I think about Deleuze, the movement of becoming (becoming). To extinguish the sound of the stream, I must become the sound; to enter the stream, I become part of it. When I linger in the forest, I take part in the silence and the chirping, the rustling of the leaves. I become one with nature.

That idea of Romanticism - oneness with nature, with a loved one, with the cosmos, with God - generates bliss, delight, bliss, ananda. Deleuze certainly does not use these terms. His philosophy of immanence, of nonduality, attempts to describe the changes of the world, its becoming and disintegration, its construction, its structure, its order, its laws and dynamics through terms such as becoming, deterritorialization, flight, rhizome, repetition, rhythm, etc.. However, his philosophy remains essentially a movement of the concept.

He breaks away from the rigidity of Anglo-American philosophy of language, which focuses on an empirical concept of truth, and instead attempts to describe movements of thought that depict a more complex reality. The central question remains, however, how our thinking, our perception, our experience, our being can be directed towards something outside of ourselves - how our consciousness can draw something into itself, process it, analyze it, observe it and experience it. How can my consciousness become one with what it has as its object? This fundamental problem of almost all Western models of dualism can actually only be resolved through immanence.

When I step into a stream in my imagination and try to switch off the sound, I have to become one with that stream. How do I become one - regardless of whether I actually step into the stream or just imagine it? This is how I experience it in meditation: My consciousness sinks into the depths of existence, understands itself as part of the whole, becomes one with that primordial consciousness, emptiness, Brahman, existence, and sees itself as identical with what it is in its self-awareness.

When I hear a stream rushing, the noise is nothing other than my consciousness itself: the vibration of the water and the vibration of the air, the vibrations and my ear that receives them, my consciousness, which is that primordial resonance, is identical with it, already contains everything in the world within itself. It's a bit like Leibniz's monad; he also had a good thought there, even if he didn't immerse himself in real experience, but remained stuck at the level of the text and truthful statements.

I will (become) thus one with that which is to be extinguished in the koan. By becoming identical at the deepest level of emptiness and recognizing its form, I can give expression to this form. I can now imitate the sound of the stream or imitate its movement, I can bathe in it and flow with it, or I can paint it, perhaps in an ink drawing; I can describe it poetically or try to express it in some other way. But that expression is not identical with being identical - it refers to it.

Vconnection

For the last two years, I've been immersing myself quite deeply in the Upanishads, practicing some yoga and getting to grips with the System of the Yoga a little. I immersed myself in my own body, my own senses, my own consciousness. I have seen that there are a large number of levels and that there is no reason to assume that there are not even more levels. Two years ago, I had simply denied most of what I was experiencing here. It's nice to know that. The world is much bigger than I always thought, it is much more complex, more colorful, more alive, deeper. And that seems to be just the beginning.

A core idea of the teachings in India is letting go, not wanting to have everything and to desire or rejecttolean back. Simply accepting the world as it is is the great art. Simply enjoying it as it is, even if it is not easy, is bliss. Sinking into meditation and being one with the world. This feeling can also be taken from meditation into everyday life, because we all have to eat.

The basic structureüis indeed something

The exploration of one's own body, one's own consciousness, one's own life energy is systematized in the 24 tattwas. The self, its relationship to Purusha (soul), Prakriti (primal nature), the Buddhi (intellect), the Ahamkara (ego consciousness), Manas (sense-bound thinking) connects the essential cognitive and spiritual levels of experience. However, it remains an experience that stands on its own; it seeks unity with the cosmos, transcends itself beyond itself, yet remains in the same existence. Dvaita-advaita, the duality of duality and non-duality, i.e. a complex idea of immanence, which is supported by pure consciousness, its basis is Brahman, that which we cannot really think, but which is somehow accessible in spiritual experience, even if none of our organs are equipped for it. Only in the synthesis of the senses, in the complex experience of pure (disinterested) enjoyment, the sharpening of the senses, lies a path that is rocky.

The Beautiful in India, however, is that it goes on and on. Having arrived somewhere, the little mind imagines that it has grasped something and can put it into words. But here, almost as if in a dialectical reversal, new levels open up.

Before the 24 tattwas come the 12 tantra tattwas. 5 pure (Śiva: pure consciousness, absolute; Śakti: dynamic energy, power; Sadākhya: ever-present, eternal; Iśvara: supreme lord, ruler; Śuddha Vidyā: pure knowledge, clarity) and 7 semi-clean Tattwas (Māyā: illusion, cosmic veil; Kāla: time, temporal flow; Vidyā: limited knowledge, consciousness; Rāga: attachment, desire, passion; Niyati: cosmic order, destiny; Kalā: creative skill, art; Purusha: individual soul, self), which complement the 24 impure Tattwas. The 24 tattwas comprise the 4 Antahkarana (inner instruments)manas (mind), buddhi (intellect), ahamkara (ego) and chitta (memory or consciousness); the 5 Sensory organs (jñānendriya): ghrāna (nose) for smell, rasana (tongue) for taste, caksus (eye) for sight, tvāk (skin) for touch, śrotra (ear) for hearing; the 5 Organs of action (karmendriya): pāyu (anus) for excretion, upasthā (sexual organ) for procreation and sexual pleasure, pāda (leg) for locomotion, pāni (hand) for grasping and touching, vāk (mouth) for speech; the 5 subtle elements (tanmātra): gandha (smell), rasa (taste), rūpa (form), sparśa (touch), śabda (sound); the 5 rough elements (mahābhuta): prthvi (earth), jala (water), tejas (fire), vāyu (air) and ākāśa (ether or space).

The fascinating thing is that the realization that the world as it presents itself to me in everyday life does not exist (everyone here always says that space and time do not exist) is described with Maya. The world exists, if at all, as will and imagination (Schopenhauer). So when I have recognized this and realize that I aover af I still seem to exist somehow, because after all that is what I am thinking, then there must be another way of seeing the world; the world must be different from what I think, there are possibilities in this world that are different from the ones I know.

I have already come to terms with the fact that time, knowledge, causality, my own existence are fundamentally different, that I cannot trust my senses, that I cannot trust knowledge systems. The logic of the material world is limited to that world, that's okay. It applies there as far as possible. But what about desire? The desire for objects (food, beautiful things, pleasure), or the desire for others? Asceticism can significantly reduce the world of what I desire. I am making good progress by my standards, even if it is hardly noticeable. a big leap can be called, finally I'm sitting here at my computer...

The other, the intersubjective or the unity with a greater consciousness

In the World of Tantra are seeing objects and subjects beyond the veil of Maya and it is possible interacting with them, that is the great art. Magical thinking, occult practices, ecstatic unions, connecting things that are not yet connected, merging, amalgamating, making gold from mercury, dhe secret of tantra is to expand reality and master its fine structure. The great masters can do incredible things, they say. But we can also do a lot on a small scale. For example, when we meet another person and connect with him or her. What actually happens there? The external senses scan each other, an idea of the other person develops, an exchange begins, an attempt is made to understand the other person. And when it becomes magical, when the eyes sparkle and the face smiles, when we lose ourselves in the eyes of the other person, then we immerse ourselves in another reality, in a counterpart. I had learned that we can't look into other people's heads. That seems to me to be fundamentally wrong. I have always had this unease. In moments of deep friendship or falling in love, we can transcend ourselves, form a unity with the other person, unite, merge, form a symbiosis. But it also goes beyond this. Within a community, together with others, our own consciousness becomes part of a larger one. That is probably the danger of sects; if you are not careful, brains are quickly washed and invisible military helmets are put on. What I mean but positive is the spiritual power.

At the moment, I am experiencing this in meditation, which is fed by the certainty of the existence of another. At the moment I wake up at 4 in the morning and meditate. I did this maybe 2-3 times decades ago. These are special moments when the consciousness that comes straight from sleep dives into meditation before the senses have engaged with the world. It is heavy, cumbersome and slow, but also highly sensitized, every nerve becomes perceptible, every little restlessness perceptible and every connection to the outside world perceptible. I realize that I am not alone in the world; the cosmos is there, the sun will rise soon... but also the experience of the other is there, the presence of another person's consciousness, a deep connection, beyond space and time. This kind of connection seems to me to be a tantric one. To perceive this connection, to live it out, to strengthen it and to make it shine through concentration is to ignite the inner light.

The unity of Shiva and Shakti represents this connection. In the everyday world, with my body and social customs, this connection is extremely rare. Many people may not even be aware of it. It is a connection that first happens in reality: drinking coffee together in the afternoon, or getting lost in each other's eyes, experiencing the world and world view together, laughing together or being irritated by honking motorcycles. But also the certainty of the other person's existence, the feeling of closeness despite physical distance, thinking of the other person and being present with them. The levels that connect are not only the material, but also the world of life, the world of consciousness, the spiritual and cosmic experience of the self as part of the great, in which there is also another.

What is the philosophy here in India? Is the deep compassion, the fusion compatible with the realization of Maya? Is the tantric union a spiritual union? I have been asking myself these questions as I have been Ragas and feel myself and the other. Ragas, I am closing the circle a little, are the original form of Indian music and derive from the system of yogas. They are spiritual experience, improvisation at the highest level of mastery; they express how sound, i.e. vibration, is formed in consciousness through concentration and sensual experience and creates that cosmic unity through the body as an instrument. The musical experience, the reflection and meditation, the co-presence of the other, the merging and the creation of a shared reality that creates a new future horizon, are profoundly tantric experiences. You don't have to be a grandmaster to experience this. A little sensitivity is probably enough.

When I read a book, watch a movie, immerse myself in a painting or take part in a performance, what exactly is happening? I am experiencing something, images, feelings and experiences are awakened in me. Imagine a movie, a book, a play or a painting that is about human relationships, action, history or fairy tales. So you're sitting somewhere looking at something that tells some kind of story. Now, what's the difference between looking at a story and contemplating, say, looking at the bottom of a clear, living lake where fish and plants, stones and sun reflections invite you to contemplate the universe? Is it not the case that one thing, art created by another person, tells one story, and nature, created quite differently, tells a different story? One difference seems to be time. In art, the artist can shape space and time, the narrative can jump, the space can change through a cut, one feeling can change to another without a transition. The colorful hustle and bustle of the cosmos, which tells its story, takes place for us in a space-time continuum. We can move faster or slower within it, we can fly or walk slowly, but we cannot change time.

What we can do, however, is use our memory, our mind and our perception to focus on various elements from our environment and link them together in our consciousness. This world of experience makes up our waking consciousness and sometimes also our dream consciousness. We bring a consciousness with us into the world.

Now we already have a whole host of different roles here: a person who experiences the world as an observer, an artist who expresses his experience and makes it tangible for others, and the world itself, which in its expansion in space and time provides the basis for those experiences. We can make direct contact with the world, reflect on it and inquire into its deeper meaning. We can try to establish a connection to what holds the world together within, i.e. to experience a principle, a force, an origin that goes beyond that of which I am a part. This going beyond is now to be regarded with a little caution, as it immediately raises the question of duality. Is something beyond that of which I am a part, or is the whole of which I am a part, in the form of immanence, the whole that is thought of as such as transcendent, but is not?

The question of duality is important here, because from here we can ask what the role of art really is. Is art something that creates a kind of world that the viewer can immerse themselves in, as something that is different, that confronts me, an illusion, a representation, a simulation? Or is art part of the world in the sense that the consciousness that created it has expressed something that each of us can experience, at least structurally? And what makes art special here is the possibility of expressing it in a medium that is independent of the artist's consciousness.

That's quite amazing. There are different ways of thinking about it. I can understand art as a system of signs, i.e. I can look at it semiotically, like a language. I identify elements of the artwork and bring them before my inner eye in the form of linguistic or semiotic structures of consciousness - be it visual, auditory, gustatory, physical or olfactory - depending on which is the dominant medium here. So I can say: "I see or hear or taste x." This x, if previously perceived similarly by an artist, would be the content of the work. Most art theories stop here and now concentrate on the formal elements of x. Is x interesting, new, surprising, provocative, emotional, etc.?

However, the underlying principle here is consciousness itself. Consciousness experiences, creates and shares. The world itself unfolds in the work of art in a very special way. The work of art offers us the opportunity to reflect on the experience of the world itself and to understand it in the experience itself as sublime, as bliss, as transcendent. When it comes to art that critically engages with reality and shows us what is not going well, where there is suffering and injustice, this may be more difficult to accept, but qualitatively it also remains that experience.

In India, this is referred to as rasa, literally taste. However, it denotes precisely the experience that is shared between artist and audience through expression, but which at its core refers to the general consciousness, the immanence, Brahman. Art is thus essentially not merely anchored in the material world and the world of the living, of knowledge and the intellect, but reaches into the realm of the contemplative, the meditative. It is part of Satchitananda.

I realize that I have become tired of looking at art in purely formal terms. That misses the point of art and even the point of our existence. Art is merely a form of expression that Brahman has given itself. Art is immanent, it is a knot that connects different things and creates lines on a material basis, the work. The experience of it is different for everyone, so talking and writing about it only makes sense up to a certain point. What you can't talk about, you should keep quiet about. But that doesn't mean that there is nothing there. On the contrary, this is where it gets really interesting.

