphasised

here that I am not proposing a retrospectiveover-interpretation of

Matisses energetics: Matisse himself understood his whole trajectory in

this vitalist, constructivist and non-aestheticway.

At this point, I dont really know if thinking is existentially aimed

at the mediation between being and doing, but I do know that modern

thinking has always started and re-started when it has been able to take

into theoretical and practical consideration the effects of transversalityproduced by a new combination of forces, which rarely obeys the recogni-

tion of (social) mediations to become political (i.e. to recover politics as

a causal effect of universality). There is for me a politics of Being which

involves in its process of subjectivation Becoming versus Recognition. What

Deleuze attempted to do, beyond the biophilosophical articulation between

Bergson and Nietzsche, but in a radical Nietzschean acceleration, was to

evaluate thinking in terms of its capacity to do the multiple (the Deleuzo-

Guattarian formula for Construction) in non-imaginary but machiniccon-

nections with the composing forces of the Outside forces that cant be

expressed without assembling and constructing them as a resistant act

to the composed power formations it dis-organises from the very primacy ofthe former. (Before / beyond Foucault and the exclusive-constitutive function

of the relations of power, the agencementqua desire is the collective reality

condition of this rhizomatic expressive-construction.) Far from being any

kind of phenomenological regression there is no longer an outside in a

non-artificial naturalistic sense the Thinking of the Outside means socially

and politically that Power is essentially an apparatus of Capture.

We can now perhaps see the main difference between Adorno

and Deleuze, despite a common non-organic ambition arising from (an

unequal) information from / deformation of life. Driven by a principle of

consistent connections between heterogeneities, following a circulation

of intensities which drives the de-territorialisation always further, the

Multiplicity exceeds the Whole that maintains the principle of unity as its

problem (and I really do understand its fully-conceptual character!), and

consequently maintains the problem of Construction itself in the dialectic

of Spiritualisation,while Expression is fundamentally conceived as the

intuitive mimesis of the non-organic and a-signifying natural through

which the rationality of the art-work will aesthetically affirm itself in its

diametrically contrary. I cant deny that I am here describing the worst

point), criticising its abstract formalism and reversing its a-historicity into

the affirmation of an ontology of becoming that would totally renew the

social experience of history as well as the self-understanding of philosophy

itself. (The Deleuzian provocation concerning Pop-philosophy was one

result of this process.) My question is: what is happening on your side, as

Deleuze affirms that his philosophy was starting again for real, after 1968,

with Guattari? How, after all, do you understand and analyse the histori-

cal failure of negative dialectic in relation to 1968, if its post-Hegelian

and Marxian identity depended on its focus on the historical dimension of

the determined negation? Apparently, the reiterated Adornian affirmationthat difference remains in (a negatively determined) mediation did not help.

Coming back, next, to my admission of a critical threshold in

relation to the Matissean negation (your term; in my book it reads

destruction) of the canvas-form which I understand to follow from the

expansive affirmation of an energetics, and which de-territorialises

absolutely the aesthetic framing. I maintain that I am not down-grad-

ing superficially, artificially, or ideologically this negation: despite

the dynamic of a single process there is the creative power (potentia) of

the always singular becoming of the forces effectively mobilised, a becom-

ing which precedes, ontologically and diagrammatically, the history of

forms including those it negates historically in the field of so-calledhistory of art. (With its Duchampian resonance, the Adornian formula

according to which the unity of the history of art is the dialectic figure of

the determined negation is for me simply perfect insofar as it expresses

the necessity of an excess with regards to its dialectic recoding!) If it is

effectively in the name of the forces imprisoned in and by the canvas that

the (environmental) liberation happens with all its social implications

(a new type of physical and mental reality) and the constitutive (and

destitutive) relationship of Ar t with the Outside this liberation depends in

itself on the self-expansion of a combination of forces that can no longer

be reflected through the relationship between matter and form (or in the

synthesis between form and content). Therefore, the Matissean question

is effectively not how to think a new kind of totalisation from within the

historicity of the existing material which would complexify mimetically

and constructively the very notion of form (Adorno), but rather how to

re-start art from an absolute de-territorialisation of aesthetic values in

an abstract-vital machine acting directly in sensation through physically

non-formed matters and semiotically non-formal functions which is to

propose a kind of heterogenesis of sensation itself. Processually, this


13/15


tion of a becoming-concept of space in contemporary art because

it cant be confused with the objects it distributes but will rather be the

real non-thing to be embodied paroxistically in potentialities actualis-

able in new situations. Under our de-territorialised condition, directly

related by contemporary art to space (Peter says non-place), art trans-

materialises the sensuous heterogenesis of the concept of space in the

socially chargedtime of a (performative) construction (and of a sensational

de-construction: Gordon Matta-Clark), to produce a local event from

a-signifying interstices which reintroduce life at the very level of the most

de-territorialised space. A space contemporary art unblocks intensively andreopens accidentally (accidere: what happens). Therefore, it is only through

