Deleuze’s Aesthetic Answer to Heraclitus:The Logic of Sensation

Filippo Carraro

Abstract

The painter Francis Bacon and the philosopher Gilles Deleuze agree withHeraclitus: any phenomenon is constituted of movement or becomingand no appearance endures. I read Francis Bacon, The Logic ofSensation from the perspective of the Heraclitean flux. This allows me toshow the eminent role of forces (movement beneath the soil of visibility)in the work of Deleuze, which he inherits from the Greek philosopher.I point at sensation as Deleuze’s re-thinking of the notion of becoming.‘How can an artist make an object endure?’ The artistic product, forDeleuze, embodies the force to recreate itself, and thus to endure in theuniverse. This phenomenon is a bloc of sensation.

Keywords: creation, Deleuze, Francis Bacon, Heraclitus, movement,real, sensation

I. The Figure is an Instance of Becoming

The work by Bacon, Cézanne and other painters represents a dynamicfield of interpretation of the images it presents, rather than a static copyof them. In Logic of Sensation, Deleuze outlines his comprehension ofart as an aesthetic experience (which, thus, includes time and motion).Deleuze’s logic of sensation, in fact, assumes that modern paintingproduces ‘musical’ and ‘rhythmic’ effects, rather than resting on theunvarying opposition of copy and model (see Deleuze [2003] 2004:71ff., 82ff.). However, although the artist’s interest is greatly kindled

Deleuze Studies 8.1 (2014): 45–69DOI: 10.3366/dls.2014.0133© Edinburgh University Presswww.euppublishing.com/dls

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by the task of ‘rendering movement’, it is Deleuze’s idea that in anycreative process becoming is affirmed together with being – as in rhythm,subsequent beats are musical when they are thought of as part of a‘simultaneous’ silent duration.

In Bacon’s experience the primary pictorial subject, the Figure, is notjust a compound of colour and form. The artist is never satisfied with‘rendering the visible’. Deleuze believes Bacon’s aim is to ‘render visible’,that is, to discover the hidden pieces of a fact and to manifest them onthe canvas. Common objects, as we see them, are images that can beseparated into their two components: form (contour) and matter (whichin painting is a question of colour). To render the visible would be topaint what one sees: contour and colour. In order to achieve his aim ofrendering visible, however, Bacon has to paint what seeing means forhim. This is to paint sensation; otherwise he would be painting whathe senses. Therefore, to paint sensation is to re-create or re-interpretthe perspective of the subject seeing, in addition to reproducing theobject seen. Subject and object are indissoluble (Deleuze [2003] 2004:34). For Deleuze, art does not associate a content to a correct formulawhich expresses it. Instead, art is interested in decomposing (sensedobject, on the one hand, and viewing subject, on the other hand) andrecomposing (sensation). The painter shares the musician’s attentivenessfor the harmony of the two moments: his aim is composition in thesense of a melody. Better put: his art consists in a resonance betweenvisible and invisible, or heard and unheard. ‘It is rhythm itself that wouldconstitute the Figure’ (71).

Bacon never paints one Figure, he rather paints coupled figures, underthe influence of a single force (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 65). Painting,being a matter of combining the dynamic and the static aspects,utterly prepares the audible aesthetic experience. More than melody,thus, canvases are places of resonance (69). A Figure is sensation, butsensation is ‘difference of level’ (65). Art aims not at reproducing thesensed model, but at reproducing sensation. (Bacon’s Platonism appearsrather weak when he says that his series of Popes is meant to reproduceVelázquez’s work.1) Bacon, in an interview (easily accessible online),reveals to Melvyn Bragg his ambition as a painter: ‘I want to be ableto re-make in another medium the reality of an image that excitesme’, he insists. Inevitably, Bacon’s Figure is not one figure. It onlyachieves the task of enveloping sensation by presenting not simply thesuperficial level of images or clichés, but also the level ‘beneath’. Deleuzerepeats that painting is not so much about representing images as it isabout metaphysical forces. ‘Everything is force’ (Deleuze [2003] 2004:

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59). For him, ‘we can go behind the [apparent] movements to theseforces’; in fact, ‘the visible movements of the Figures are subordinatedto the invisible forces exerted upon them’ (62–3). In Bacon’s work,Deleuze suggests separating three things: a Figure, its levels (a system ofsubordination) and the re-composition of its levels in one sensation. Wehave Pope Innocent X; we have the visible mouth and the invisible forcesthat make it; and we have the re-making of the aesthetic experience ofthe scream as such. From one representation Bacon leads the philosopherto an event (a movement, a becoming), that is, the moment in which asensation passes from the level of an impetus to that where it becomesvisible.

The question of sensation (that is, the essence of the artist’s creativity)follows, for Deleuze, the stages of a thought that considers becomingtogether with being (or the river of chance together with the circularpower of time). At first Deleuze acknowledges that any affirmationof being entails an affirmation of becoming. In order to recapitulateDeleuze’s Francis Bacon, I found it necessary to compare this workwith what the tradition attributes to Heraclitus. Heraclitus writes thatby stepping in the same river one can only be flown upon by differentwater (Krik [1954] 2010: 367). Similarly, he writes that the sun risesevery day and is ever changing (264). Everything is transformed, for theObscure; for, if it were not, then it would not be. ‘Even the barely-drinkdisintegrates if it is not moved’ (255). In this affirmation of becoming,Deleuze is similar to Heraclitus and, with respect to the Obscure’sconvictions, he states:

[Heraclitus] made an affirmation of becoming. We have to reflect for a longtime to understand what it means to make an affirmation of becoming. In thefirst place it is doubtless to say that there is only becoming. No doubt it isalso to affirm becoming. But we also affirm the being of becoming, we saythat becoming affirms being or that being is affirmed in becoming. (Deleuze[1983] 2002: 23)

At first, thus, it is clear that Deleuze absorbs both notions. A secondstage concerns their relation. If a Figure affirms becoming and being,what possibly admits their link? Logic allows to say that becomingjust becomes, and thus to conclude that only being is. In aesthetics,however, Deleuze shows that an eye is not simply limited to contemplatewhat is. An eye is already a philosophical subject; it can always ask thequestion, ‘what sustains that which I see?’ There is a difference betweena logical and crystallised ‘screaming before or about’, and an aesthetical‘screaming at’ the forces it is going to become (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 61).

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We are presented here with a figurative notion of image and a figural one.We could say that, with Bacon, Deleuze works on a separation of levels,and, by repeating the question ‘what sustains?’, a difference returns. Thelogic of sensation can bind being and becoming together for it workson a difference of level. Thus, we get a glimpse of a second elementof similarity between Deleuze and Heraclitus, who also considers theconfrontation of stable beings (the day as opposed to the night) to be afunction of a ‘divine Logos’ (Krik [1954] 2010: 33), that is, the visibledeterminations to be a product of grounding forces.