I have been living with a neurotic dog for a few weeks now. She barked a lot while she still perceived me as a stranger. She kept her distance and was frightened. After a few weeks, she accepted me, approached me and wanted to be stroked. Now she lies at my door and keeps watch; she protects me. What happened? I haven't changed my attitude towards her. I have little connection with dogs and pay her little attention. I am relatively indifferent. But something fundamental has changed with her. It's hard for me to ask her questions, we don't speak the same language. But I seem to have become part of her world. She remembers me, I have become familiar to her. In her world I was a stranger, a threat; now I am a confidant, part of her world, perhaps one day a friend. The possibility exists.

How can I become part of a world that is someone else's world? I think it has a lot to do with memory. I become part of the memory of others. The same applies to me, of course. A new world of experience builds up, especially when I move to a new world, e.g. from Europe to India. Everything is new, strange; I am not afraid, but rather fascinated and curious. All the new impressions - the objects and nature, the people and the culture - become part of my memory. They are integrated into what is my world.

I have been attending a workshop on Tantra philosophy for the last few days. I learned the 36 tattvas, some new meditation techniques, the difference between western science and shastras (knowledge systems). I heard reports of things that are considered impossible in the western world (e.g. alchemy and telekinesis). In essence, Tantra is about the relationship between two forces: Shiva and Shakti, and this on all levels of being, i.e. on the material level, the level of life, consciousness, mind, spirituality, the cosmos, pure existence... It is about understanding that what holds the world together inside is not empirical science. Empirical science is the method that our minds have mastered relatively well since modernity; but it explains very little of what makes up our living world.

But what makes up our world? It is the inner experience, and the approaches to this are through reflection, devotion, meditation and yoga. Tantra seems to be undogmatic here. Every path is okay: never value the path of others, after all, the world is much bigger and more complex than any of us can even imagine. Fate and chance have a complex relationship; spiritual practice, sadhana, shows the way.

But at the moment I'm interested in the Memory and the memory. Memory is the vessel, memory is the content, experience is its history and structure. Memories are images; they are within us and can be actively remembered, appear unasked, be associated more or less by chance. They form our identity. And just as the world outside me becomes part of my memory, I naturally become part of other consciousness if I was part of that experience. And just as I forget many things, I will also forget. That is okay. Sometimes, however, something imprints itself and becomes an integral part.

I'm slowly getting to the point I want to make here. We have cultural techniques to share these memories, our memory, our experiences, our identity and our world view. Through language, text, images, expression through dance, theater, music, mantras, tantras. There are 64 kalas (art forms) in India. Over thousands of years, techniques have been perfected to refine the process of this communication. The resulting aesthetic theories are manifold. In the West, for example, the mechanism of representation is very important; in the Eastern tradition, rasa is more important, i.e. the expression of essence, the essential. Since the 19th century, we have had technical devices such as the camera, the cinematograph and the gramophone as an extension of older printing techniques. So we have found a technique not only to materialize memory (as many art forms do), but also to automate and reproduce it. I think this has created a great deal of confusion.

Gilles Deleuze, with reference to Henri Bergson, has created clarity here by recognizing that film is thinking.

(this is an old text of mine, found in the archives. It is strange to read it again, as it shows to me how desperately I tried to get out of the trap of representation and the urge to embrace a philosophy of immanence. I went through so many ideas, looked at so many artists - I never did anything with the text, as my self-critical voice didn't consider it to be any good. I have to say I like it better now. It is a bit convoluted, sometime there are some jumps, but it gave me a platform to leave the western canon and to finally go to India. I was writing on that text while I was teaching in the USA, and before I went to India for the first time in 2016. I now realize why a part of me stayed in India and never came back, calling me for years, until I moved here. )

"This is the dark thought I have had about representation for so long: we are immersed in it and it has become inseparable from our condition. It has created a world, a cosmos even, of false problems such that we have lost our true freedom: that of invention."-Dorothea Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation

Two positions on Deleuze aesthetics

If we compare two prominent approaches to a Deleuzian aesthetics - one by Daniel W. Smith, the translator of Deleuze's Francis Bacon book and the other by Jacques Rancière - we gain insight into one of the central problems of aesthetics in a Deleuze's philosophy. Daniel W. Smith in his introduction to the Deleuze's Francis Bacon book said that Deleuze "suggests that there are two general routes through which modern painting escaped the clichés of representation and attempted to attain a "sensation" directly: either by moving toward abstraction, or by moving toward what Lyotard has termed the figural. An abstract art like that of Mondrian or Kandinsky, though it rejected classical figuration, in effect reduced sensation to a purely optical code that addressed itself primarily to the eye "[1] Jacques Rancière in contrast discusses a Deleuzian Aesthetics starting with two Deleuzian 'formulations': ""The first statement is found in What is Philosophy?: "The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself. . . . The artist creates blocks of percepts and affects, but the only law of creation is that the compound must stand up on its own." The second appears in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation: "With painting, hysteria becomes art. Or rather, with the painter, hysteria becomes painting.""[2] It seems as if we have four proposals for an aesthetic theory on hands:

• modern painting escaped the clichés of representation and attempted to attain a "sensation" directly by moving toward abstraction
• modern painting escaped the clichés of representation and attempted to attain a "sensation" directly by moving toward what Lyotard has termed the figural
• The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself
• With painting, hysteria becomes art. Or rather, with the painter, hysteria becomes painting

Although Smith talks about modern art while Rancière quotes Deleuze on art in general, they both state a dichotomy: art is either self-sufficient and abstract, or move toward something that Lyotard calls figural: a nonrepresentational figure which through its power of recognition without representation gives us access to sensation. To unpack that riddle, it is helpful to look at how Deleuze can be understood as a philosopher of immanence who rejects transcendental concepts of subjectivity.

Deleuze in context

One of the many distinctions in the history of thought opposition between a subject-object dualism operating ultimately on a concept of transcendence, on the one hand, and thought of immanence on the other hand. This opposition itself is, off course, a dualism. The dilemmas for both sides are equally unsatisfactory. While dualism has to explain how two essentially different forms of existence can interact within a consistent system of non-contradictory forces, immanence has to explain how self-awareness is possible. It is Alfred N. Whitehead who identified within this puzzle the notion of process as one that covers the scientific as well as the spiritual aspect of reality. He stands of course in a long tradition of thought that spans diverse school of thoughts from Buddhism, to Heraclitus, through Nietzsche and Bergson to post-human thought.[3]

William James for instance, made a distinction between though minded and soft minded philosophers. He vehemently rejects the soft-minded, the rationalist, idealistic religious thinkers of the absolute. He rather favors the empiricist sensualistic, fact oriented philosophers who can stand the contradiction, the multitude. It is no surprise that he influences Deleuze, and that Whitehead identifies him as one of the four influential philosophers of the western tradition: Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz and James. James pragmatism, which bases truth within the methodology of questioning everything in regards of how useful it is to us. He is in close aliens with Henri Bergson, who anchors consciousness and memory in usefulness. While pragmatism similar to vitalism overcomes idealism and rationalism, it is still human centered. Deleuze pushes these boundaries beyond the human. What does something mean for something else? What is a stone for the tree? How can we think being a tree? In the West there is a tendency to describe our body as equipped with fife senses: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting, in the Buddhist tradition there are six sense organs: eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind. For the West, the mind synthesizes fife senses through abstraction[4]for the Far East the mind is just another sense as well as the body is. This difference should be an invitation to revisit what we call sensation. Sensation is sometimes perceived as deceptive (i.e. scepticism) or as sinful (i.e. purism), mostly input for a brain, following a mechanical machine metaphor. During the interview with Claire Parnet "Gilles Deleuze's ABC Primer" (1996), which was released posthumously, at the very end Deleuze talks about the wisdom of Zen.

Immanence, life and art

Gilles Deleuze is the latest great thinker of immanence. His ideas of the fold and the rhizome are aiming to address the very fundamental problems of philosophy. The fold is designed to explain self-awareness[5]; the rhizome guarantees the consistency of reality through endless connectivity. Deleuze's philosophy develops an alternative to a subject-object dualism. This alternative needs to understand the idea of a subject in a radically different way. A subject is no longer an irreducible kernel of human existence, but a configuration of connected machines. The body-machine is connected with the subject-machine, and let's say a painting machine - where "machine" does not necessarily mean robotic constructions. Rather, "A machine may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks."[6] Furthermore every machine has a code built in[7]. This understanding of world as connected machines with build in codes which control interruptions offers one possible departing point to engage immanence. The continuous folding of time (memory) and space (Escher) in mathematics and in physics, in computation and biology (DNA) is an act of creativity within the plane of immanence.

It is not very difficult to find evidence of immanence within experience. We only need to state the obvious, for example: we live. Life is the most fundamental of our experiences, it is also the most evident fact; we can very easily make a distinction between life and death. We feel it, and we fight for it. We protect life and sometimes even insure it; we share it, prolong it, and take it away. The only thing we don't do with it is to include it within science. We analyze instead the dead, solid object. Henri Bergson moved life, i.e. Élan vital, in his 1907 book Creative Evolution, into the center of his philosophy. Gilles Deleuze calls pure immanence "A life". Artists like Kandinsky searched for life within art. Art history at the beginning of the 20th century^th century focused on formalistic analysis and the subordination of art under scientific theory. Art historians looked at art as a solid object although many avant-garde movements tried to achieve the opposite - capturing movement, time, change, chance, sub consciousness etc.. But we should remember that looking at art is foremost 'looking', that is, connecting the eye with i.e. a painting. The connection is in the center of Deleuze analysis of the painting of Francis Bacon[8]. How does the subject-machine connect with the painting-machine? Which parts of the body are affected when we look at a painting? How is the response of the nervous system related to our thinking? How do we get from percept to concept to affect and vice versa?

Becoming machine: In Kafka's MetamorphosisSamsa becomes an insect, in Machine-human, (2006) Christopher Rhomberg and Tobias Zucali transform the human into an extension of a machine, the human "becomes" a machine, in the Telegarden, Ken Goldberg extends our gardening into tele-gardening, he investigates a tele-epistemology and we become an exo-brain, Stelarc becomes a cyborg and merges with exoskeletons, LSD test-persons in the 60's became open interactive systems. ("From endosensation to exosensation."[9]) When the subject-machine connects with other machines, they form a rhizome. Yoshimasa Kato & Yuichi Ito's, White Lives on Speakers, Brain-driven Aesthetic Environment 2007, let the human's thoughts physically manifest. Orlan physically becomes the incarnation of beauty. Time-based media are always in the process of becoming. On the other hand, in the paintings of Francis Bacon, Deleuze describes the becoming of animal and woman. But we must not understand the "becoming" of an animal in Bacon's work as a representation of becoming animal, rather, the becoming is taking place within sensation. The logic of sensation follows the structure of becoming, rhizome, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization[10]. The elements in the canvas unfold their logic and invite the viewer, who sees and doesn't gaze, to become different strata of his/her becoming. S/he can become mineral or animal, zoon politicon or homo faber.

"The logic of sensation" was a "Commissioned text based on a year's seminar (1979-80)"[11] It was written in the spirit of the 70's in France: writing with and against Marxism, the figurative gained a new significance. Overcoming abstract expressionism, American pop culture, and the LSD impregnated, cybernetic 60's, the figure re-emerged in painting.[12] But instead of following the kitschy propaganda of leftist painting, Deleuze was interested in the plane of consistency. He rejected Althusser's materialistic notion of encounter as aleatory and contingent and offered the notion of immanence, opposing transcendence, but not in a reductionist materialistic manner. The canvas is not a sheet for signs, but a plane of events. As an anti-narrative it contains encounters, which are based in process philosophy, a la Whitehead, and the perception of change, a la Bergson[13].

The 'medium' becomes a plane of thought, not as a McLuhan-esque extension, but as an 'autonomous' container of thought. Following the image of thought of a rhizome, connections develop, encounters happen, and events lead to new events. The connections are not necessarily causal. Schopenhauer pointed out the fourfold root of the principle of causality[14]; Bergson goes deeper into the "process" characteristics of reality, and divides "becoming" into qualitative, evolutionary and extensive movement. If we leave transcendence behind and anchor thought on the plane of immanence, it is here where it rhizomatic connects, and it can be best described as becoming, change, and an event. It is also here where complex fields are constituted, and where intensity and disruption characterize the visual elements of art. "This means that there are no sensations of different orders, but different orders of one and the same sensation."[15] How then is the sensation structured? How does sensation operate on a non-signifying stratum? Deleuze rejects three traditional attempts to explain the phenomenon of sensation[16]: first, he rejects the unity of the represented object; second, he identifies the confusion between sensation with feeling; and third, he recognizes the misunderstanding is in the perception of movement - movement comes from sensation and is not prior to it.