the non-propositional alterity of the concept it constructs a passage from

the relative deterritorialisation of capital to an absolute deterritorialisa-

tion upon a p lane of immanence expressing the non-philosophical at / as

the heart of philosophy that (contemporary) art can meet (contempo-

rary) philosophy. In this contemporary meeting, what contemporary

means politically is the expression (i.e. experience) of the ontological excess

of (the desiring-machinic-becoming of) productive forces with regard to

(historically sedimented) productive relationships, and the construction of

(and experimentation with) its creative effects of the new (a non-tradi-

tional new) once this excess has been brought back to the sensation ofthe forces of the Outside which un-determines the state-of-affairs socially

imposed upon a brain-body in the distribution of the sensible (creation

versus enlarged re-production of the administered world).

Coming back after this long detour to Peters key affirmation art

has both conceptual and non-conceptual aspects; and its conceptual as-

pects cannot be linguistically reduced though I concur with this assertion

as he develops it post-conceptually against the initial intentions of Concep-

tual Art (its analytic programme), I am still confronted by the problem of

art being defined by a concept which is not defined clearly enough in itself

and in relation to its artistic use to totally eliminate the impression of an

ideational recoding of art qua a dialectical philosophy of art that at its

best simply reasserts conceptually the aesthetic as a necessary element

of the art-work (which would be what shows the failure of the linguistic

turn of Conceptual Ar t). To argue that the concept of art is at stake in the

reflective mediation between aestheticaffects and critical concepts would fall

short from my point of view, since, starting from a post-Deleuzian intensi-

fication of the question of sensation, I propose an alternative answer to a

common contemporary necessity: how to go beyond the aesthetic framing

(romantically outdated) and lowest profile of the Adornian aesthetic theo-

ry (where the post-Hegelian is still Hegelian), the highest being perfectly

formulated by Peter: to bring construction to the point of expression. But

are they absolutely incompatible? Or, better, if the latter formula makes

sense only through the will to dis-integrate the first one after the triumph

of instrumental rationality, who could seriously deny that the correc-

tion inAesthetic Theory of Adornos earlier anti-avant-gardism still betrays

the tribute paid by the very notions of Construction and Expression to

Adornos earlier position? The aesthetic experience may become a proc-

ess integrating the ruins of empirical reality into the art-work by mon-tage, but the montage itself does not contradict (but, insists Adorno, goes

thoroughly into) the aesthetic principle of the objectivity of the form, etc.

All this may have caused Deleuze some amusement when he heard for the

first time the latter Adornian formula And he may even have anticipated

the kind of confusions were trying to disentangle in our discussion!

What Peter calls Adornos theorisation of the solution i.e.

converting construction i tself into expression, and vice versa is, for me,

a superior aporetic answer to the fact that the appearance of the social

principle of instrumental rationality immanently registered by Construc-

tion has been art-historically expressed (in the Modernist tradition) in its

formal definition (as such accepted by Adorno) as the cut offfrom life. Onthe one hand I think that the revindicated dematerialising conceptuality

of strong Conceptual Art inscribes itself as the akm of this tradition, a

tradition it attempted to consolidateanalytically in order to overcome it

dialectically in the propositional form of the art-concept as a kind of truth-

effect of the nascent post- industrial / Postmodern society. On the other

hand, I dont think that the liberation of construction from the (Modernist)

constraints of medium is the exclusive concern of a nominalistic radical-

ism there has been, there is, the energetic alternative to it that I call

Matisse-Thought: a beyond painting, or, beyond the mediumnic instanti-

ated painting-form (the Modernist reduction of painting you systematically

identify with painting as such). The key to its future, crossing the 1968 bor-

der, is that what is at stake is less as is currently said a spatial expansion

of painting than an active investment and problematisation of space itself.

Or, to put it in another way: it is because (extensive) expansion means

(intensively) that spatiality is no longer treated as a (constructed) given

that architecture may be and will be (expressively) interrogated and at-

tacked in its prevalent structures of economic and social power (anarchi-

tecture). As I understand it, the whole process is supported by the sensa-


14/15


cal) presumption of a temporal disjunction between theory and practice.