We get to a last stage, the threat of Platonism. Difference of level isnot new in philosophy, and Deleuze has to face Plato’s philosophicalreasons, if he wants the Heraclitean becoming to support his pointof view on art (that the pictorial subject is not a copy, but embodiessensation and, even, a sensation that ‘moves’). To put it differently,Deleuze has to show that there is no ‘model’, in the height of the sky;that the grounding forces also collapse under the strokes of becoming;that the reality of becoming is not contradicted as an unchangingreality. A third question arises: how can becoming be preserved? TheHeraclitean answer to this question would be that there is no mistakein thinking becoming as a superficial effect of a ‘stable’ divine ground,precisely because, apart from metamorphoses, becoming is an immanentprinciple with no depth, or a cause with no substance different thanits pure effect. ‘War is the father of all and king of all’ (Krik [1954]2010: 245). Similarly, Deleuze describes the Figure. A Figure is alreadymany entangled figurative moments; they fight like wrestlers, or theyre-compose the rhythmic meter. It is a war of bodies that affirm onefact (one battle) (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 66). Our third question isanswered as follows: becoming is not contradicted because only itssurface returns – only the river of succession.

Bacon never stopped admiring those static images of movement – henever abandoned the question of ‘how to render movement’ (Deleuze[2003] 2004: 58). Time marks the passage from image to image;therefore images are present from time to time. The issue of a presentthat flows (the Baconian Figure, which descends the stairs – see Portraitof a Man walking down Steps, 1972) encounters one of the mostbeautiful answers in the wonder of the Obscure: one is the way upand the way down (Krik [1954] 2010: 105). As if we were before aparadoxical image or a ‘geometrical improbability’, the Figure is notmore the isolation of the bodies that wrestle (before up, afterwardsdown), than it is the dynamic zones of the painting where the two bodiesare indiscernible – a third possible body which is at once up and down.

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In the same manner rhythm is not more a separation of two distinguishedbeats, than it is a re-composition of undistinguished intensity betweenthem (resonance).

Heraclitus, like Deleuze, distinguishes between the level of the visiblesuccession and that of an invisible co-existence. Heraclitus admires andpraises the unrecognised and unseen connections. ‘The real constitutionof things – he says – [. . . ] is accustomed to hide itself’ (Krik [1954]2010: 227). We also know that the distribution of distinguished anddistinguishing (of image and of force) in Deleuze corresponds to therelation of subordination of visible to invisible. In other words, on theone hand, the philosopher isolates the metamorphoses or oppositionsvisible to the naked eye, and, on the other hand, he points at forceswhich minister their becoming. Heraclitus, in a very similar manner,subordinates objects of succession (earth, water, soul) to forces ofcreation/destruction (life/death): ‘For soul it is death to become water,for water it is death to become earth; out of earth water comes-to-be,out of water, soul’ (339).

To the third issue we add that both Deleuze and Heraclitus saythat the face of the invisible is that of war, but to war they assigna special meaning. The face of the ground is never collapsed to anidentity: Heraclitus never says that all things, being at war, face the same(death). War is rather a principle of affirmation of becoming, for it isthe generative concept of a philosophy that, within the field of battle,separates and recomposes forces (hunger – satiety, life – death). Deleuzealso signals that war is not the cause of the coupling sensations; it is asurface effect. War, thus, should not motivate a figurative pessimism, forit is only one face of a figural optimism:

What produces the struggle or confrontation is the coupling of diversesensations in two bodies, and not the reverse, so that the struggle is alsothe variable Figure of two bodies sleeping intertwined, or which desire mixestogether, or which painting makes resonate. (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 69)

There is something in the Deleuzian thought on art, which, withoutreplacing endurance with temporariness, the figural with the figurative,or, even, the circle with the river, turns to the moment of birth as the clueof the whole business of becoming. What matters in art, for Deleuze, isthe creative process of the artist, and not a static model of ‘beauty’,re-interpreted and copied to the best of the artist’s abilities. The artistdoes not ‘repeat’ the model, nor does his work represent a ‘differentcopy’. If the artist re-makes something real, all of Deleuze’s effort isdirected at arguing that any experience is an entirely creative experience.

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In any experience (for instance, the aesthetic experience I have watchinga painting) a new ‘I’ is created (an ‘I’ that has contracted the power ofseeing the scream). It is a phenomenon of difference, or a habituationand repetition of one’s ‘I’.

Becoming is creative because, as rhythm, it has the same force oftime to ‘accumulate’, to ‘pass’, to coagulate sensation or to destroyit. Deleuze’s forces account for a becoming that becomes something;for Deleuze, an image truly endures on condition that it reveals theforces that sustain it. In the creation of a body, or in the re-creationof a Figure, a spirit becomes independent from every ‘now’ and every‘before’. It simply appears; it simply becomes and comes into being. Ifin Difference and Repetition, by creation, a body faces its destiny, inFrancis Bacon, a Figure unshackles itself from the artist, as if the creatorwere able to bestow on it the strength that allows it to reproduce itsown ‘pictorial’ life (see Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 163–5). ‘This is thereality of becoming.’

If Bacon represented a figure opposed to the embodiment of its fears,he would have involved a segment of temporality in his representation.He would have painted the scream and the horror, as if they weretwo objects interacting through a spatiotemporal opposition (here isthe feared and there is the scream; horror is the future and the squealanticipates it). However, Deleuze notices that the artist avoids by allmeans presenting a given opposition of subject and object. This supportsthe Deleuzian intuition that art must rule out narration and temporalsuccession. At the core of this accord between the artist and thephilosopher it is worth quoting the words by the philosopher himself:‘difference remains not the given itself but that by which the given isgiven’ (Deleuze 1994: 226). Difference is never the product more thanit is the producer. We must affirm the creative power of difference,for it ‘makes itself, as in the expression “make the difference”’ (28).The challenge in painting time is that of registering the difference inits making – the individuation of a spatiotemporal opposition in itssource.

As to the destructive power of becoming, or the negative power ofdifference, the Deleuzian must understand that they are ‘moments’ ofa creative difference and repetition. ‘End’ is just a face of becoming;its correlate – death – is only its negative representation. There is noend. (Aesthetic) experiences are products of a mechanism of differenceand repetition. In Deleuze’s writings there is a connection between‘becoming’ and Difference, ‘different’ and negation. In fact, becomingand Difference represent the positive head of a negative facial expression,

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or partial difference per negation. The excitement we sense for life isa creative source from where both different lives and a succession ofdeaths take place; life affirms both different lives and possible deaths(see Deleuze [2003] 2004: 62). Indeed, difference, for Deleuze, is no lessgenerative than permanence and preservation are devitalising momentsof an experiencing spirit.

II. Painting a Living Fact Alive, Painting Sensation

According to Deleuze, Bacon focused on the static as well as on thedynamic component of the aesthetic experience (in accordance withhis philosophy of becoming and with the ancient image of the river).How then is a body real beyond a sequence of representations? In otherwords, how, despite the violence of an image’s deformation (I usedto be one metre tall, now I am one metre and eighty) can the bodysurvive? Understanding the Deleuzian appreciation of the painter inFrancis Bacon, therefore, means to be able to adopt the following pointof view: we can sense something real beyond and besides the constantbrutality with which facts are exposed to change.