"Painting gives us eyes all over: in the ear, in the stomach, in the lungs (the painting breathes...). This is the double definition of painting: subjectively, it invests the eye, which ceases 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 freed from organic representation. And each is produced by the other: the pure presence of the body becomes visible at the same time that the eye becomes the destined organ of this presence." (p.45)

Deleuze understands painting primarily as being purely visual, and how could it not be visual?[17] He thus reanimates painting from death, through theory. Painting is not a sign that needs to be understood intertextually. That is what text is for.[18] Deleuze focuses on the affect which painting has on the bwo, i.e. the virtual body with all its potentials. The eye is sliding over the surface, it becomes the color and light, the form and texture, the shape and figure, it brings before us the reality of painting, not as representation, but as an object that affects the bwo. The affect follows the logic of sensation; the constitution of 'meaning' is immanent in the subject-machine and painting-machine. Deleuze reminds us that we need to SEE when we encounter painting, seeing in the form of a connection, where the nerve systems is affected; the "seeing" of seeing. "Avoid the figurative, illustrative, and narrative," (p.6) Deleuze serves as a model for radical immanent thinking about art. The radicalism does not lie in the superimposed ideology of certain art works, but in an immanent understanding of its rhizomatic process.

This matter is the unformed, unorganized, nonstratified or destratified body of the earth with all its follows of subatomic and submolecular particles. Deleuze and Guattari call it the plane of consistency, the body without organs - that is, the body of the earth, of protoplasm, even of human life that is not subject to an organizing principle, to a sign, to a force that orders it.[19]

The traditional understanding of painting is that of a medium of communication, i.e. the artist communicates something through the painting, to the viewer, who needs to decode it. Art history helps that process of decoding by revealing additional information. The mechanism of painting is one which uses a multitude of tools to achieve this communication: representation, resemblance, perspective, narrative, abstraction, etc.[20] Deleuze, in contrast, has an understanding of painting that radically rejects these notions. The painting is something the eye connects with. The eye can become ears, and stomach a.o. The nervous system, which is affected by the painting, connects the painter with the painting and the viewer. (I will later explain the underlining ontology of images a la Bergson.) Although the viewer is not a person, painting does not allow for the presence of the viewer, but for the connection with a bwo. What constitutes a painting then is: rhythm, coupling, forces, color, hysteria, and becoming. The logic of sensation explores these mechanics, the rhizome connections. The logic of sensation is prior to philosophy and anchored in the plane of immanence.

Music is a prime example for pure sensation: an acoustic event, i.e. a performance of music using different kinds of instruments played by one or more musicians, is sensed by the audience as well as the musicians. The musicians produce a complex sound pattern, tin which sound waves superpose. The active participation of the music performance as a musician is the constant transformation of the complex sound pattern. It involves memory and potentials. The remembrance of the heard and the expectation of the to come from the present experience. Based on the memory and the potential, the performance is an actualization of a sensational event. But how is the brain affected? The complex sound pattern reaches the listener's ears. That pattern is deconstructed into a rhizomatic organization of waves. The identification of different instruments, of melodies and rhythm is based on the succession of one complex frequency, which lets the eardrum resonate. Only through the awareness of the past and the future sound becomes music, as pure presence sound is nothing but noise. Similarly, we compose complex visual sensations, smells and haptic experiences. Looking at a painting is a process. The viewer starts somewhere, directs the eyes somewhere else, remembers the just seen and actualizes the potential of the present sensation. The time span of the present (Husserl called said that retention and protention always accompany the present) allows for affection and seld-affection. Unconsciously, a present sensation triggers past sensations and reflex action as potentials. On a conscious level we are aware of the past (memory) and the future (potential). In a self-conscious state we are aware of the present being intrinsically interwoven with past and future.

Within the plane of immanence, the notion of aesthetic experience vanishes. It is not a subject that has aesthetic experiences of, let's say, beauty and ugliness, or harmony. And is certainly not representation that gives a subject an aesthetic experience. That was three transcendental concepts in one sentence. The plane of immanence, or 'A life' as Deleuze calls it, produces 'a subject'[21]. Of course, there are subjects who look at representational art and have aesthetic experiences, but this description of reality is a highly constructed one, it is embedded in sociopolitical and cultural, as well as religious constructs. It reinforces existing structures or clichés. For art to have the disruptive force which is not only claimed by Deleuze, but a very common request throughout modernity, it needs to descend onto the plane of immanence, and extend the rhizome. Immanence is ant-dialectical and does not refer to a false consciousness.

Deleuze is using Bacon's paintings to show that painting was always abstract. How Bacon treats force, shape, color, material, rhythm, coupling etc. exemplifies how the painterly elements were at work at all times. We need to look beyond the narrative of figurative painting to understand painting.

Kandinsky and cosmic laws

When Kandinsky turned his back on representation, two ontological realms became accessible-the inner (spiritual, emotional, psychological, and sensual) and the abstract (formal, mathematical, and physical). For both realms we claim laws. A vast variety of modern aesthetic theories stem from here in such fields as empirical psychology, information aesthetics, gestalt theory and phenomenology. These laws seem to be complex and we are far from a proper understanding of them as of yet. What our attempts of uncovering the underlying laws have in common is a focus on processes, rather than objects.

At the beginning of the 20^th century, both tendencies were strongly developed. Within the European Avant-garde movements, a vitalist philosophy competed against a materialistic machine aesthetic. In 1936-the year Konrad Zuse built the first computer named the Z1-Alfred Barr published his famous diagram Cubism and Abstract Art. For the year 1909 Barr had identified "machine esthetic" as a central notion, which influenced everything but (abstract) expressionism. It took nearly 30 years (mid-60s) before computer artists finally emerged. Although they were usually trained as engineers rather than artists, they represented a new breed of experimentalists boarder-crossing between art and science-much like the Renaissance men who fixed the problem of C.P. Snow's "two cultures". But until today it seemed that these two cultures were not bridged[22].

It is with 1960s computer art that the materialistic side of that cultural division tried to bridge the gap through artificial intelligence. The approaches taken in the aftermath of WWII differed significantly around the world. In the USA, we find an empirical approach that is praxis-oriented and stemming from industrial laboratories. On the other side (in Europe), their approaches were inspired by philosophy and psychology, born in university computer labs and theoretical, mathematical and political in nature. In 1965 at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, Michael Noll exposed Piet Mondrian's work to a "Turing-Art test". The question was straightforward: Can a computer generate art that would be considered equal to man-made (by Mondrian) art? At the same time in Tokyo, the Computer Technique Group (CTG) explored early concepts of robotic art production. And in Stuttgart (Germany), Max Bense inspired his students to apply his Information Aesthetic to the computer. In Bense's "manifesto" of computer art he declares:

Generative aesthetics therefore implies a combination of all operations, rules and theorems, which can be used deliberately to produce aesthetic states (both distributions and configurations) when applied to a set of material elements. Hence generative aesthetics is analogous to generative grammar, in so far as it helps to formulate the principles of a grammatical schema-realizations of an aesthetic structure.[23]

This quote poses several questions, which include: How does an artist interact with a plane? How do marks form symbols? When is the certain distribution of visual elements considered to be aesthetic or art? Can we investigate this process to the extent that we can formalize it? And if formalized, would it be possible to transfer it to machines?[24]

In 1954, Max Bense was invited to teach "information" at the Ulm School of Design by his friend and concrete artist Max Bill. Bill was also one of Kandinsky's students at the Bauhaus and during that time he worked on the introduction for the third German edition of Kandinsky's Point and line to surface, or Point and Line to Plane. In Point and Line to Plane (first published in German in 1926 during Kandinsky's Bauhaus period from 1922 to 1933), Kandinsky speaks of grammatical structures, numerical terms and a future science for aesthetics:

The multiplicity and complexity in expression of the "smallest" form attained, after all, by slight changes in its size, serve to the receptive mind as a plausible example of the power and depth of expression of abstract forms. Upon further development of this means of expression in the future, and further development of the receptivity of the observer, more precise concepts will be necessary, and these will surely, in time, be attained through measurement. Expression in numerical terms will be indispensible here.[25]

The relationship between Kandinsky's call for measurement and early computer art has been addressed numerous times by art historians. Max Imdahl[26] contrasted Bense's aesthetic with Kandinsky. Cumhur Erkut pointed out the parallels between computer art and Kandinsky[27]. Computer artist Joseph H. Stiegler[28] sees Kandinsky as a forerunner of computer art. And Frieder Nake refers to Kandinsky's notion of an inner necessity[29]. But being interviewed by Nierendorf in 1937, Kandinsky answered his question whether abstract art has no longer a connection to nature:

No! And no again! Abstract painting leaves behind the "skin" of nature, but not its laws. Let me use the "big words" cosmic laws. Art can only be great if it relates directly to cosmic laws and is subordinated to them. One senses these laws unconsciously if one approaches nature not outwardly, but-inwardly. One must be able not merely to see nature, but to experience it. As you see, this has nothing to do with using "objects." Absolutely nothing![30]

Here Kandinsky vehemently opposed a naïve form of materialism. While Kandinsky searched in Munich for a connection with the inner nature in The Spiritual in Art (1911), Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure held his Third Course of Lectures in General Linguistics (1910-1911) in Geneva, and French philosopher of vitalism and immanence Henri Bergson said in his lecture The Perception of Change given at Oxford (1911):

My present, at this moment, is the sentence I am pronouncing. But it is so because I want to limit the field of my attention to my sentence. This attention is something that can be made longer or shorter, like the interval between the two points of a compass. For the moment, the points are just far enough apart to reach from the beginning to the end of my sentence; but if the fancy took me to spread them further my present would embrace, in addition to my last sentence, the one that preceded it: all I should have had to do is to adopt another punctuation.[31]

At this point, it is interesting how Bergson treats the punctuation as a means to extend attention. Roman and medieval Latin, for instance, do not know the punctuation as a closure for sentences. The sentence full stop is a rather modern invention. How was it to read and write without full stops and punctuation?

I do not want to suggest that Kandinsky is directly responding to the quoted paragraph by Bergson, but Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a contemporary to Henri Bergson (1859-1941). In 1913, Max Scheler announced the Bergson reception in Germany-which had elements of hype-must be overcome.[32] Hilary Fink (1999) gives an overview of the relationship between the two in Bergson and Russian Modernism (1900-1930).[33] She claims that during the 20s and 30s of the 20^th century almost all intellectuals in Russia were acquainted with the basic ideas of Bergson's books Introduction to Metaphysics (1903) and Creative Evolution (1907).

Through Bergson, we can get a better understanding of Kandinsky's remarkable extraction of the point from the sentence "Today I am going to the movies" at the beginning of Point and Line to Plane. He continues with:

Today I am going to the cinema.

Today I am going. To the cinema

Today I. am going to the cinema

. Today I am going to the cinema

Kandinsky leaves us with the form of a written sentence of pre-modern times without a full stop and an isolated graphical element-or a point-that is now freed to gain other meanings. In Little Articles on Big Questions (1919), Kandinsky describes how our "accustomed eye responds dispassionately to punctuation marks,"[34] that "outer expediency and practical significance of the entire world around us have concealed the essence of what we see and hear behind a thick veil," and that "This thick veil hides the inexhaustible material of art."[35] Kandinsky goes on by saying "In these few lines I shall dwell only upon one of these beings, which in its tiny dimensions approaches 'nothing,' but has a powerful living force-the point."[36] Kandinsky's description of the geometrical point as "union of silence and speech" identifies punctuation as a zero gravity center from which meaning is constructed. The pauses between words are as important as the chain of words itself. The point "belongs to language and signifies silence." Furthermore:

In doing so, I abstract the point from its usual conditions of life. It has become not only not expedient, but also unpractical, nonsensical. It has begun to break through the conventions of its existence; it is on the threshold of an independent life, an independent destiny. The thick veil has been rent from top to bottom. The astounded ear perceives an unfamiliar sound, the new utterance of what once seemed a speechless being.[37]

And finally Kandinsky says, "farewell to the now insane punctuation mark and sees before him a graphic and painterly sign. The point, liberated from its coercive destiny, has become the citizen of a new world of art."[38] Kandinsky extracts what is called in science a "primitive notion point" from architecture, dance, music, woodcut, etc.. The point is an element that appears in all kinds of artistic media. It is remarkable that Kandinsky extracts the point only from artistic media and not from everyday objects or phenomena. The point is thus derived from art-not from nature or science-and it is an element of the human spirit.

Interpreting Kandinsky:

Bergson speaks of a contraction as one of the five senses of subjectivity.[39] "As we shall endeavor to show, even the subjectivity of sensible qualities consists above all else in a kind of contraction of the real, effected by our memory."[40] That contraction-where the distance between perceived object and brain is zero-is the point where affection arises, subjectivity and personality is established, and perception and memory are connected. Very much like Kandinsky, the point is thus a key element that needs to be exposed to a force. When a point is moved it leaves a trace in memory. When it is drawn or danced, sound and molded it becomes a line.

To extract the point from written language, and to introduce it into painting as a formal element, is radical in its intermedia approach-a term coined in the 60s by Dick Higgins in relation to poetry (1966). During the 60s, Gene Youngblood developed the concept of expanded cinema (1970) and Bense postulated generative aesthetics (1965). The 60s were dominated by a strong tension-on one hand there was the scientific, cybernetic, sociological and system-based theory, and on the other hand there was the expanded-consciousness, hippy culture and flower power, radical exploration of processes in art and intermedia. Like no other period, the 60s also stood for conceptualism. Computer art was born from mathematics and pure concepts. As a poet, Kandinsky anticipated central ideas of the 60s, when he extracted the point from a sentence about the cinema to find a precise numerical law for art. Kandinsky's compositions follow an inner logic. This logic unfolds on the canvas, follows color theory and geometry, and is born in the painter's mind. The canvas, the theory and the mind are interwoven. This web inspired early computer graphic artists. It-at least in theory-translated easily into the cybernetic circles and flow chart architecture of the mainframe computing age.