Dialectical logic expands the conceptual conditions of intelligibility, but

intelligibility is always retrospective ; hence its inevitable non-identical

remainder. All thinking contains a necessary element of ideational recod-

ing, but practice is prospective and has elements of openness, in princi-

ple. Experimentation (in art, life and politics) works on the space of that

openness. So when you speak of the effects of transversality produced

by a new combination of forces rarely obey[ing] social mediations, you

conflate the ontological question of the possibility of the production of the

new with the epistemological question of the intelligibility of the novelty. Inorder to be intelligible, once produced, the effects must be thought in the

totality of their relations (i.e. as mediated). They produce these new rela-

tions, comprehended as mediations; they dont obey them. Furthermore,

these new productions subsequently enter into additional sets of relations,

not possible at the time of their production, which effects what they are.

In Benjaimins terms, the afterlife [Nachleben] of a work of art is retroac-

tively ontologically constitutive. This means that there are things about it

that an understanding of its production cannot grasp, in principle.

Secondly, your memory lets you down on Adornos articulation

of the relationship of the experience of the work of art to philosophy.

Aesthetic experience, as you put it (for me, never the same thing as theexperience of the work of art but thats another matter), should precisely

NOT become philosophy. Rather, in conventional early Romantic fashion,

philosophical criticism completes the work. That is to say, the experience of

art is transformed, immanently, by the philosophical dimension of a second

reflection. For Adorno (as for both Hegel and Benjamin), and I follow them

all here, philosophy is a mode, aspect or structure of experience, which re-

quires the non-philosophical as its material. It has an inherently transdiscipli-

nary productivity. For me, this relates directly to your transversality, which

Deleuzes own late classicism about philosophy effectively negates.

Finally: the meaning of 1968 (something about which Adorno did

not live long enough to have more than immediate views he died in 1969).

The problem for me is that the current historical meaning of 1968, as acultural-political radicalism, appears primarily as a transformation of vari-

ous of the internal dynamics of capitalist societies, rather than as a set of

oppositional potentialities. Its ongoing consumption as a figure or token

of oppositionality itself bears witness to that. For me, Deleuze seems

to have had a practicist or affirmitivist misconception of the practical

meaning of his own ontology precisely because of his identification with

of art through traditional sensibility to an essentially visual experience.

I attempt to do it in such a way that aesthetics need not return in sensa-

tion, in a sensation that would consequently invite conceptual mediation

negatively determined as to quote Peter the principle of the unity of

a contemporary work of art. With regard to what Adorno called the

art-works content of truth, namely that (I quote Adorno from memory)

the true aesthetic experience must become philosophy, or it simply does

not exist wasnt it precisely this post-Romantic identification that De-

leuze wanted to resist with the caesura between sensation and concept? I

recognise for my own part that I am perhaps forcing this dualism but isntit Deleuze himself (with Guattari) who proposes (in What is Philosophy?) an

extraordinary energetics of the concept that follows and capitalises on the

ontological problematisation of the very notion of sensation, launching it

towards an intuition of the sensuous heterogenesis of the concept itself?

And isnt it Deleuze and Guattar i who consider all dualisms as the enemy,

but an entirely necessary enemy, the furniture

we are forever rearranging?

* * *

POWe must conclude, so my response will be brief. First, I mustconfess that the Deleuzian concept of sensation remains obscure to me,

theoretically that is to say, it is insufficiently developed (I would say

determined, in a Hegelian logical sense) to bear the burden placed on it in

your discourse. This lack of determinacy is, of course, part of its point

a marker of its fundamentally ontological character but it prohibits its

productive application to historical material in anything but a positivistic

manner. It is indifferent to the material. I might thrill to the idea of an

absolute de-territorialisation of aesthetic values in an abstract-vital

machine acting directly in sensation through physically non-formed

matters and semiotically non-formal functions, but when I see this pro-

posed as a description of Mattise, it becomes a reductio ad absurdum for

me. Its philosophical radicalism loses all credibility when confronted withthe experience of the art in question, which, for me, requires some mediat-

ing terms between itself and so general a monist ontology.