An image can change and yet keep hold in the realm of the visible; itcan assume much-distorted contours and colours; it can even change itsmode of activity. The artist’s aim is precisely to ‘record’ how things are,and how they can become in the future. This is why Bacon puts so muchstress on the notion of ‘free marks’ or ‘chance’: ‘I want a very orderedimage – he says – but I want it to come about by chance’ (Sylvester 2008:56). Bacon’s basic idea is to introduce a dose of chance or chaos into apre-given image (like in a photograph), and thereby to trap the figure inits most natural movement, that is, in its most factual, intense appearing.Precisely this power of re-creating the real is what Bacon sought in hiswork (172), and clearly this is what makes art difficult and the life of theartist a struggle.

Merleau-Ponty had done something similar with Cézanne as Deleuzeattempts to do with Bacon in Logic of Sensation. Merleau-Ponty writesthat the artist discovers ‘the geological foundation of the landscape’(Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 17); that the artist looks at ‘germination’, atbirth, and puts all his effort into capturing the continual rebirth ofexistence. As with Bacon, Cézanne was plagued by self-criticism anddoubt. Merleau-Ponty gives a name to his struggle: ‘he consideredhimself powerless because he was not omnipotent, because he was notGod and wanted nevertheless to portray the world’ (Merleau-Ponty1964a: 19). Though Bacon’s life was probably very different from

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Cézanne’s, it is safe to say that they were both struggling for the sametask: to paint the real, to paint the world, to avoid second-hand images,photography and clichés. In a word, their desire was to re-create reality.As with Heraclitus, the real constitution of things is thought of ashidden. The artist, who wants to capture a fact in its innocence, or inthe moment of its pure presence, has to select its representations, cleanits surface and reach what is beyond visibility. Painting is about creatingforces, not about imitating skills.

Deleuze’s focus on forces rather than on the represented imagesshifts the idea of art as imitation to that of art as creativity. Deleuze,by the notion of force, might be denoting a face of becoming, andcontrasting the artist’s creativity with the subject’s static dependencefrom an object-model. Creativity, however, must not be interpreted asan inversion of such a dependence relation; in fact, Deleuze would notsimply expect Bacon to populate the world by generating unknownimages. Creativity is rather a complex process where the artist bestowson his creature the spirit of an independent struggler for survival, notwithout gaining for himself a renovated organ of sensation. For Deleuze,the aesthetic experience is always a double creation of a Figure and ofa viewer – that is, a mutually dependent process of sensation.2 Firstly,sensation coagulates on the side of the canvas; that is, a painter mouldsa new Figure. Secondly, sensation coagulates on the side of the viewer;that is a spectator is educated to see (I learn from Bacon to appreciatethe untold effort required to open a door). An artistic experience is acomplex moment when a bloc of sensation produces the independence ofthe work from the subject, and measures their distance. This is creationproper; that is, to render durable a moment of the world, or to make itexist in its own right (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 172).

Bacon, as Cézanne, was aware he had the mission to germinate, toimplant on canvas the seed of the unseen perception; but Bacon alsoknew that he was not God. He could not create ex nihilo, for to createis always situated in a possible creation (Deleuze [2003] 2004: ch. 11).However creative the act of painting appears, the artist is limited to whatis already on the blank canvas. The artist starts with decomposition, de-organisation (some say reduction). He compresses what is under his sightuntil it explodes. Only then will a new creation be possible: the artistmoves reality or deforms it (making any object pulsate: compressing ahead, letting a face come under explosive forces – see Deleuze [2003]2004: ch. 8; Sylvester 2008: 8–18). In Bacon’s portraits, he paintedheads, not faces. Why heads? Because the head is the de-humanisedhuman face. The head reminds one of a known person, but it is violently

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manipulated under the hands of the artist. (Bacon’s interest in that whichis impersonal or purely de-subjectified recurs in Interviews; see Sylvester2008: 40, 51, 194ff.) The body is also mere body, just matter underthe pulsation of cosmic forces, the same that moves dust and planetsin the universe. Perhaps this is even the same that actually makes theuniverse itself expand. The artist applies this merciless rhythm on headsand on other human bodies. Up and down, inhalation and exhalation,compression and expansion, the painter paints the forces that strike andinhabit the body. Bacon lets invisible forces ‘strike the head from verydifferent angles’ (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 58).

The movement that distorts Bacon’s Figures is not the spatiotemporalmovement that drags creatures around (from place to place) until theymeet their end. Rather, it is the same ‘sacred source’ that creates them.3

‘What I want to do – says Bacon – is to distort the thing far beyondthe appearance, but in the distortion to bring back to a recording ofthe appearance’ (Sylvester 2008: 40). Pope Innocent X, for example,is moving in place when he makes his appearance first in the workby Velázquez (1650) and then in the work of Bacon (1953). Changeis of two types: a change in place and a change of place. The latter issupported by the framework of narration: firstly there is the ‘here’, andthen comes the ‘elsewhere’. The former type of change, in contrast, isnot as clear and straightforward: it is the exploration a subject makesof its own space, of the space where the subject takes place. Change isessentially movement, but of two types: a change in place is analogousto a movement of creation, while a change of place is analogous to amovement of narration. In his book on Bacon, Deleuze develops anontology of artistic creation, that is, a study of movement that allowsa ‘fact’ to occur. The first and only rule of this ontology is to exorcisethe figurative or illustrational, of which narration is the correlate. WhatDeleuze was struck by in Bacon’s work, and what he attempted toprovide a philosophical account for, was the way Bacon was able topreserve the likeness between what he painted and the living object, allthe while allowing the artistic product to move in place. Bacon attemptsto preserve the likeness between the thing painted and the living thing,but not without allowing the artistic product itself to move in place. Inso doing, Deleuze absorbs into his philosophy Bacon’s task of ‘reporting’or ‘recording’ sensation (Sylvester 2008: 60). Sensation is precisely whatsurvives change.

Painting, in Deleuze’s Francis Bacon, ministers the liberation of whatis beneath representation (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 49, 52) – it captures apresence that survives change. Though faithful to a vision of flux, what

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Deleuze is looking for is that element in flux which does not change, dieor vanish. He looks into the way Bacon speaks about and understandshis own work, and works out the philosophical implications of anartistic movement that tries to ‘trap a living fact alive’. The resultingLogic of Sensation constitutes the philosopher’s attempt to extrapolatefrom the work of Bacon the kind of movement that allows sensation toendure, that is, to persist in its rhythm.