But it is Gilles Deleuze in his Logic of Sensationwho anchors this web deeper within sensation.[41] He redefines notions like machinic, virtual and digital and explores the triad of concept, affect and percept as constitutive for an extended notion of subjectivity. This subjectivity stands in opposition to a metaphysical cogito. It rather engages in forms of deterritorialization and connects with or becomes a body without organs (or a stratified world). Art for him is an encounter, or a connection between art-machines and subject machines.[42] The connection is rhizomatic. Art begets the viewer to become its matter. In relation to Kandinsky's treatment of the point, the subject-machine explores the transition of becoming. In the shift of events, the point comes into existence on the picture plane and is set in motion. The moment of coming into existence on a picture plane resembles the formation of subjectivity, or "A life", in the plane of immanence.[43]

Kandinsky's extraction of the point at the beginning of his central Bauhaus publication stands in stark contrast to Paul Klee's deduction of the point at the beginning of his Form and design theory during his Bauhaus period 1920-31.[44] For Klee, the point is gray because it is neither black nor white, and yet black and white at the same time. It is neither at the top nor at the bottom, and yet both at the same time. It is un-dimensional. For Klee, the elevation of the point to a central "Gestaltung" (shaping) is a cosmos-genetic. And thus, the point resembles the egg.[45] While for Klee the analogy to life-in particular the cell structure of eggs-is very explicit on the following pages in his book and the connection to life in Kandinsky's book is less literal. Michel Henry describes that process as follows:

Yet, if the point is situated in its place in a written text and plays its normal role, it is accompanied by a resonance that one might call its resonance in writing. Its displacement within the sentence and then outside of the sentence in an empty space produces a double effect: the writing-resonance of the point diminishes, while the resonance of its pure form increases. At any rate, these two tonalities have appeared now where there was only one, two modalities of invisible life within us when there was one single objective form in the world and there still only is one point before us. The radical and now undeniable dissociation of the external and internal elements of painting occurs through the invincible force of essential analysis, if, as in the course of the experiment that we just carried out, it is the case that the external remains numerically one while the internal is duplicated and has become a "double sound".[46]

Michel Henry's interpretation of Kandinsky focuses on the notion of life. As a philosopher of radical phenomenology, he aims to overcome the epoché of the world by reaching into its internal force, or life. In the tradition of philosophers who search for inner forces such as will (Schopenhauer), power (Nietzsche) and spirit (Hegel), Henry has the closest resemblance to Bergson (élan vital) and Deleuze (Plane of Immanence / A life). While Henry shares a strong grounding in Christianity with Kandinsky, this common root is not essential for the current analysis of Kandinsky.[47] For Henry, Kandinsky's search for interiority can be described in the following equation: "Interior = interiority = invisible = life = pathos = abstract."[48] When an artist, or art for that matter, looks inward it creates an inner space in which that which is invisible is about to be made visible. At the same time, that which is invisible is governed by forces of life. In an auto-affection (pathos) it becomes consciousness and can be express abstractly. Henry has two seemingly mad ideas:

1. The content of painting, of all paintings, is the Internal, the invisible life that does not cease to be invisible and remains forever in the Dark, and 2. the means by which it expresses this invisible content-forms and colors are themselves invisible, in their original reality and true sense, at any rate. [49]

Thus, the invisible life as auto-affect pathos, that as underlying forces is prior to subjectivation, establishes the resonance and rhythm between the picture plane and the interior of the world. It is through the notion of life that Henry sees the connection between the seen and the seeing, between the internal and external. It is his answer to the question of how the pre-established harmony between mind and world can be explained.

Double sound

What is interesting in the above mentioned quote by Henry is the 'double sound'. According to Deleuze, Foucault was always "haunted" by the double, for him "the double is never a projection of the interior," but "an interiorization of the outside." We can see that in Rene Magritte's painting "The Treachery of Images" from 1928. An image of a pipe and a sentence "C'est ci n'est pas une pipe" are set next to each other on a canvas. How do they relate? What do we learn from a sentence that truthfully claims that the representation is not the represented? According to Deleuze, we learn from Foucault's analysis of that riddle, about the shift from phenomenology to epistemology. Neither the statement "C'est ci n'est pas une pipe", nor the visual representation, actually refers to an outside. They stay within the realm of knowledge. Deleuze goes further by saying that "when we see a pipe we shall always say (in one way or another): "this is not a pipe" as though intentionality denied itself."[50] But if we lose the connection to the outside world because of the rejection of intentionality, how can we re-establish it? Foucault says, "Kandinsky delivered painting from this equivalence: not that he dissociated its terms, but because he simultaneously got rid of resemblance and representative functioning."[51]

And how can that delivery be achieved? Lyotard identifies rhythm as a central joint:

"This is how what is given one by one, blow by blow, or, as Bergson puts it, 'shock' [ébranlement] by shock, in the amnesiac material point, is retracted', condensed as though into a single high-frequency vibration, in perception aided by memory. The relevant difference between mind and matter is one of rhythm."[52]

For Deleuze, the shock of film and the replacement of the figural through the figure (Bacon), or the code through the diagram marks the transition from representational (perspective) thinking, to a structuralist - process based thinking. While the mechanics of that transition have to be spelled out, the results are sensible in a rapidly expanding virtuality beyond the individual experience. "Seeing, and more generally sensation, then becomes "experimental" just when it thus, encounters or presents something "unrepresentable," even "inhuman," prior to code or discourse" [53]

We need to learn to "see" events in art, and not just in process art. When Whitehead introduced his process philosophy the same year Heidegger published Time and Being, we had an alternative as to how we proceed in the 20^th century[54]. Until Deleuze reintroduced the philosophy of Whitehead and Bergson,[55] and its application to painting (Bacon) and film (movement-image), Whitehead's heritage had been neglected. The radical shift toward processes (Whitehead) and becoming (Bergson), as operating ontologically, primarily to substances and the subject-object dualism, offers a deeper understanding of the potential of encounters through art. Through the technological treatment of time: recording, projecting, feedback, computation, simulation, and animation, we are able to reflect on the special and timely conditions of art. Here the machine enters the 'plane of immanence,' that layer of reality that exists prior to subjectivity, which structure intertwined with perception images, representations of world, and the non-human eye. Dziga Vertov's non-human eye - introduced by Henri Bergson's cinematograph -and the central metaphor for Deleuze's, cinema 1 book, has an equivalent in the computer. Its laws are non-optical, but operate with internal images, their description are mathematical, precise, and machine driven. The camera eye and the computer, as well as the plane of immanence, collide in Deleuze's notion of the machine and the rhizome. We now have the tools to understand the full impact of the marginal mentioning of Kandinsky in Deleuze's Logic of Sensation:

"Abstract optical space has no need of the tactile connections that classical representation was still organizing. But it follows that what abstract painting elaborates is less a diagram than a symbolic code, on the basis of great formal oppositions. It replaced the diagram with a code. This code is "digital," not in the sense of the manual, but in the sense of a finger that counts. "Digits" are the units that group together visually the terms in opposition. Thus, according to Kandinsky, vertical- white-activity, horizontal-black-inertia, and so on. From this is derived a conception of binary choice that is opposed to random choice. Abstract painting took the elaboration of such a properly pictorial code very far (as in Auguste Herbin's "plastic alphabet," in which the distribution of forms and colors can be done according to the letters of a word). It is the code, that is responsible for answering the question of painting today: what can save man from "the abyss," from external tumult and manual chaos?"[56]

Art by no means can be reduced to the pure object. The surface is a screen on which events of encounters are invited. The logic of perception is not an interpretation, nor a historical contextualization; it is not a reconstructive analysis of intentions or external conditions. The legacy of Kandinsky is the search for laws of perception - its logic. There is a long tradition, which merges the cerebral cortex with the surface in a plane of immanence. Media allows for the amplification of this deep connection; they can make the processes experienced.

Among the many provoking thoughts of D+G, there is a particular provoking thought in What is Philosophy? that addresses abstract art. D+G say "there is only a single plane in the sense that art includes no other plane that that of aesthetic composition"[57]. Three pages later they say:

"Abstract art seeks only to refine sensation, to dematerialize it by setting out an architectonic plane of composition in which it would become a purely spiritual being, a radiant thinking and thought matter, no longer a sensation of sea or tree, but a sensation of the concept of sea or concept of tree."[58]

The reference to Mondrian (sea and tree) and Kandinsky (spiritual) cannot be overlooked, especially after they addressed both artists by name, shortly before the quoted passages. They write:

"Is this not the definition of the percept itself - to make perceptible the imperceptible forces that populate the world, affect us, and make us become? Mondrian achieves this by simple differences between the sides of a square, Kandinsky by linear 'tensions', and Kupka by planes curved around the point." [59]

The reference to Kandinsky is part of a tour de force through the realm of art. Working with the triad of percept, affect and concept, art is anchored in the 'plane of composition' in contrast to the 'plane of immanence' in philosophy, and the 'plane of simply undefined coordinates'[60]. D+G have been attacked for their unscientific attitude. The characterization of science as a 'plane of simply undefined coordinates' is indeed less charming, as it is an attempt to repel science back a method of knowledge production, which is less capable of explaining existence. Consequently, D+G differentiate between the composition of science and the aesthetic composition. D+G want to reserve the notion of composition for the aesthetic, and discredit the scientific composition (p.192). This distinction addresses of course the emergence of abstract art. The scientific attitude of Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Kupka (among many others) is pushed back, and the role of art as the restoration of infinity is emphasized. It is always a bit confusing to see with which heavy concepts D+G operate within in order to establish a materialistic philosophy. The aim of the chapter on percept, affect and concept is to ground art within matter. The relation of matter and sensation for instance, is deeply inspired by Bergson. Bergson thought that matter extended into sensation, otherwise it would be difficult to explain how we can sense something that is not touching our senses. This move is necessary after the notion of representation is rejected. We don't collect representational copies of what we perceive, we rather perceive directly. The subject-object dualism is a construct, everything is already connected with everything; it is only the relations between all things, which have to be understood (Leibniz). By reestablishing the connectivity of reality, the problem becomes the establishment of centers, perspectives, and thought. D+G offer the notion of territories. Animals define territories; there are different strata of territories synchronously present in a given space. Ant territories collide with dog territories and bird territories. Animals mark their territories with scents, sounds or colors. Birds attract their mates through patterns, and if their feather pattern is not sufficient to attract mates they create color patterns like the bower birds. Birds, for D+G, are artists. Art is not exclusively human. Through art we can become animal (as Deleuze showed with Bacon, or think of Beuys "I like America, and America likes me" 1974). We can even become mineral, like in Stan Brakhage prelude to "Dog, Star, Man" 1961-64). The plane of composition thus extends beyond human. It is not hard to see that; we see patterns, symmetries, and attractors throughout nature. In an analogy to the animal, which defines a territory, artists create houses in their art. D+G are talking quiet literary about walls and windows in paintings, but later extend it microscopic and macroscopic metaphorical houses. Essential is the creation of territory in which the figure is placed. The territory defines the subject. If art is constrained to the plane of composition, how then do, on the one hand, birds enter the plane of composition and on the other hand, is complex art refused entry to the plane of immanence? D+G say:

"Everything (including technique) takes place between compounds of sensation and the aesthetic plane of composition. (...) The composite sensation, made up of percepts and affects, deterritorializes the system of opinion that brought together dominant perceptions and affections within a natural, historical, and social milieu. But the composite sensation is reterritorialized on the plane of composition, because it erects its houses there, because it appears there within interlocked frames or joined sections that surround its components; landscapes that have become pure percepts, and characters that become pure affects. At the same time the plane of composition involves sensation in a higher deterritorialization, making it pass through a sort of deframing which opens it up and breaks it open onto an infinite cosmos. (...) Perhaps the peculiarity of art is to pass through the finite in order to rediscover, to restore the infinite." [61]

Bergson

Let me try it one more time. Henri Bergson describes the intersection of the present consciousness with the memory, and the (unspecified) plane:

"... our body is nothing but that part of our representation which is ever being born again, the part always present, or rather that which, at each moment, is just past. Itself an image, the body cannot store up images, since it forms a part of the images, and this is why it is a chimerical enterprise to seek to localize past or even present perceptions in the brain: they are not in it; it is the brain that is in them. But this special image which persists in the midst of the others, and which I call my body, constitutes at every moment, as we have said, a section of the universal becoming. It is then the place of passage of the movements received and thrown back, a hyphen, a connecting link between the things which act upon me and the things upon which I act - the seat, in a word, of the sensorimotor phenomena.