This ontological conception of philosophy leads to a dual mis-

understanding of the status and structure of philosophical interpretation

in Adornos work which is as influenced by Benjamins version of early

Romanticism as it is by Hegel. In the first place, it misses the (histori-


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problematic(a non-dialectical relationship involving and exercising the

inseparability between concept, percept and affect) and anachronic,because

the crisis of the notion of truth means the crisis of the notion of time (the

untimely character of becoming) when the former attacks the distribu-

tion of the unity of the real between being and thought. To put it in other

terms: if art hystericises philosophy, it does not do so without a becoming-

hysteresis of (the artistic) hysteria which exerts its forces in theory and in

practice in a delayed / afterlife of play. But this all too general proposition

actualises itself in (rare and determinant) cases where the heterogene-

ous temporality of the becoming at stake in the work of art (in its excessto the product of art) and the historical short-circuits it provokes (with

regards to the teleochronology of the art-form) manifest the heterogene-

ous spatiality expanded by these cases. It is through this kind of intensive

confrontation of history / becoming that I configured what I call Matisse-

Thought as a paradigmatic case. It required, dear Peter, many mediating

terms (your term, not mine), upstream (modern art) and downstream

(contemporary art), to preserve (and not to neutralise) its challenge to

philosophy to use a key expression of Deweys in his over-Matissean

book,Art as Experience, omnipresent in the studios of American artists in

the 1940s and 1950s. (This point did not escape the young Harold Rosen-

berg, who will go on to develop reflections in direct resonance with theanti-museal Deweyean aesthetics; nor did it escape Kaprow, refusing as he

did the Dada identification of anti-art to accentuate the importance of an

earlier vitalist-experimental mood.)

Coming back, finally and very briefly, to the 1968 break Peter and

I recognise quite differently, beyond Adornos misunderstandings and to

his death in 1969. I have to say that I dont see any contradiction between

the internal dynamics of capitalist societies that 1968 would embody and

the oppositional potentialities it would empower. In fact, Deleuze refers

to 1968 as a threshold that crystallises the mutations of late capitalism

(which, for him, have to be investigated from the Marxist analysis) andas

an event perceived as intrusion of the pure Real, when the biopolitical

reality-conditions of Communism manifest themselves as this immanentpotential that haunts, and emerges in and through, capitalism. Capitalism

and Schizophrenia. But 1968, for Deleuze, is also a time of aesthetic over-

coming because of the present insufficiency of a mere description of the

new image of thought coming from modern art: despite a declared anti-

Hegelianism, the percepts and affects of art tend to be reduced to the mo-

ments of a concept working at the indeterminate extension of philosophy.

the moment of 1968 as a new beginning. So 1968 is a problem for both

traditions, I think. It was too complex a moment simply to be affirmed.

* * *

EA Before and beyond the insufficiencies of my exposition there is the

inevitablethe inevitable obscurity (skoteinos) of the Deleuzean concept of

sensation whose last philosophicalfunction is to say how concepts refer

to a differential non-conceptual understanding, without which there is no

creation of concepts at all, and whose first artistic function is to show thatthere would be no creation tout court without a sensation embodying the

intensive physical reality of the forces which take hold of thought itself.

Once again, I recognise that this double statement is formally open to an

Adornian transformative reading such as Peter has already put to me as

a critical dialectical truth without which Deleuzean speculative indetermi-

nation would fuel the misunderstanding of philosophy qua conception of

the world (it prepares, a step further on, the idealist gap between the phi-

losophy of art and art-works). This is the Adornian critique of Spinoza and

Nietzsche: the projection into the Absolute of a purely expressive concept

makes a reified thought return in an arbitrary subjective act which denies

the intention to truth of philosophy itself. Art exists to prevent us dying oftruththis Nietzschean proposition affirms at the highest possible level the

difference between Deleuze and Adorno, because, for Adorno, it is truth,

and the dialectical essence of truth, which determines, in a very classically

romantic path, the completion of art by philosophy.

Art, explains Adorno, is the non-intentional manifestation of truth,

while philosophy is the medium of expression whose proper intention is

truth, but there is of course no realtruth outside of the truth of the non-

philosophical as it determines itself in the superior dialectical movement

between (prospective-expressive) practice and (retrospective-constructive)

theory. Hence, the centrality of the aesthetic theory for Adornian philoso-

phy, its aesthetic hard-core as an open totalisation in movement which

informs and transforms the truth-value of philosophy in a paradoxical proc-ess, recognised as such and invested as the dialectical becoming of truth.

At this point, the Deleuzean shift affirms from art the affirmative truth of

the becoming that puts the very notion of truth into crisis, instead of the negative

becoming of truth that tries to save it dialectically. In this sense, any aesthetic

narration will be falsifying with regards to the pretention to totalisation of

the truth and the relationships between art and philosophy will be openly

All i Ez Osborne Adorno Deleuze

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