What Deleuze wants to rule out is the type of movement that wouldnever allow a fact to endure (namely, the movement of narration, thechain of which merely displaces sensation rather than allowing it toaccumulate around the image). Bacon must exorcise figuration. Thesole movement that inhabits his Figures must not be a movement thattakes place in time; instead, time collapses on the original momentof the Figure’s appearance. It is the Figure’s movement of creation.Figures are not to tend to any model outside of time or to a narrativecompletion in time. They have to endure in the portion of time thatallowed them to come to be and to reproduce that movement – thisis why Deleuze insists on Bacon’s capacity of painting time as such.They must stand up on their own, allowing a moment of the worldto exist by itself (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 164, 172). In much thesame way, Merleau-Ponty was sensitive to Cézanne’s wish to renderthe type of movement that sustains itself, is preserved in the object,and does not pass away. This is the issue of a creating original-time.Merleau-Ponty writes about Cézanne: ‘an emerging order, of an objectin the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 14). In Deleuze’s words: the artist concentrates a bloc ofsensation from the whirlwind of time and makes this bloc imperishable,or at least it tends toward this direction as much as possible.Art must endure; the subject painted on the canvas must be capable tostay where he is, to do what he is doing, to scream his scream, forever.4

The study of appearances (as it is understood by Merleau-Ponty)allows Deleuze to conceive of becoming as subject to the laws ofaesthetics. Aesthetics, in this sense, means simply ‘that I see’, or ‘thatwhich allows me to see’. In Deleuze’s hands, the philosophical problemof sensuous determination may point at a series of artistic solutions.Among these Deleuze selects Bacon’s paintings and interviews. It is here,with the converging of becoming and Bacon’s Figures, that Deleuze’snotion of difference is illuminated by Bacon’s notion of sensation (thatwhich hits upon one’s nervous system). The action of a force on a bodycreates sensation: here an organ might temporarily take place. An eye‘sees’ and ‘allows the body to see’; it moves. From a sensation localised

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on the head it transits to other parts of the body. Other parts of the bodybecome visible:

Painting gives us eyes all over: in the ear, in the stomach, in the lungs [. . . ]This is the double definition of painting: subjectively, it invests the eye, whichceases to be organic in order to become a polyvalent and transitory organ;objectively, it brings before us the reality of a body, of lines and colors freedfrom organic representation. And each is produced by the other: the purepresence of the body becomes visible at the same time that the eye becomesthe destined organ of this presence. (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 52)

It is as if the river became ‘coagulated’ sensation with the body leaningtowards new sensations. We can therefore see how for Deleuze and forBacon perception of the real is not a matter of sight, but a matter ofcreation. Their central problem is to capture and explore those forcesthat sustain the visible. Deleuze’s insight into art is that capturing forces,which is the same as painting sensation, pushes a bloc of sensationoutside of the circle of narration. The artistic Figure enters durabilityprecisely within this movement.

Deleuze radicalises the question of ‘germination’ that troubledCézanne: art not only reveals to us how things appear, but also theprocess through which they appear. In this way, art shows us howthe real is created. For art creates in the same way – undoubtedly,Deleuze refers to a ‘materialist creation’. Deleuze goes further thanHeraclitus: metamorphosis is always already exposed to novelty, thatis, to indetermination. For him, to the sequence earth – water – soulthere follows nothing like its circular inversion (soul – water – earth). Thethree-layered Figure is the living present opened to creative zones ofaffirmation:

Life alone creates such zones where living beings whirl around, and onlyart can reach and penetrate them in its enterprise of co-creation. This isbecause from the moment that the material passes into sensation, as in aRodin sculpture, art itself lives on these zones of indetermination. They areblocs. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 173)

Logic is the realm of the ordered surfaces of meaning, and the sightthat seizes upon such layers captures something of the reality that logicorganises. It is as if the terms of some logic had the same creative powerupon reality that the divine Verbum has on the shaping of being. Deleuzediscovers some of those terms, and these are in line with Heraclitus’sobscure but divinised reality.

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III. Becoming and Sensation, Save the Contour

In The Logic of Sensation – chapters 1–11 – everything is in movement.Movement is the key to the interpretation of the book, becausemovement is taken as the true character of sensation as such. A perennialexchange between ‘opposites’ occurs – a perennial coupling of sensedand sensing. Just as physicists increasingly tend to conceive of matteras intensity, so Deleuze believes that whatever is in being is nothing buthigh-speed motion. An example will help us further understand. Let ustake a worldly object and reveal its nature of pure motion. A mouth: thecompound of teeth, lips and a hole. What is a mouth? How do cosmicforces relate to it? How does a mouth become a mouth?

Do I need to escape? We can assume that, in order for us to conceiveof an organ, we also need a function for it.5 What is the function ofthe mouth, for instance? Bacon might have suggested that the mouth’sfunction is ‘to let it out’, or ‘to let it in’: a man wants to free himselfthrough his own mouth (or through the washbasin – which amountsto the same thing). Bacon then has some solid, undetermined materialwhich is the body, but the body does not have any organs yet. It is ratheran ‘indeterminate organ’. Furthermore, this unformed body is traversedby an intense wave which, in Deleuze’s words,

traces zones and levels on this body according to the variations of itsamplitude. When the wave encounters external forces at a particular level,a sensation appears. An organ will be determined by this encounter, but itis a provisional organ that endures only as long as the passage of the waveand the action of the force, and which will be displaced in order to be positedelsewhere. (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 47)

Then a mouth comes to being – as a result of the unapparent intensemovements under the radar of visibility.

It has been mentioned how the primacy of invisible movements overthe representation of the appearing object brings Deleuze’s ontologycloser to that of Heraclitus. Deleuze considers the example of how tworather differentiated images reveal their invisible becoming, that is, howthey lead to a region of being that allows no differentiability itself. Manand beast are not only similar; they are the same ‘thing’ in the realm ofbecoming:

This is not an arrangement of man and beast, not a resemblance; it is adeep identity, a zone of indiscernibility more profound than any sentimentalidentification: the man who suffers is a beast, the beast that suffers is a man.This is the reality of becoming. (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 25)

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But the experience of movement and becoming in Deleuze’s work onaesthetics recapitulates the flux of Heraclitus, and adds two notions toit: creation and sensation. Becoming rests on the aesthetical encounterof a movement that creates and a movement that coagulates sensation;we have already seen above: ‘painting gives us eyes all over’. ForBacon, these two are spontaneously related in the work of art: artcreates sensation and it accumulates sensation around its creatures. Butit is only with Deleuze that Bacon’s intuition assumes an ontologicalimport. Painting creates sensation (on the canvas and on the viewer),and sensation accumulates around creatures (around the ‘I’ and aroundthe Figure). Music, for instance – the crossing of a number of waves in acomplex topography of vertical and horizontal distances – has the powerof generating and dissolving bodies. Different speeds, different timbresand music’s crucial power of emanating sensation make this possible.The same is also true of Nature: there is first the tension that makes theappearance of different species of animals vibrate, and also a rhythm ofseveral coordinates of sensation: food chain, or suffering. The conceptis that the artist faces and manipulates chaos, or the flux. He filters thereality of becoming through the levelling of sensation (suffering, the needto escape, and so on); and finally he creates, that is, he allows an imageto differentiate itself from those movements that make any image vanishinto something else (flux). The Figures of Bacon, for instance, are objectswhich are able to sustain their own appearing; they do not undergo themovement that resembles first man, then beast; first soul, then water,then earth. They already are that movement – indiscernibility; they arecloser to a pure bloc of sensation.