If I represent by a cone SAB, the totality of the recollections accumulated in my memory, the base AB, situated in the past, remains motionless, while the summit S, which indicates at all times my present, moves forward unceasingly, and unceasingly also touches the moving plane P of my actual representation of the universe. At S, the image of the body is concentrated, and, since it belongs to the plane P, this image does but receive and restore actions emanating from all the images of which the plane is composed."[62]

The body-memory that is described here is structurally similar to the point extracted from the sentence, 'Today I am going to the movies." The point from the end of the sentence that describes an intention to go to the moving image, a recorded thought, a series of time-images, an externalized stream of consciousness, is freed from its syntactic function and set in motion on the plane. The image of the body and the point on the plane resonate, and a rhythm is established. In What is Philosophy?" Deleuze says:

"The grandiose Leibnizian or Bergsonian perspective that every Philosophy depends upon an intuition that its concepts constantly develop through slight differences of intensity is justified if intuition is thought of as the envelopment of infinite movements of thought that constantly pass through a plane of immanence."[63]

The plane of immanence is one of the richest and most fundamental ideas in Deleuze's philosophy. It is at the center of A Life, and it's his answer to the problem of subject-object dualism. The plane of immanence is essentially related to all forms of existence. It is maybe there where meaning is constituted. Kandinsky's extraction of the point from syntax, performance, or architecture, and the process of setting into motion is perhaps one of the most fundamental achievements of 20^th century art. The point is immanently intermedia. As a rigorous zero extension in a mathematical sense, it is a prime candidate for a connecting force.

John Rajchman contributed a chapter in "Constructions "1995 to the notion of abstract in Deleuze. He focuses on Deleuze treatment of the line in Pollock's painting and points out that Deleuze sees in Pollock the line as a catastrophe, as an intersection of lines, which create a reversed Platonism. Not the form is at the beginning, which we see only as shade on the wall, but the abstract chaotic space. The line in Pollock is a gothic line, i.e. a line that is not determining a form, that is not concave or convex, that doesn't separate or include, but just a line as one that passes points. We can look at line as being connections between 2 points, or as line that pass through infinit points. Defining the line starting from the point, would mean to define the line from the abstract point. That is what Kandinsky did, and that is where Rajchman states that Kandinsky's abstraction is traditional (Greenbergian, self-reflexive modernistic), that does not capture the Deleuzian reversed Platonism. Pollock, according to Deleuze understands the line proper as abstract, as part of that abstract space and is before any form. While Rajchman has a good point to critique Kandinsky's concept of a line, he give himself the hint to a proper understanding of the point as Deleuzian abstract:

"To explain by abstraction is to start with abstract Forms and ask how they are realized in the world or extracted from it. But to explain these abstractions themselves is to reinsert them in a larger (and smaller) "pluratistic" world that includes multiplicities that subsist in Forms and induce variations in them, alerting their connections with other things."[64]

That is what Kandinsky does when he extracts the point from different media. Art is placed in the abstract space and starts already with the pre-historic. Abstraction in form of generalization or reduction is only a western specific modern phaenomenon. But is exactly this search for the abstract space that drove Kandinsky and Klee in contrast to Mondrian or Malevich.

Two exemplary positions in regards to Kandinsky's work should be mentioned. 1957 Peter Selz draw a direct connection between Bergson and Kandinsky. Selz states: "His philosophy finds perhaps the closest parallel in the thinking of Henri Bergson."[65] And he supports his comparison with the following quote: "art, whether it be painting or sculpture, poetry or music, has no other object than to brush aside the utilitarian symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalities, in short, everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself."[66] Selz points out that for Kandinsky Realism = Abstraction and Abstraction = Realism. He describes how Kandinsky derives the line from the de-contextualized hyphen and the inter-linkage of pure painting, pure music and pure poetry. Selz roots this connection in the 19^th century theory of Gesamtkunstwerk and give Kandinsky's "Der gelbe Klang" (1909) as example. (Selz misunderstands the transmedia aspect of Kandinsky's extraction of the point from different art forms, which than create a link that goes deeper that the construction of an external Gesamtkunstwerk) In the conclusion he quotes Diego Rivera's admiration for Kandinsky from 1931:

"I know of nothing more real than the painting of Kandinsky - nor anything more true and nothing more beautiful. A painting by Kandinsky gives no image of earthly life - it is life itself. ... He organizes matter as matter was organized, otherwise the Universe would not exist. He opened a window to look inside the All."[67]

Selz contextualization of Kandinsky falls short. Reading Kandinsky through Bergson, Henry and Deleuze it will become evident that Kandinsky's reference to an inner necessity is deeply in what Deleuze calls a plane of immanence.

Jürgen Claus in contrast gives in 1991 a placement of Kandinsky within the noosphere:

"About 100 years ago, the cosmic code entered the paintings of Cezanne and van Gogh in the form of a 'painted code'. These paintings embody an awareness of the philosophical, religious and existential 'anchorage' of the cosmic code. Cosmic data have been dissolved into a field of painted energies, no longer seen as earthly things, no longer perceived as mere objects or events. The cosmic data have been melted down together by a transfer of energies. (...) Kandinsky's (...) search for a new science, 'the science of art' as he called it, started with the "proto-element of painting: the point", reducing the element of time to the point as its briefest form. When preparing his manuscript Point and Line to Plane at the beginning of World War I (it was not published until 10 years later), Kandinsky came astonishingly close to defining points (picture elements) as the equivalents of pixels, as close as one could have come to reaching this definition at that time."[68]

Jürgen Claus' interpretation of Kandinsky is a consequent extension of his embracement by the computer artist in 1960s. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), coined in 1922 inspired by partly Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution the notion of the noosphere. The idea of a sphere consiting of human thought has multiple forms during the 20th century^th century: from esoteric Gaia mysticism to expanded consciousness and system theory.

Michel Henry's affinity with Deleuze has been pointed out recently by James William[69]. He credits John Mullarkey for identifying two similarities: the usage of affect and their dedication to immanence. But he only briefly scratches Kandinsky.

"The plane of immanence is itself actualized in an object and a subject to which it attributes itself."[70]

Thinking about images

Henri Bergson delivered the foundation for a philosophy based on body memory. He argues in 1896 against the idea that our mind represents reality:

"The idea that we have disengaged from the facts and confirmed by reasoning is that our body is an instrument of action, and of action only. In no degree, in no sense, under no aspect, does it serve to prepare, far less to explain, a representation. (...) that which the brain explains in our perception is action begun, prepared or suggested, it is not perception itself."[71]

Bergson's philosophy is centered on the notion of image. But what is an image if not representation? A first rough sketch of the image of Bergsonian thought would be: The world consists out of images, which extend into the nervous system (brain image) where they become memory (virtual). The brain image itself doesn't change, it rather an apparatus that makes connections, and thus constitutes a personality/subjectivity, while the world images in relation to the body constantly change. The (free) will determines what is consciously perceived as well as what is remembered. It is evident that these images of thought is the background for Deleuze philosophy of rhizomatic connectivity. His philosophy together with Felix Guattari is a plaidoyer for complexity. Rather than following a certain school of thought, and thus imposing a conceptual apparatus, they argue for an analysis of the given multitude, decentered, anti-hierarchical, including post/non human thought, questioning the dominance of the cogito.

When it comes to art, Bergson is rather traditional at first sight: "If we reflect deeply upon what we feel as we look at a Turner or a Corot, we shall find that, if we accept them and admire them, it is because we had already perceived something of what they show us. But we had perceived without seeing."[72] But it is through Deleuze that we can understand the complexity of a Deleuzian/Bergsonian aesthetics. While Deleuze works with Bergsonian terms in relation to art in his Bacon and Cinema books, at the end of Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? (What is Philosophy?) (1991) Deleuze and Guattari prominently reference Kandinsky, who appears only briefly in the Bacon book. As Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a contemporary to Bergson (1859-1941), I want to investigate his theoretical writings in relation to Bergson/Deleuze. As a bridge serves Michel Henry, who in 1988 published Voir l'invisible, sur Kandinsky (Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky). Through the notion of life Henry offers a connection between Kandinsky, Bergson and Deleuze.

If A is presented/presents itself to B, B has an image of A: a virus has an image of a cell, a frog of a fly, a camera of a building, a human being of a face. The virus identifies a cell, the frog perceives a fly, the camera records a building, the human consciously perceives a face. With or without consciousness the world consists out of images. The material world is connected through light and reciprocal forces. These connections are connections between images. Images thus are real (and not ideas or representations); they constitute reality. A tree presents itself as an image to a rock or the sun. Bergson and Deleuze go so far to say that reality consists out of images. (Leibniz thought of it in terms of monads), and that molecules perceive each other. This thought also appears in Kant's concept of reciprocal action or Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. "All seams to take place as if, in this aggregate of images which I call the universe, nothing really new could happen except through the medium of certain particular images, the type of which is furnished me by my body"[73]

A special image is for Bergson and Deleuze the body and the brain. We can say that everything presents itself to everything as image (monad), but if we select images through perception we are dealing with organic matter i.e. life. The way certain images are connected constitutes subjectivity. Subjectivity in the form of a brain within a body is a special image. Bergson says it is like a "central telephone exchange" [74]. Nothing is added to the perceptions, only selection and connection of "a great multitude" [75] These "central telephone exchange(s)" are centers which give birth to consciousness:

"In other words, let us posit that system of closely-linked images which we call the material world, and imagine here and there, within the system, centers of real action, represented by living matter: what we mean to prove is that there must be, ranged round each one of these centers, images that are subordinated to its position and variable with it; that conscious perception is bound to occur" [76]

But how do these conscious perceptions occur? Within the "zones of indetermination" certain elements have to become "actual", to be forces to become pictures:

"Representation is there, but always virtual being neutralized, at the very moment when it might become actual, by the obligation to continue itself and to lose itself in something else. To obtain this conversion from the virtual to the actual it would be necessary, not to throw more light on the object, but on the contrary to obscure some of its aspects, to diminish it by the greater part of itself, so that the remainder, instead of being encased in its surroundings as a thing, should detach itself from them as a picture. Now if living beings are, within the universe, just centers of indetermination, and if the degree of this indetermination is measured by the number and rank of their functions, we can conceive that their mere presence is equivalent to the suppression of all those parts of objects in which their functions find no interest." [77]

This image is auto-affective. Perception is accompanied by affection and might extend to conception. So if we think about images through concepts, we must decent to the connectivity of reality. To create connections is an act of creativity and sometime it is organized rhizomatically. A focus on the activity within these centers is an activity of a "body without organs", a self-reflexive awareness of central nerves activity. Within this reality of images we can identify a specific kind of images: art. Art for the clarity of the argument reduced here to painting, is a special image, created by an image (brain and body/artist) to be perceived by an image (brain and body/viewer). The auto-affection on both ends invites special sensations.

"The whole difficulty of the problem that occupies us comes from the fact that we imagine perception to be a kind of photographic view of things, taken from a fixed point by that special apparatus which is called an organ of perception a photograph which would then be developed in the brain-matter by some unknown chemical and psychical process of elaboration. But is it not obvious that the photograph, if photograph there be, is already taken, already developed in the very heart of things and at all the points of space? No metaphysics, no physics even, can escape this conclusion. Build up the universe with atoms: each of them is subject to the action, variable in quantity and quality according to the distance, exerted on it by all material atoms. Bring in Faraday's centers of force: the lines of force emitted in every direction from every center bring to bear upon each the influences of the whole material world. Call up the Leibnizian monads: each is the mirror of the universe. All philosophers, then, agree on this point. Only if when we consider any other given place in the universe we can regard the action of all matter as passing through it without resistance and without loss, and the photograph of the whole as translucent: here there is wanting behind the plate the black screen on which the image could be shown. Our "zones of indetermination" play in some sort the part of the screen. They add nothing to what is there; they effect merely this: that the real action passes through, the virtual action remains." [78]

"What you have to explain, then, is not how perception arises, but how it is limited, since it should be the image of the whole, and is in fact reduced to the image of that which interests you."[79]

"Take, for example, a luminous point P. of which the rays impinge of the different parts a, b, c, of the retina. At this point P, science localizes vibration of a certain amplitude and duration. At the same point P, consciousness perceives light. We propose to show in this study, that both are right; and that there is no essential difference between the light and the movements, provided we restore to movement the unity, indivisibility, and qualitative heterogeneity denied to it by abstract mechanics; provided also that we see in sensible qualities contractions effected by our memory. Science and consciousness would then coincide in the instantaneous." [80]

Perception always has (sometimes a very short) duration. With duration comes memory. If a perception endures within time, there is a past and a present. But Bergson reverses past and present. If I remember the past it becomes present, and the present becomes past.

[1] Daniel W. Smith Deleuze on Bacon: Three Conceptual Trajectories in The Logic of Sensation

[2] Rancière, Jacques, and Djordjevic, Radmila. "Is There a Deleuzian Aesthetics?" Qui Parle 14, no. 2 (2004): 1-14. The two Deleuze quotes are from "What is philosophy?" p.164 and Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation. P. 164, quoted after Rancière

[3] A communality of that track of thinkers (which could be easily expanded by a few dozens light towers like Spinoza, Leibniz and Schopenhauer) is to distrust the function of language as primary access to reality.

[4] This structure doesn't change even if we expand the number of senses in the western tradition through: heat, cold, pressure, pain, motion and balance.

[5] The project of modernity has as central notion self-reflexivity. Self-reflexivity is understood as constituting subjectivity and self-consciousness i.e. a cogito. Deleuze philosophy has as one of the major goals to overcome the misleading notion of a cogito, a speculative transcendent thought of 'I'. Thus it would be possible to relate central self-reflexive artistic movements in the 20^th century (ready-made, conceptualism, concrete art, appropriation, system art etc) to the project of modernity, while other movements of expansion have a closer affinity of Deleuze philosophy (abstract art, Dada, informel, expanded consciousness, art+science, digital art, new media art etc.).

[6] Deleuze, Gilles. Anti-Oedipus. Continuum, 2004. p.38

[7] Deleuze, Gilles. Anti-Oedipus. Continuum, 2004. p.41

[8] Is there a relation between Deleuze in Bacon's Velsquez reference, and Foucault's analysis of "Las Meninas" by Foucault? (in: Bryson, Norman. Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France. Ed. Norman Bryson. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988).

[9] Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Janis Tomlinson, and Graham Burchell III. Columbia University Press, 1996. p. 185

[10] Deleuze has a great resemblance with Buddhist thought. Compare i.e. the concepts of becoming, penetration, emptiness and inter-being in: Hanh, Thich Nhat. The Heart of Understanding: Commentaries on the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra. 2nd ed. Berkeley, Calif: Parallax Press, 2009.

[11] Wilson, Sarah. The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations. New Haven, Conn. [et al:] Yale University Press, 2010. p. 128

^[12] In Germany later the "Neue Wilde". What is the relation between Baselitz and Bacon, aren't they very similar?

[13] Gerbson uses the cinematograph as a model for externalized thought: Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1911. p. 304 ff.

[14] Schopenhauer distinguishes between the Principle of Sufficient Reason of: 1.) Becoming (empirical truth), 2.) Knowing (transcendental truth), 3.) Being (logical truth), 4.) Acting (meta logical truth). Schopenhauer argues that these principles are irreducible to each other.

[15] Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2005. p.33

[16] Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2005. p.33ff.

[17] Evan radical approaches like the auto-destructive art by Gustav Metzger, Robert Rauschenberg's collages or Anish Kapoor's paint train have a visual component

[18] Unless we paint signs like Cy Twombly or trace them through the history of technology like DeMarinis. Mark Tansey, for example, is painting nothing but postmodern, French philosophy - it's heavily intertextual.

[19] Olkowski, Dorothea. Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. p.101

[20] For instance, the renaissance developed the perspective which does not correspond to our perception because we see stereoscopic (N. Goodmann), the camera obscura delivered an apparatus to create detached images, similar to mirror images, Descartes with his diagram of the eye offered a metaphor to think about images as being representational. It is important to remember that images, in their origin are mystical, religious, sensational, and connect with the body to deterritorialize.

[21] Deleuze, Gilles. Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life. 2nd ed. New York: Zone Books, 2001. p.27

[22] Even though Brockman, John. The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Tried to bridge that gap. Brockman was the organizer of the Expanded Cinema festival in New York and as publisher connected many great thinkers of both discipline.

[23] M. Bense and G. Nees, Computer-Grafik (Stuttgart: Walther, 1965) English translation in J. Reichardt, Cybernetics, Art and Ideas (London: Studio Vista 1971) p.57f.

[24] The philosophical aspects of information aesthetics and its application to art production can be found here: Klütsch, Christoph. Computer Graphic-Aesthetic Experiments between Two Cultures. Leonardo October 2007, Vol. 40, No. 5: 421-425. The article is an English summary of the German book publication: Klütsch, Christoph. Computer graphics: Aesthetic experiments between two cultures. The beginnings of computer art in the 1960s. Vienna: Springer, 2007.

[25] Kandinsky, Wassily. Point and Line to Plane. New York: Dover Publications, 1979. p. 30

[26] See: Imdahl, Max (1968): Modes in the relationship between aesthetic and semantic information. Notes on Max Bense's Aesthetica (1965). In: Simon Moser (ed.): Information and communication. Presentations and reports from the 23rd Alpbach International University Weeks 1967: 145-149. Munich: Oldenbourg.: 281]

[27] Erkut, Cumhur (2000): Abstraction Mechanisms in Computer Art. Helsinki: Art@Science.

[28] "Instead of the term 'elementary dictionary', let's use the word 'sign repertoire' and instead of the term 'Composition theory' the word 'manipulation repertoire', one recognizes in the Formulation Kandinsky's nothing less than the visionary anticipation of information-theoretical program art." In: Stiegler, J. H. (1970): Transmutation. In: Old and modern art. Issue 109, 1970: 39-41.

[29] Nake, Frieder (1974): Aesthetics as information processing. Basics and Applications of computer science in the field of aesthetic production and criticism. Vienna, New York: Springer. P.48f.

[30] Lindsay, Kenneth C., and Peter Vergo. Kandinsky: Complete Writings On Art. New York: Da Capo Press, 1994. p.807

[31] Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Citadel, 1997. p.151

[32] Pflug, Günther. "The Bergson Reception in Germany." Journal for philosophical research 45, no. 2 (1991): 257-66.

[33] Fink, Hilary L. Bergson and Russian Modernism: 1900-1930. Northwestern University Press, 1998.

[34] Lindsay (1994). P.423

[35] ibid.

[36] Kandinsky "On point" 1919 in: Lindsay, Kenneth C., and Peter Vergo. Kandinsky: Complete Writings On Art. New York: Da Capo Press, 1994. p. 423f.

[37] ibid.

[38] ibid.

[39] see: Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 1990. p. 53

[40] Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1990. p.34

[41] The logic of sensation is not a sensation of logic. Deleuze's exciting analysis of sensation reveals its logic as being autonomous from the subject, but not disconnected from it, as part of a body without organs, but not disembodied. Sensation correlates to a haptic space constructed through the eye. Artist, painting, viewer; sensation, color, contour; rhythm, diagram, and catastrophe built the machine. The machine cannot replace the subject. This would be a category mistake, i.e. they can only coexist. Or, in other words, it will be promising to look into a process aesthetics that rejects a naïve subjectivism as well as a naïve objectivism, in the tradition of radical empiricism.

[42] O'Sullivan, Simon. Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought beyond Representation. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

[43] Gilles Deleuze talks about a transcendental empiricism, which is a rather paradox thought in: Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life. 2nd ed. New York: Zone Books, 2001. Kandinsky's point can serve as a boundary value case study for the thought of pure immanence in art.

[44] Klee, Paul. Form and design theory. 3rd ed. Basel [u.a.]: Schwabe, 1971. p. 3f.

[45] The resemblance of that image of thought is striking to D+G, the BwO and form of an egg. "That is why we treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation and kinematic movements involving group displacement, by migrations: all independent of accessory forms because the organs appear and function here only as pure intensities." Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 12th ed. Minneapolis, Minn. [et al:] University of Minnesota Press, 1987. p. 153

[46] Henry, Michel, and Scott Davidson. Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky. London: Continuum, 2009. p.48

[47] Williams points out that the earlier work by Henry can be understood independently of his thought on Christianity in: James Williams, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Henry: Critical Contrasts in the Deduction of Life as Transcendental, in: SOPHIA (2008) 47:265-279 DOI 10.1007/s11841-008-0073-4: "John Mullarkey, kindly commenting on an earlier version of this paper, has pointed that this Christian reference is neither ubiquitous nor perhaps necessary in Henry's work." (p.267)

[48] Henry (2009) P. 11

[49] ibid. P. 10

[50] Deleuze "Foldings, or the Inside of thought (Subjectivation) in: Kelly, Michael. Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault / Habermas Debate. 3rd ed. Michael Kelly. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994. p.315-346, p.328

[51] Foucault, Michel. Ceci n'est pas une pipe. October, Vol. 1 (Spring, 1976), pp. 6-21

[52] Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The inhuman: reflections on time. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991, p. 42

[53] Rajchman, John "Jean-François Lyotard's Underground Aesthetics", October, Vol. 86 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 3-18

[54] see: Shaviro, Steven. Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2009.

[55] Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 1990. The French publication was in 1966.

[56] Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2005. p. 84f.

[57] Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. What Is Philosophy?. Trans. Janis Tomlinson, and Graham Burchell III. Columbia University Press, 1996. p. 195

[58] Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. What Is Philosophy?. Trans. Janis Tomlinson, and Graham Burchell III. Columbia University Press, 1996. p. 198

[59] Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. What Is Philosophy?. Trans. Janis Tomlinson, and Graham Burchell III. Columbia University Press, 1996. p. 182

[60] Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. What Is Philosophy?. Trans. Janis Tomlinson, and Graham Burchell III. Columbia University Press, 1996. p. 197

[61] Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. What Is Philosophy?. Trans. Janis Tomlinson, and Graham Burchell III. Columbia University Press, 1996. p. 196

[62] Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1990. P151f.

[63] Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. What Is Philosophy?. Trans. Janis Tomlinson, and Graham Burchell III. Columbia University Press, 1996. p.40

[64] Rajchman, John. Constructions. Cambridge, Mass. [et al:] The MIT Press, 1998. p. 64

[65] Selz, Peter. "The Aesthetic Theories of Wassily Kandinsky and Their Relationship to the Origin of Non-Objective Painting." The Art Bulletin 39, no. 2 (1957): 127-36. p.128

[66] Bergson, Henri. "Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic." 1911. P.157 (quoted after Selz, Peter. "The Aesthetic Theories of Wassily Kandinsky and Their Relationship to the Origin of Non-Objective Painting." The Art Bulletin 39, no. 2 (1957): 127-36. P.128)

[67] Quoted after Selz, Peter. "The Aesthetic Theories of Wassily Kandinsky and Their Relationship to the Origin of Non-Objective Painting." The Art Bulletin 39, no. 2 (1957): 127-36. p.135

[68] Claus, Jürgen. "The Cosmic and the Digital Code." Leonardo 24, no. 2 (1991): 119-21. p.121

[69] Williams, James. 2008. Gilles Deleuze and Michel Henry: Critical Contrasts in the Deduction of Life as Transcendental. Sophia 47 (3): 265-279. Williams and Mullarky attempt to push aside the Christian implications in Henri's writing to focus on the ontological similarities. William characterizes Henri's understanding of life as auto-affection (pathos). Life as a universal force is not self-hood, I, cogito or self-reflexivity, but auto-affection. For Deleuze in contrast he postulates: "Affects are only fully registered when affirmed in a creative response to them, which Deleuze often calls counteractualization." (p.266). The characterization of Deleuze is problematic, and when it comes to immanence it becomes even contradictory: Henri is characterized as "In contrast, immanence is deduced by Henry as a necessary transcendental condition following a phenomenological reduction that is the same for any form of life." (p.267)

[70] Deleuze, Gilles. Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life. 2nd ed. New York: Zone Books, 2001. p. 31

[71] Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1990. summary

[72] Bergson, Henri. Perception of Change. In: Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Citadel, 1997. p. 136

[73] Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1990. p. 18

[74] Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1990. p. 30

[75] Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1990. p. 30

[76] Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1990. p. 31

[77] Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1990. p. 36

[78] Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1990. p. 38

[79] Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1990. p. 40

[80] Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1990. p. 41

I am slowly penetrating a little deeper into the superficiality. Concepts that I have absorbed from different knowledge systems such as the Vedas, Agamas, Shastras are slowly connecting. I see rough root systems. For example, how the 5 elements (water, fire, earth, ether and air) as a starting point in the teachings of the Vedas develop further in Vastu or Ayurveda, i.e. in space and the body. I see how different systems of knowledge intertwine in the temple and how this is still reflected in contemporary art practice today. And it becomes clear how the interpretation and appropriation of these knowledge systems is highly political. This knowledge was colonized and is now being critically questioned at universities with regard to its colonization. However, it is also still active in many ashrams and gurukuls, often with a great deal of pride and a reference to reviving the tradition.

Following Deleuze's ideas, I have rhizomatically connected different concepts, visited plateaus, left my home and allowed parts of myself to deterritorialize. A 'body without ogans' has emerged, lines of flight of the mind have formed. The plane of immanence has opened up, folded, its inclusions have opened up new worlds for me, which are now slowly aligning with reality and everyday life.

This is a painful process. The naive world of wonder and mild fascination, the honeymoon of spiritual exploration comes to a first caesura. This superficiality, i.e. the linking in immanence, is an active exploration, a thinking in the sense of expansion. I have combined it with an internalization, a tracing in meditation, spiritual practice, temple visits, exhibitions, 'folklore', study groups and conversations.

Now I have been on a 4-day intensive course on Vastu (architecture). Didactically it was well structured: slowly introducing the world of thought derived from the Vedas, leading to basic concepts of space, vibration, geometry, cosmology, energy. The Upanishads shone through again and again. We practiced puja and a temple visit - and finally practical applications in architectural plans.

The tasks are now much more difficult. The pure resonance and association needs to be checked for legitimacy. And this is where the question of the criterion arises. How should knowledge be measured? I discuss this with my teacher on the basis of Hegel and the Taittiriya Upanishad, but also in postmodern reflection. However, this oscillating thinking escapes systematic access. So how should it express itself? In the last few months, a lot has been condensed for me through personal experience. I have written letters that have followed the inner movement that feels drawn to something. And I have visualized and exhibited knowledge as a starting point for questions: a diagram of a temple exhibited in a gurukul that practices tantric rituals.