Deleuze discusses how the artist deals with movements that nestthemselves in any possible appearance. In addition, although it is thetask of the artist to break up the sovereign optical organisation, toface the chaos and reproduce its movement, he admits that the artistis never to let the catastrophe proliferate and shadow the Figure-ness.The hands of the artist touch the chaotic movements, his brushes andsponges recreate some of them on a canvas – then, the fight to limit andcontrol the catastrophe begins (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 111). The artistfaces the chaos or flux – the graph of the waves of a musical instrument,the several forces making the planets rotate – and strives to trap a factalive, without allowing it to vanish. ‘Save the contour’ (110).

One might want to ask whether the mouth painted by Bacon (or themouth of the figures which take shape on any topos of his canvas)is indeed a coming to rest of the flux. Is the activity of the artist aproduction of those differences that stop the flowing of differences?

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Deleuze describes the artistic experience of creation as follows. In thefirst place the artist has to face the chaos by means of introducing on hiscanvas a-pictorial marks. This destroys the emerging figuration. It is as ifthe dominion of our daily sight is destabilised by measured doses of theunseen – it is in this pre-pictorial moment that the invisible chaotic realityof flux shows its face. However, the experience of this latent catastrophecan be dealt with in very different ways; every great painter has to findhis way in it. ‘Where painters differ is in their manner of embracing thisnon figurative chaos, and in their evaluation of the pictorial order tocome, and the relation of this order with this chaos’ (Deleuze [2003]2004: 103). Deleuze designates the different ‘manners’ with a technicalterm: the notion of diagram. ‘Van Gogh’s diagram, for example, is theset of straight and curved hatch marks that raise and lower the ground,twist the trees, make the sky palpitate’ (102). A diagram is called an‘operative set’, and it is ‘a possibility of fact – not the fact itself’ (110).

Firstly, the question above receives a negative answer. Deleuze doesnot see the artistic product as an arresting of the flux which characterisesany appearance whatsoever; instead, Deleuze is addressing art in general,though of course he focuses on the work of Bacon in particular. Inthe work of different artists, the flux finds virtually compossible restingpoints (Bacon and Kandinsky, Kandinsky and Pollock, and so on). In thissense it is not only Bacon’s Figures that are an answer to the Heracliteanflux; it is also Deleuze’s Figure-ness (the fact established by a bloc ofsensation).

There is still another reason for giving a negative answer to thequestion above. If the work of the artist tries, at any price, to limitthe chaos which precedes the becoming of the object, it does not doso by collapsing movement onto rest or difference onto the model. Thefact that a bloc of sensation is able to endure does not mean that abloc of sensation receives a fixed shape; to endure means not ‘to beso’ – ‘to be lips, to be teeth, to be tongue’. What enduring requiresat the very least is to be able to re-create the movement that firstallowed the appearance of a mouth. The Figure traps movement as afact – the fact that a mouth moves. A mouth becomes a scream – a mouthscreams. And a scream becomes an ear – the ear that listens to the scream.Deleuze speaks of a metamorphosis that does not dissolve the mouthinto a sound, and the sound into its listener: ‘sensory becoming is theaction by which something or someone is ceaselessly becoming-other(while continuing to be what they are), sunflower or Ahab’ (Deleuzeand Guattari 1994: 117). Thus, Deleuze’s idea is not that the artisticproduct is a visible portion of an invisible chain in metamorphosis.

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Art does not need an object as we commonly see it (like what happenswith photography), because art can deal with its invisible becomingand produce the schema of a new possible appearance of ‘it’. With thenotion of diagram, Deleuze reformulates the concept of flux in termsof what allows invisible movements to make an object appear. Thediagram, being an operative set, balances itself between probability andobscurity; it gives access to new areas of sensation. It is true that artneeds contours (just as appearance needs ‘something’ to be seen), thusit necessarily ‘stops’ movement, as Deleuze acknowledges – ‘and aboveall, a new figuration, that of the Figure, should emerge from the diagramand make the sensation clear and precise’ (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 110).

IV. The Logic of Sensation

How does a mouth become this mouth? This is an ontological question.A similar question, posed along aesthetic lines, seems to be the oneDeleuze is after: how does a painter paint a mouth with his brushes, andhow does that mouth on the canvas create the painter’s actual mouth,out of the brushes’ reach?

We shall hereafter read Deleuze’s Francis Bacon, The Logic ofSensation, in particular chapters 1–11, starting from the last ones: weshall read it as a phenomenology of sensation. Indeed, our aim is tounderstand how in each chapter movement – inhalation and exhalation,compression and expansion – gives rise to a lasting figure of Bacon’s art.We have to go through several ‘levels of complexity’ of motion: everychapter develops one or more phenomenological steps that describethe artistic co-creation of the real. One instance of the levels or stepsmight work as an example. In Francis Bacon terms like ‘human meat’and ‘animal meat’ (dog), are terms of a perpetual becoming oppositeof the opposite. A dog easily becomes a man in Bacon, and viceversa. However – and here is the idea of an aesthetical answer toHeraclitus – the incessant flux between the two poles of the movementis the starting point, both for Bacon and for Deleuze, for the search ofthe being of the flux, that is, for something stable in the flux – its measureand source. In the context of this example, there is something invisibly atwork: the Figure-spirit. The spirit is neither human nor animal: it is theirzone of indiscernibility. It is the unapparent that sustains the apparent,an approximation to the notion of a bloc of sensation. Hence, in theDeleuzian lexicon there are not only terms for the flux, but, prior tothose, there are terms for a durable entity, Figure-ness, that is, a fact ofnature.

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Most of the chapters from 1–11 in Francis Bacon reproduce theschema of the Heraclitean flux-movement whilst offering the aestheticalanswer Bacon put forward – a fact, or stable reality. Thus, we nowread the work by Deleuze aiming at grasping both the terms of themetamorphoses, and a stable fact that sustains those opposites. That is,those terms of a logic of sensation that, underneath the range of visibilityof the naked eye, grants our worldly sensation.