Yesterday I had a long conversation about the origin of thought. Which comes first, the words or the thoughts. There are of course very different forms of thinking. Visual, musical, analytical, synthetic, performative thinking etc... There is thinking on the level of intuition, there is thinking in memory, there is vision and intuition. There are so many types of thinking. What is thinking? Who thinks while thinking? How is it different from consciousness?

Much within my consciousness is not thinking, it is sensory perception, contemplation, daydreaming, there are unconscious and subconscious processes. Strictly speaking, none of this is thinking. Thinking is reflection, it is a reflection on the world, it is an attempt to understand and comprehend the world. It is largely analytical. When I perceive something through my senses, something is simply given to me within my consciousness. When I think about what I see, I give things names, I identify characteristics, I describe actions. This is my way of understanding the world. Describing the world in the form of an imaginary text allows me to see deeper connections: Functionalities, causalities, principles...

But where does a thought come from? How does it arise? There is intertextual thinking, i.e. I read or listen and react to text with text, connect many texts ... that is rather academic. There is a way of thinking that involves active listening and communication. People who listen to each other and think together explore a thought together. This listening and communicative thinking is exciting. Someone says something, someone else understands something, hopefully the two will coincide as far as possible, because they will never be identical. Now there are many dialogues here that are relatively standardized. Generalities are exchanged, or standard positions are compared, like in a game of chess ... but there is also philosophical dialog, the joint questioning. The question, for example: What is thinking? How do you answer this question? How do you think about it?

Sensations and impressions

I recently read Deleuze's essay on David Hume read. Hume says that everything begins with 'sensation' or 'impression'. When I feel something and then name it, this is the beginning of thinking. I can perceive objects, abstract properties, postulate causality, make statements, establish facts. But how can I record sensations and impressions? How can matter have a memory? How can my consciousness have images? These are Henri Bergson's questions.

What is the relationship between the outside world and the images of consciousness that are then structured into thoughts in language? Doesn't language have to be designed a priori as possible in order to express itself? Chomsky says that our brains, and perhaps also those of animals, have a general capacity for language baked into them. The Bible begins with: In the beginning was the word. Something similar can be found in the Vedas and Upanishads. In the Vedas, however, it is not just language that was there in the beginning, but a whole system of knowledge that encompasses different levels of consciousness and understands the human being as a microcosm. Everything that I can think can also exist and everything that exists can also be thought. We will probably need many more generations as a species. But a correspondence is postulated between the world and consciousness. They are one, nondual.

Deleuze's thinking revolves around how thoughts arise from a level of immanence. How these thoughts connect and combine to form complex systems. He calls this, for example, abstract machines, diagrams, rhizomes, plateaus etc... This is how words, thoughts, things, structures, power, art, the unconscious and the abstract etc. can combine. The world thus expresses itself, there is life in it (A Life). This is also the basic principle of the Upanishads, Brahman expresses itself through the creation of the world. An existence must also contain the process and change. This is the only reason why this reality exists.

As far as we know, man has so far created the most complex and wildest level of reality within thought. If you take all the different languages, cultures, religions, forms of society together, it becomes clear that something is being expressed here, something is manifesting. This is that. This is that.

Origin of thought

The origin of thinking is therefore only on one level in perception. In spiritual practice, inner contemplation and habitual practice (meditation and yoga) are the key to an original way of thinking that frees itself from stimulus-response patterns. The scriptures and teachings, the rituals and exercises serve a self-formation that allows us to look beyond the surface of sensual certainty. The thinking that becomes possible here goes further than the mere recognition of causal connections. It also goes further than rational reflection on problems of ethics, aesthetics and cognition. The rational mind has succeeded in ushering in the Anthropocene, a terraforming that is unique as far as we know. Nevertheless, existential questions remain untouched by this kind of thinking.

So the question of the origin of thought remains. Did the word come first? The word stands for language, which can capture many things. If we understand language as a symbolic system that can also be understood visually, musically or performatively, we could say that thought itself is always language. However, this only covers a small part of our existence. Our consciousness is broader, our physical existence, our life force (prana) our intellect (buddhi), memory (manas), our identity (ahankara) our spirituality (satchitananda), all this goes beyond thinking. Thinking can reflect and describe it, but it is not thinking itself.

I keep asking myself what it looked like at the beginning of thought. Many thousands of years ago ... I remember how we once wanted to bury a cat. Our (living) cat was irritated by the cardboard box. When the box with the carcass was gone, our cat performed a very elaborate ritual. We had never seen this before, even though he is an older cat and we have lived together for a very long time. It was clear that our cat was reacting to the death of a fellow cat. There are many stories from the animal kingdom, the elephant graveyards are perhaps the best known. It seems to me that there is a consciousness here that remembers others.

Thinking is rooted in experience, language, insight. It is often an experience of the world that lies beyond empiricism. This is where everyone's true creativity lies. Thinking is also always an act of creation.

One year of Auroville

I have lived through some intense years. Moving to a new country is always a major transformation - that was the case when I moved to London, then to the USA, France and now India. It's always important to me to leave my own culture in the background as much as possible and to embrace the new, which of course isn't new at all, just for me. And so one important task - especially in the first year - is to forget. Making space in your head, breaking down prejudices, surrendering to the magic and enjoying the rush a little.

The senses feel very fresh, the self very young, a childlike curiosity and naivety spreads that allows everything to take effect without prejudice.

I'm moving further and further away from the place that socialized me, and it's becoming increasingly clear why I'm doing this. Two things go together: the unease in a culture that I have always perceived as somehow foreign and the longing for a culture that would be more of a home.

India

India has always been this place of longing, and I'm certainly not the only one. Of course, it is the search for spirituality that brings people like me to India. Mother India calls and carries. The adventure that awaits you here is almost incomprehensible. It can hardly be grasped, neither by the act of grasping nor by the act of comprehending. The world as such reveals itself to be a different one. The European traditions of the Christian religion, occultism, exorcism, enlightenment, empiricism, romanticism, transcendentalism, modernism, postmodernism, etc. do not apply here. They are perceived as possible points of view, but no more.

Indian spirituality is about a synthetic understanding of life. It is not primarily about a scientific picture, the explanation of the material world or the construction of a simulation. In India, the question of consciousness is at the center. Consciousness is the starting point of everything. It has its starting point in consciousness itself. It is actually obvious that consciousness itself must exist, I have one, the reader has one, we can exchange ideas with other consciousnesses. Why is it so difficult to accept this in the West? (Husserl was quite close) But why is the statement of this fact branded as speculative? Just because it eludes the small-minded paradigm of scientificity? Isn't it much more the case that only what I find in my consciousness has any kind of relevance? Isn't that why the West celebrates so-called culture so much. But it is objectified, it does not invite a serious exchange about our own existence, but a discursive reflection. It is representative, it represents something as something else and it is used to represent, that is, to communicate power and powerlessness.

Adventure

It is this adventure of consciousness that makes traveling in the Indian cosmos so fascinating. Of course, you have to tame your skepticism and that immediately opens doors to all kinds of worldviews. Many are very strange to me. But they have a subjective validity. It would be presumptuous to want to place my consciousness above that of someone else. The contradictions that this creates must first be endured. This is not easy and causes a large number of crises in me. Crises in the sense of disorientation, restlessness and impatience. But the nice thing is that these crises can quickly be transformed into opportunities. They are invitations to meditate. An adventure of inner synthesis.

However, this synthesis is only possible if I admit to myself that my existence does not only consist of rational consciousness. I have a material and biological body, a life spirit and rational thinking, I have a world view and am capable of experiencing the sublime. I can reach higher levels of consciousness that move beyond the stimulus-response scheme. And I can approach the big question of our existence. I cannot answer it, but I can stay close to it. Many questions that present themselves as dilemmas to the rational mind are almost irrelevant on other levels of my existence, or even dissolve there.

This adventure is made possible by a whole series of different knowledge systems that have their origins in prehistoric times, i.e. the time before written language. The complex system of the Vedas was not written overnight. It is true that the knowledge it contains was revealed to the rishis. And no matter how skeptical one may be about this idea, one central question remains. Where does the idea of creation come from? And even more importantly, what is creation? How could such complex knowledge systems emerge at the beginning of history, of orderly time? What does inward vision see? Who hears by hearing, who sees by seeing?

Temple

I have decided to approach Indian culture through the temples. They are infinitely complex and I have to be patient with myself. It takes several lifetimes to even scratch the surface here, yet I want to try and capture an approximation. It will be amateurish, but perhaps that is precisely why it will be interesting.

The temples combine the knowledge of the Vedas, the Agamas, Tantras... It is architecture, sculpture, dance and music. They are places of worship, learning and coming together. They are embedded in the economy, ecology and social structures. They are intertwined with cosmology, meditation and spirituality. The bindu, the mantras, yantras, tantras, describe the relationship of the individual consciousness to the great, to the one. Unity and diversity manifest themselves in the temple. They are the living core of Indian spirituality. Many traditions seem to have existed unbroken for thousands of years.

I am still pursuing my project of reading Deleuze in India. Apart from difficult ideas like immanence in Deleuze, what interests me in Deleuze is the house in relation to art:

"Art perhaps begins with the animal, at least with the animal that marks out a territory and builds a dwelling (the two complement each other or sometimes merge in the so-called habitat). With the territory/house system, many organic functions change - sexuality, procreation, aggressiveness, food; but it is not this change that explains the appearance of territory and dwelling, rather the other way round: the territory implies the emergence of pure sensual qualities, sensibilia, which are no longer merely functional, but instead become expressive features and thus enable a transformation of functions. Certainly, this expressivity is already widely scattered in life, and one can say that even the field lily praises the glory of the gods. But it is only with territory and house that it becomes constructive and erects the ritual monuments of an animal mass that celebrates the qualities before gaining new causalities and finalities from them. This emergence is already art, not only in the treatment of external materials, but in the positions and colors of the body, in the songs and cries that mark the territory." (Deleuze, Gilles, Félix Guattari, 2003. What is philosophy? p.218)

What fascinates me about Deleuze is that his philosophy essentially describes how ideas come into existence. They emerge from the Implicitness, out of immanence. Ideas become active, they fly, form a flight path and thus connect. They create complexity. This way of thinking, which manages without axiomatics and without ideology, seems to me to be structurally very similar to the thinking of the Upanishads. Brahman unfolds itself in order to be able to experience itself. Where else but in the temple could this best be experienced?

So I sit in temples a lot, listen to the chants, bow to impermanence by smearing ashes on my head. From the inner chamber Garbhagriha the vibration spreads and manifests itself in the images on the walls of the temples. The Garbhagriha is only entered by the priest, who recites the mantras for the devotees. The bell, the incense sticks, the ablution and bedding of the gods, all this happens in the Garbhagriha. Here is the origin. "the territory implies the emergence of pure sensual qualities, sensibilia, which are no longer merely functional, but instead become expressive features and thus enable a transformation of functions." (see above)

The word werden is somewhat distorted in German: "Das wird doch nix!", or "Das wird schon...". There is something causal in the German 'werden', a process of development. In English, the word 'becoming' is more beautiful, something comes into being. It is more open: 'coming into being'. In French, Deleuze speaks of 'devenir', of "something coming", it is more active, a movement, away from something towards something else. It is important to perceive such small subtle differences when dealing with Deleuze's thinking, because that is the school of postmodern thinking, to see something in such small differences, the differences and structures that was not visible before. So when Deleuze, in the English translation of 'What is Philosophy' says "becoming is an extreme contiguity within a coupling of to sensations without resemblance or, on the contrary, in the distance of a light that captures both of them in a single reflection." I had to read this sentence over and over again for many years to understand it. Two sensations that are not similar touch each other, as in the distance of a light that captures both sensations in a single reflection. You have to pause a little.

For example, what is the difference between 'arising' and 'becoming'? Is there a 'becoming' in the physical world? In the world of atoms and physical forces, the law of conservation of energy applies. Matter and energy can change, their arrangement can change, E=mc2 etc... But a process of 'becoming' in the sense of becoming or devenir is something else. This is about sensations, sensory impressions, consciousness. How do two sensations become a sense impression? How does one sensory impression become another? How does consciousness change over time? How does a person change? What do I see on a screen? Who hears when I hear? This is the world of becoming. Sensations are contingent. They unite to form a more comprehensive sensory impression. They do not do this by merging or being grouped by similarity, but in a reflection. A reflection of a distant light that unites several sensations. The image is beautiful. However, the reflection is not an image, not a representation, but reflects light. In this reflection, very different elements can be very close to each other, great contrasts can appear harmonious, different qualities can touch each other.

But where does the light come from, in the distance? And where is the reflection perceived? Who sees when they see? The reflection of light and sound, warmth and impulse has its origin in vibration and creates vibration on contact. These impressions unite in consciousness, they become awareness.

-

I recently stumbled across David Hume again. I remember how intensively we studied his writings in Heidelberg. We went very deeply into the text, very meticulously and systematically. It was the opposite of those Anglo-American history of ideas lectures. So I stumbled across the concept of taste in Hume, as the core of his 'aesthetic' theory. I thought of Rasa and began a Conversation with the AI. Larger connections became clear to me, lines that I had never seen. However, I was a little disappointed by the superficiality. But if I compare the conversation with other conversations I've had with people over dinner, it was one of the more interesting ones.