Preliminary Movement: The Painter Jumps into the Canvas and theCanvas Offers Him a Chance to Escape – Chapter 11

A canvas is never blank, not even before the artist paints on it. It isan imposition: our sight is dominated by historical clichés, and the lessvisible they are, the more powerful they are. Bacon’s cleaning womanwould not ‘see’ these clichés; she would think that the canvas was empty.On the contrary, Bacon knows in advance that that which is in hishead or around him in his studio represents the most probable, thatis, the image which is already given on the canvas. The blank canvasis not a mirror, but it contains virtually – with high probability – whatis usually seen around. There is already a flowing of appearances thatreaches the canvas from the head of the painter, or from his room. Inaddition, a response of the canvas is already there, and this is a lessprobable mirroring of that which is around – a distortion. An artist seesthose invisible movements that support both probable figuration and itsdistortion. He ‘apprehends’ – Bacon says – the presence of pre-pictorialconnections between the movements of his brushes and the emergence ofan actual object. A Figure emerges: the Heraclitean flux (the movementthat takes the man and the canvas closer) has found the first measure ofits own motion. Between figuration and chaos an artist makes an objectagain, a pictorial Figure.

Invisible Movements of the Figure An Acrobat Balanced betweenFame and Death – Chapter 6

The Figure in Bacon is the result of movements of invisible forces, andindeed it is itself in constant movement: how can it be durable, then? Itsmovement, insofar as the artistic work has achieved its task, is itselfinvisible, internal and external to time and space. The movement ofthe Figure is not spatiotemporal (Deleuze often states that the Figureis time). The Figure in Bacon actually seems to have honoured the firstand only rule of Deleuze’s ontology of creation, because it excludes

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figuration and avoids narration. There is no narration in Bacon: Deleuzeinsists on the capability of the artist to leave historical time out of hispaintings. But the lack of narration is not the stillness of a heavy stone,but the equilibrium of an acrobat, suspended between probable deathand fame. He vibrates internally, he wants to live but his life is consignedto immobility, balancing between the forces of gravity and death. Theportraits, the Figures, the acrobats, every object of Baconian creation‘moves “in-place”’, a spasm towards life facing the forces of fear (seeDeleuze [2003] 2004: 61–2). All of this movement, which is actually thewill of an object to emerge over chaos, is not for nothing, but in factapproaches eternity. The Figure exists, so to speak, more than ordinaryobjects themselves.

What Comes to Pass at the Heart of a Figure: Both Force andSensation – Chapter 8, or the Rebirth of Existence in Pure Sensation

One unsettled issue in Deleuze’s Logic of Sensation is the relationbetween ‘force’ and ‘sensation’. Is the Figure the result of unapparentchaotic forces or is it the artificial bloc of sensation? Definitions do nothelp. Consider for instance the confrontation of the two expressionsthat Deleuze uses: ‘paint the sensation’ and ‘painting forces’. What ispainting, the capturing of forces or the rendering of pure sensation? Thefollowing hint provides some guidance: sensation ‘remains at the basisof perception, perception in turn being what brings about the creationof events’ (Conley 2005: 244). Perhaps the Figure is not everything inthe Deleuzian aesthetic universe, but there is still room (and there mustbe) for a perceiver. The perceiver distinguishes forces that constitute, intheir play of visible and invisible, organic Figures and definite shapes.The Figure reciprocates by emanating sensations, so that the perceiver isonce again hit by forces which have now acquired the artistic nature ofa bloc of sensation: ‘some paint comes across directly onto the nervoussystem’ (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 35). This ‘outcome’ has eternally alreadygone back from the perceiver onto the body of the Figure, and it makesits reality (as if the cosmic forces could in fact subtract from the perceiversome of its reality with the scope of increasing the reality of the objecton the canvas). A sensation, through the organs, strikes a body, thenorgans dissolve again, but the wave is the real as such. It immediatelyhits the perceiver (there is no time in-between its production and itseffect) and ‘when sensation is linked to a body in this way it ceases tobe representative and becomes real’. The perceiver hit by the sensationdevelops another organ, the organ that was dissolved in figuration by

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the intensity of the sensation (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 45). The exchangeoccurring between the Figure and the Figure’s perceiver is the becomingreal of the sensation itself, its bypassing of the perceiver’s subjectivityand its formation as a bloc of sensation. This is the Figure then: definedby the income of directed forces while emanating filtered sensations. Thisis its equilibrium, this is the flux of which the Figure is the filter; this is theeternal pulsation of opposites and the emergence of the acrobat. Baconhas obtained the subject of what Merleau-Ponty calls the ‘continualrebirth of existence’: the Figure.

In the remaining part of the book that we will focus on (chapters1–11, excluding those already analysed, namely 6, 8 and 11), Deleuzeexplores the logic of the Figure’s movements; that is, its logic ofsensation. From now on the terms of these movements will be eminently‘Baconian’: ‘animal’, ‘hysteria’, and so on. These terms introducelevels of complexity of the Figure’s movement within Bacon’s workalone, therefore they cannot really be used to refer to the work ofany other artist. The Logic of Sensation is an aesthetical answerto the problem of the Heraclitean flux: everything is in motion,yet some reality makes its way towards being, passing from therealm of invisible forces towards the surface of a canvas. Whatfollows is precisely the exemplification of this rule of motion inDeleuze’s Logic of Sensation. Deleuze’s work is the analysis ofthe levels of complexity through which the artistic object passes.Every chapter corresponds to a certain level of complexity. In orderfor the birth of the artistic object to take place – this is where Deleuzeresponds to the problem of the Heraclitean chaos – we must read throughDeleuze’s presentation in reverse order. The reason for this is thatDeleuze’s presentation proceeds by unfolding the logic of sensation,while another task is pursued: the concentration of all movements ontoone single coagulation of reality.

From the Fall to the Figure – Chapter 10, Considering the Caseof a Triptych

A sensation, being defined by different levels of intensity, circulatesthroughout the painting (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 76). This is already –Deleuze says – a third level of complexity, with the third levelcorresponding to a movement that, step by step, will eventually lead toan artistic answer – a real permanence on the canvas. Different objectsstand for active and passive rhythms (no doubt ‘activity’ and ‘passivity’represent relational notions, as the definition of rhythm suggests), and

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their difference is produced by random spurts of paint, which Baconlikes to utilise. The active and the passive interact with each other andcorrespond to a restless, invisible movement, like the water in a river,which is relatively still and inexplicably ever changing. Let us take a stepback to what Deleuze calls a second level of complexity: the passive andthe active rhythms form a body or a materiality on the canvas. Theseare attendants of the movement.6 They become the visible attendant andthe rhythmic attendant. A last step back (to the first level): before, thetwo attendants were standing only for an attendant-function, dependingon the moment of the viewer’s perception. The mere function nowindeed receives a body of its own, and in fact it is painted: an explicitattendant really observes another attendant, the rhythmic one, who isnot observing, but is being observed. The co-presence of two opposite,yet complementary, functions is the cause of the multiplication of thethree levels analysed above.

From Resonance to the Figure/Fact – Chapter 9, on Bacon’s Bodies

The two attendants (it can also be just one) are in fact the outcome ofa more superficial movement: the movement of sensation that involvesa subject of sensation, the Figure, and a perceiver of it (the attendantor attendants). ‘Rhythm itself would become the Figure.’ The vibrationbetween Figure and attendant(s) is a rhythm without narration: thisis Bacon’s challenge – to paint time without narration. The two mustbe one fact, immediately connected, ‘coupled together like “wrestlers”’(Deleuze [2003] 2004: 68) in a single body struggling within itselfbecause of the presence of deeper energies, and never telling a story.From the multiple rhythms dealt with in chapter 10 Bacon obtains aconcentration of rhythms, united in a single fact, and led by the Figure:rhythms ‘constitute the Figure’ (71). Art produces a new reality as theemergence of dark movements under its surface: the Figure’s body, orbody-vibration.

From the Discovery of ‘the material reality of bodies’7 to the Bodywithout Organs – Chapter 7, the Hysteric Body

The body previously created is mainly the body of a Figure, or, so tospeak, the leader of the painting – a human body. The human body isan organism, but the living body is not (for the organism is not life;it is what imprisons life, as Deleuze states). The living body (what weare going to discover on top of the invisible movements which any

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materiality is subjected to) is the body of those forces that escape theorganised-body and can do without it. The real body is the body withoutorgans, that is, a hysteric body that ‘makes’ present. Within any bodythere are the intensities of a sensation, which, when encountered, createan organ: that is our body, or what one easily claims to be a fixed, orgiven, state. The organ is nothing but a hysteric adjustment (Deleuze[2003] 2004: 47) for a provisional liberation of tension. In that point,at that time, painting discovers the pure presence of which it is made:movement, the hysterical movement of a body. Hysteria is the newfigure, the new aesthetic discovery that derives from the vibration ofa body without organs and the organism through which to escape.

From a Hysteric Body to the Real Body – Chapter 4,the Corporeal Spirit

The body without organs is a potential body, or a molecular body, thatcontains every relation of movement and rest required for the creationof a molar entity. This woman, that girl, this dog, that Christ: theseall have an indiscernible basic nature of meat. Meat is true. It is thatin which Bacon finds his faith (Sylvester 2008: 23, 46) – though he wasnot a believer – and what compels him to paint a becoming-animal ‘notwithout the animal becoming spirit at the same time’ (Deleuze [2003]2004: 21). Meat is true because it is the ground of indiscernibility ofthe ever-becoming (of the hysteric body): there is not a mere analogicalcorrespondence between man and dog, they are not simply ‘alike’.However, if the painter is religious enough, then he can see a spiritstruggling between man’s metamorphosis into a beast, suffering, andat the same time see a beast’s metamorphosis into a man, suffering.This is the reality of becoming: an animal spirit, or a Christ, whosevital breath tends to resurrection, but which is concealed by a corporealnature (20) – its destiny is to remain part of this movement, and never toascend.

From the Spirit, through the Material Structure, and to theFact – Chapters 3 and 1, the Last Shape

The spirit is not the conclusion, because Bacon believes that there isno longer religious possibility, but just ‘game’ (Sylvester 2008: 29).According to Bacon, Christ and other religious subjects are incapable oftranscendence. The only movement they undergo is the same movementevery piece of meat undergoes. Chapter 10 deals with the flow ofactive and passive; chapter 9 discusses the vibration of the attendants.

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Every chapter points to a certain level of the Heraclitean flux, and namestwo opposite constituents; chapter 7, for instance, names the body asgiven, and the hysteric body without organs. Every chapter representsa level of complexity of the flow. However, there is never mere ‘flow’,but ‘Figure-ness’ too: the perceiver of the flow, its measure and its filter.‘After all, the human body, is in a sense a filter’ (Sylvester 2008: 199).For instance, in chapter 4, the flow is represented by the coupling ofBacon’s human and animal body. They become, restlessly turning intotheir opposite, man into dog, dog into man. Yet the canvas graspshold of these forces of chaos, which, without this grasping hold, wouldlead to a vanishing of humanity and animality in their meaninglessnarration. In this way, Bacon paints the Figure-spirit. This is preciselywhat both emerges from and resists the flux. Heraclitus is challengedby the presence of attendants: they experience the flux and measure thesensation it emanates, upon their body. The spirit is not the end. Theflow leads back towards its opposite. The Figure-spirit is then the subjectof a renewed motion, more superficial than the others: athleticism. At thesame time the Figure ‘wants to pass to a vanishing point to the contour inorder to dissipate into the material structure’ (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 17);and ‘the material structure curls around the contour in order to imprisonthe Figure’ (14). Eventually, the pulsation between the Figure and thematerial structure allows the last shape of the Baconian universe toemerge: the matter of fact. This is precisely the event occurring betweenthe Figure and the material structure, via the round contour. The fact, orthe matter of fact, rules out figuration because its movement is capableof being without distance and duration. The fact is the bloc of sensation.

V. The Aesthetical Answer to Heraclitus

It remains true: ‘Cold things warm themselves, warm cools, moist dries,parched is made wet’ (Krik [1954] 2010: 149). It is as if the Heracliteanuniverse is reshaped. The Obscure used a ‘naturalistic’ vocabulary – thewet and the dry, the day and the night, the rivers, the fire, and so on. ButDeleuze, still maintaining the logic of the Heraclitean movement, pushesHeraclitus’s naturalism towards an aesthetical understanding. The dryand the wet become the Figure and the Material structure, or the Figureand the Attendant, or even the Human and the Animal, which foreverface off against each other, becoming each other, and vanishing in amoment of indiscernibility.

Bacon wanted to paint something real, but lived in chaos – his studios,too, were extremely chaotic. The real emerges from chaos – from the

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game of an incessant movement from the invisible to the visible andagain into the invisible – and not ‘from nothing’ and into ‘nothing’. Theaesthetical creation does not proceed ex nihilo (like God’s creation). Itrequires an unformed material. Indeed, art co-creates the real – and co-creation is a form of re-creation.8 In chaos there is matter (the meatthat Bacon has to shape); while in the void there is nothing, not eventhe invisible. The chaos that the artist starts from is unintelligible,mysterious, yet it can be grasped in a schema: the becoming oppositeof each opposite. The Obscure confronted the problem of becoming:everything is just what it is as long as it becomes its opposite. He calledthis ‘river’ and ‘flux’. Thus, flux is not simply pure chaos, for purechaos is beyond representation – how can the pure metamorphosis bepainted, or described? Heraclitus gave the schema of chaos, the river,and described it as the hidden flowing of ‘every piece of meat’ into itsopposite.

What does not emerge in Ancient Greece, however, is an accountof how something becomes something, for Heraclitus seems to havestopped before this problem. For him, indeed, things simply become. InHeraclitus’s notion of becoming we also find the problem of endangeringits nature, that is, providing a proof that a multitude is not simplyone – as in the example of the wise man, who fails to distinguish theday and the night, for they are one (Krik [1954] 2010: 155). But how,then, does something become that something? The original intuitionof an aesthetics that creates, like Deleuze’s, is precisely this: ‘unity ismultiplicity’ (Deleuze [1983] 2002: 24), the opposites never melt intoone. A man becomes an animal, but not even the deepest sorrow can fusetogether man and dog. We can still sense the difference. To sense is toaffirm a difference. For difference, rather than being the static oppositionof a double identity (subject and object) is the dynamic instance ‘at theorigin of individuation’ (the self individualises and the indeterminateassumes contours). The affirmation of a difference is the superficial effectof a spirit’s becoming something.

It is here that Deleuze intervenes. His idea is that art has something tosay to chaos. Deleuze shares with Heraclitus the view that the cosmos isa compound of terrific invisible forces (chaos). However, the case is nottrue that chaos is pure darkness, because darkness, like void, allows noflesh: something rises towards the surface and becomes visible. Thus, ifthere is chaos, there is flesh, hence there is something; and whatever itis (dust, apples or heads), it is able to endure in the life of the universe.Deleuze is still in agreement with Heraclitus when he claims that whatendures is unseen by most. The colour changes, the object changes, the

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apple changes . . . but art has something to say to the river of becomingbecause there are apples that render themselves independent from theflow of becoming-something-else. They exit the circle of the ‘model’,stand up on their own, and become themselves the forces that allowany material to express its sense (and the sensation turns colouring – seeDeleuze and Guattari 1994: 167). There are things which move fasterthan the movements of the cosmos, and these things are artistic products,blocs of sensations. The Verbum creates reality, but does not refer toanything; it just makes things come into being by naming them. Thus,it does not express any opinion, contrary to what most think. Ordinarylanguage, perhaps, expresses opinion, but not the Verbum. Art co-createsreality; it compels its object to run faster than any possible referent,and to germinate in time even without a perceiver. All art needs is asupport or material; aside from that it is autonomous or sufficient – it isa ‘sacred source’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 172). Apples and smilesare preserved untouched, and so are organs and mouths. These are termsof an aesthetic language that, without giving opinions, re-makes the real.(Not only different affirmations, but also affirmations of differences.)

Notes1. I refer to Bacon’s Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953.

Every molecular region of the Figure’s model (by Velázquez) is faithfully ‘re-made’, just with the exception of the irrational and hysteric presences of hisbody which are liberated (Sylvester 2008: 26).

2. To be at once at various levels – to be force and to be effect, like the motive powerthat takes the form of the displaced foot on the path – is to be the artistic Figure.Aesthetics, for Deleuze, can let this possibility become real; that is, art can createa Figure. The artist and the spectator belong to the movement of creation: theyare one of the aspects of becoming. The other aspect of becoming is the work ofart. If, on the one hand, there are the creator-artist and the creature-work, onthe other hand, there is the one who sees and that which is seen. In the aestheticexperience ‘sensation’ depends on ‘creation’. But here, where the creativity of theartist shapes a bloc of sensation, a turn occurs. The dominion of the objectiveimages of the artist’s world gains life, the Figure senses. We have the impressionthat it is the work of art that watches the spectator, as in the case of the forestand Paul Klee (Merleau-Ponty 1964b: 167). Becoming undergoes an inversionof dependence of viewer and viewed. Creation occurs not more on the canvasthan on the organs of the spectator. Sensation creates (the artist paints what hesees) because creatures sense (the Figure is like the organ of sight through whichthe spectator sees a new world). To be at various levels means to be already‘inside the painting’, almost be the Figure. It means to be not more sensation orcreation, than it means to be their becoming.

3. The words by Bacon are: ‘an illustrational form tells you through the intelligenceimmediately what the form is about, whereas a non-illustrational form worksfirst upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact. Now why thisshould be, we don’t know. This may have to do with how facts themselves

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are ambiguous, how appearances are ambiguous, and therefore this way ofrecording form is nearer to the fact by its ambiguity of recording’ (Sylvester2008: 56–7).

4. Understanding what the artistic work is about is to take into account its poweras an artistic product: rendering visible (according to Klee’s remark) is morethan merely rendering the visible. And this, far from simply being the artist’sconcern, also has philosophical implications. Two different kinds of notionsof visibility are contrasted at present: Deleuze’s and Merleau-Ponty’s. Whilethe latter believes that visibility concerns a question of vision (‘appearances’),Deleuze transforms visibility into an ontological issue. For Deleuze, the artistdoes not only contribute to the education of our natural vision (see Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 14), but also presides over the coming into being of the thing assuch. While Merleau-Ponty believes that art reinforces the capability of visionthat lies beyond what is seen, Deleuze puts forward the idea that art reproducesthe materialisation of the thing as such. Merleau-Ponty, in contrast, is concernedwith ‘the exact study of appearances’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 11).

5. Bacon ascribes to every organ a certain function, and actually he seems to makethe creation of an organ dependent on its function (Deleuze [2003] 2004: 48,51–2). But one has to contrast between an organic function and an inorganicone. An organic function, such as eating for survival, is ascribed to the mouthby someone that takes the existence of a mouth (and the life of an organism)for granted (a biologist). An inorganic function, in contrast, has nothing to dowith the vital activity of an organism. In Bacon, for instance, the mouth takes onanother function entirely: it becomes a hole through which an affect escapes.With Bacon and Deleuze, then, one has the chance to question the organicbeing of the mouth itself (rather than its biological use), both its emergenceinto the realm of being and its disappearance. While in biology, for example, avital function serves as the teleological aim of an organ’s existence, in Bacon’spainting, and in Deleuze’s ontology, the function sustains the being of theorgan as such, giving it a consistency, or a shape, independent of an organic,teleological aim. Deleuze’s notion of function is found prior to the one of organicfunction: it is the organ-isation of the (organic) function.

6. How can anything create and be created? An object painted on a canvasis ‘created’: apples. However, Cézanne’s apples are illuminated from within(Merleau-Ponty 1964a: 12). Bacon’s heads are similar to Cézanne’s apples: theyare solid bodies with a solidity that is self-creating; or again, they are sensationsthat are thickened into meat. Thus apples and heads can create: they createthemselves. But not ex nihilo because then it is a matter of belief; they createthemselves for a viewer. Bacon’s attendants are signs of viewers. In front of anattendant a head, or a Figure, or an apple, deploys its meat. An attendant isa ‘constant or point of reference in relation to which a variation is assessed’(Deleuze [2003] 2004: 13). In Bacon there is not only the function-Figure butthe function-Perceiver, too (but they can be united into one).

7. Deleuze [2003] 2004: 55.8. Bacon seems to maintain that art does not make the real in the same way that a

god creates things. For when God produces something, his creature is ‘nature’.Bacon, however, thinks that the product of men, and of the artist himself, isartificial. Every production, in other words, is a form of re-production; thus evenart, while co-producing the real, is actually re-producing something real. This,nevertheless, should not be confused with the fact that the artificial reproductionof the real is a second-hand reproduction. On the contrary, he believes that‘reality in art is something profoundly artificial and that it has to be recreated’(Sylvester 2008: 172).

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ReferencesConley, Tom (2005) ‘Sensation’, in Adrian Parr (ed.), The Deleuze Dictionary,

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 244–6.Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York:

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