So I wanted to find out more and looked up Gilles Deleuze. He was already taking part in the fictional conversation with AI, but his later essay on David Hume is on a completely different level. Deleuze's analysis is brilliant. He shows the full power of Hume's revolutionary approach, a thinking that is empirical and positivist, the power of the intellect that works with assumptions of causality, and also with the power of association and intuition to show how man builds an edifice of thought. This thought structure is not oriented towards metaphysical concepts such as self, God or world, but shows how thought itself moves and unfolds. It quickly becomes clear why Deleuze returned to David Hume towards the end of his life.

Dvaitadvaita

However, this throws me into a bit of a crisis, or hopefully to a point where I can find a new synthesis. After all, crises and new beginnings are often not so different. As I am on the fringes of what I can think, it is difficult to formulate this. Nevertheless, here's an attempt: the dualism of the Western tradition of thought is a trap from which it is difficult to escape. This is largely due to the fact that this dualism attaches great importance to the self. Once one has assumed oneself to be the center of the world, to place one's own rights above those of everything else and to fence them in again only by virtue of rational principles, a world view emerges that is concentrated on the individual person, which is expressed religiously in the tales of woe of individual prophets. The trials and tribulations of this tale of woe are part of great subjective narratives that are expressed in art.

The way out of this is not to dissolve dualism one-sidedly, i.e. into a materialistic position or a purely metaphysical position, but into a philosophy of immanence. This immanence, i.e. the idea that there is only one world that contains everything in its complexity, demands a new way of thinking. Space and time, change and process, relation and the individual, difference and repetition, resonance and language and so much more must be rethought. That was Deleuze's project. And that is also the project of the Upanishads. And that is the reason why I am reading Deleuze in India.

Now I read Deleuze's thoughts on Hume and remember my philosophy studies, and the desperate trench warfare in dualism. But I see that Hume and the Vedas are striving for something similar. A deep insight into the nature of the cosmos, without an exaggerated self-exaltation of the self. This may sound somewhat absurd, since in the Upanishads, Atman, the self as a principle, Purusha as the primordial soul, and Brahman as the creator are the starting point of thought. But this is exactly where the connection lies. The Upanishads think it together, as a kind of self-differentiation as in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. This differentiation is only possible in a thinking of immanence, where the different traditions of thought over the millennia and continents converge.

So the crisis that this triggers for me is this: I understand the perspective of the empiricist, and the perspective of the Vedas. Both of them come across dualism, in two forms, in a dualistic way. And in the Vedas one then speaks of Dvaitadvaita - dualism-non-dualismthe duality of duality and non-duality. And while I myself approach this concept of dvaitadvaita a little, my confusion arises from the fact that this happens with the help of AI.

The series of conversations with the AI is unedited, it is the machine (ChatGPT4.0) that speaks... Translation by DDeepL

Challenge: Please write a conversation between David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Abhinavagupta, Bharata Muni, Zeami Motokiyo, Gilles Deleuze and a Brahmin priest. Start with the question: What is taste?

ChatGPT
Setting: A cheerful garden with a round table in the middle. The philosophers and the Brahmin priest sit there, each representing a different era and culture, but united by the timeless question of aesthetics.

⁃ Bharata Muni: Let's start with the question at hand: what is taste? In my understanding, 'rasa' is the essence, the taste of the emotions that a work of art evokes in an audience. It is the culmination of the artist's efforts and the audience's experience.
⁃ David Hume: I agree with this, even if I would formulate it differently. For me, taste is the ability to judge what is beautiful, pleasing or sublime in art, not on the basis of considerations or principles, but on the basis of the immediate feeling of approval or disapproval it evokes. Nevertheless, there is a standard of taste that can be achieved by qualified critics.
⁃ Immanuel Kant: While I appreciate your perspective, Hume, I believe that taste is the ability to judge an object or mode of representation by a completely disinterested satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The object of such satisfaction is called beautiful.
- Abhinavagupta: Based on Bharata Muni, I would say that rasa is not just the feeling evoked, but a transcendental experience. It is a delicate interplay between the artist's intention, the artwork and the viewer's experience. This connection leads one to 'taste' the rasa, just as one enjoys a flavor.
⁃ Zeami Motokiyo: In the world of Noh theater, we don't use the term "rasa" explicitly, but we do have "yugen" - a deep, mysterious sense of the beauty of the universe. It's about the subtle and the profound, evoking emotions for the audience to enjoy, much like tasting a good dish.
⁃ Gilles Deleuze: Taste, as you describe it, seems to be an encounter. An encounter between the artwork and the viewer, between the world and its sensations. It is about becoming, transformation and the multiplicity of experiences. It's not just about categorizing the beautiful or the sublime, but about the connections that art makes with its audience.
⁃ Brahman priest: In the Vedas, taste or 'rasa' is also one of the elements that represent the liquid essence of life and connect it to feelings and experiences. In life, as in art, we enjoy different flavors, whether sweet, sour or bitter. The cosmic dance of the universe is a play of these flavors, and our dharma is to experience them in their entirety.
⁃ David Hume: It's fascinating how our different cultures and philosophies converge on the idea of taste as an experience, as an encounter. Whether it's the rasa of a play, the yugen of a Noh performance or the beauty of a painting, we are all trying to capture the elusive essence of what moves the human soul.
⁃ Immanuel Kant: Indeed, this is proof of the universality of the aesthetic experience. Our concepts and nuances may differ, but the core remains the same: the power of art to evoke, move and 'taste' emotions and experiences beyond the everyday.
⁃ Abhinavagupta: And in this shared experience across cultures and times lies the true essence of taste.

The conversation continues, with the two philosophers and the priest delving deeper into the intricacies of aesthetics, art and human experience, finding common ground amidst their differing perspectives.

Suggestion: Let the conversation continue and extend it to the physical places of art, to the different houses for art

ChatGPT

⁃ Zeami Motokiyo: When we talk about the essence of taste and art, it is worth noting that the spaces in which art is performed or exhibited play a crucial role in the experience. In Japan, the Noh stage is minimalist, allowing the audience to focus on the subtle expressions and movements, which enhances the experience of "yugen".
⁃ Bharata Muni: In ancient India, the Natya Mandapa, the theater stage, was an intimate space that brought the audience closer to the performers. The architecture itself was symbolic and represented the universe, and the stage was a sacred space where the cosmic dance of emotions took place.
⁃ David Hume: In Europe, especially during the Renaissance, art found its home in large galleries and theaters. These opulently designed spaces not only exhibited art, but were works of art themselves. They heightened the experience and made art both accessible to the masses and a symbol of prestige.
⁃ Immanuel Kant: Let us not forget the importance of the public squares and open spaces in Europe where sculptures and monuments were erected. These works of art, set against the backdrop of nature or in the midst of busy city life, had a different effect on the viewer than those in closed galleries.
⁃ Gilles Deleuze: Modern art has further expanded these boundaries. Today, art houses are not only physical spaces, but also conceptual worlds. Installations in unexpected places, digital art forms that are experienced virtually, and even performance art that uses the city as a stage challenge and redefine our traditional notions of art houses.
⁃ Abhinavagupta: The temples in India also served as important places of art. The sculptures, dances and music performed in these sacred spaces were not just for entertainment, but were offerings to the divine. The walls of these temples told stories and the art was experienced in a state of heightened devotion.
⁃ Brahman priest: The universe itself is the greatest house of art. Every sunrise, every ripple of water, every rustle of leaves is a performance of nature. Sacred rituals, chants and yajnas (sacrificial ceremonies) are our way of participating in this cosmic performance.
⁃ Gilles Deleuze: That is a fascinating perspective. In a way, modern art installations that blend into nature or the urban environment are a continuation of this idea - the universe as an art house. They break down the boundaries between the viewer and the artwork, making the experience immersive and transformative.
⁃ David Hume: Whether it is a large gallery, a temple, a Noh stage or a public square, it seems that the essence of art remains unchanged. These houses of art, in their myriad forms, serve as bridges that connect us to the artwork and, through it, to the deeper aspects of our humanity.
⁃ Immanuel Kant: Exactly. The physical or conceptual space may change, but the central aesthetic experience, the "taste" we have been talking about, remains universal. This is a testament to the enduring power of art and its ability to transcend boundaries.

The philosophers and the priest continue their discussion, exploring the nuances of different art houses in different cultures and eras and how they shape and are shaped by the art they house and the audiences they serve.

Challenge: Now that we see that they agree on many things, they should engage in a controversy and take different positions

ChatGPT

⁃ Bharata Muni: While we have found common ground in understanding the nature of art, I must emphasize that the main purpose of art is to evoke certain emotions or "rasas". It is a structured process and the artist must follow certain guidelines to achieve this.
⁃ David Hume: I have to respectfully disagree with you, Bharata. Although certain standards can guide art, it is ultimately a subjective experience. What evokes emotion in one person may not in another. Therefore, art cannot be bound by strict guidelines; it must be free to evolve and be interpreted.
⁃ Immanuel Kant: Following Hume, I believe that while art can evoke emotion, its true value lies in its ability to evoke the "sublime" - a feeling that transcends mere emotion and touches the infinite and immeasurable.
⁃ Zeami Motokiyo: In Noh theater, the focus is on the subtle and the profound. It is not about evoking a wide range of emotions, but about deepening the experience of a single emotion, such as the profound beauty of "Yugen". It is a disciplined art form, and deviations can dilute its essence.
⁃ Abhinavagupta: While I respect Noh's structured approach, I have to say that the experience of "rasa" is both structured and transcendental. The discipline of the artist and the receptivity of the audience combine to create a unique experience that goes beyond mere guidelines.
⁃ Gilles Deleuze: Although all these perspectives are valuable, they seem to be rooted in tradition. Modern art challenges precisely these ideas. It is not only about evoking emotion or the sublime, but also about deconstructing reality, questioning norms and constantly reinventing itself. Art is a rhizome that is constantly growing and changing without having a fixed origin or end.
⁃ Brahman Priest: Art, in its truest form, is a reflection of the divine. Whether it adheres to guidelines or challenges norms, its goal is to connect us to the cosmic dance of the universe. However, I fear that by constantly reinventing ourselves, we may lose the essence of this connection.
⁃ David Hume: That's the whole point, isn't it? We all appreciate the power of art, but our views on its purpose and execution are different. For some it's about sticking to tradition, for others it's about challenging it.
⁃ Immanuel Kant: And perhaps that is what makes art so powerful - its ability to be timeless and contemporary at the same time, to resonate with the past while reflecting the present.
⁃ Gilles Deleuze: But shouldn't art also push us into the future? Challenge our perceptions and make us question our realities?
⁃ Zeami Motokiyo: Questioning is important, but so is preserving tradition. It's a delicate balance.

The conversation becomes increasingly lively as each philosopher passionately defends his point of view and emphasizes the complexity of art and its interpretation. The garden, once quiet, is now filled with the vibrant energy of debate and discourse.

⁃ Abhinavagupta: Tradition and innovation are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, tradition often serves as the foundation on which innovation is built. The experience of 'rasa' has its roots in old guidelines, but it is also open to interpretation and further development.
⁃ Brahman priest: I respect the mutability of art, but we must not forget that some traditions serve as anchors that connect us to the divine. In our pursuit of innovation, we must ensure that we do not break this sacred connection.
⁃ Gilles Deleuze: But isn't the nature of the divine also fluid and constantly evolving? By constantly reinventing and questioning norms, art reflects this fluidity. It reflects the constant state of life, which is in the process of becoming.
⁃ David Hume: Gilles, while I appreciate the dynamism you attribute to art, it's important to recognize that not everything that challenges norms is profound. There is a fine line between true innovation and mere novelty.
⁃ Immanuel Kant: That's right, Hume. The sublime in art is not just about breaking boundaries, it's about transcending them. It's about addressing universal truths that transcend time and culture.
⁃ Zeami Motokiyo: In Noh, we place more emphasis on the depth of emotions than on their breadth. The challenge is not to portray a multitude of emotions, but to dive deep into one emotion and refine it to its purest form. This depth, I believe, touches on Kant's idea of the sublime.
⁃ Bharata Muni: And this is exactly where the guidelines come into play. They serve as a map that navigates the artist through the vast ocean of emotions and ensures that the essentials are not lost in the vastness.
⁃ Gilles Deleuze: Maps are useful, but they can also be limiting. True exploration often takes place when you venture off the map and into the unknown. That's where true creativity lies.
⁃ Abhinavagupta: Gilles, the departure into the unknown is important, but so is the return to the known. It's a cyclical process - the known becomes the basis for the unknown, and the unknown, once explored, enriches the known.
⁃ Brahman priest: It is like the eternal dance of creation, preservation and destruction. Each phase is important, and one cannot exist without the other.
⁃ David Hume: So here we come full circle. Even if our views on the purpose and execution of art differ, we all agree that it is cyclical - a balance between tradition and innovation, the known and the unknown.
⁃ Immanuel Kant: Indeed, and it is precisely this balance that makes art a reflection of life itself - constantly changing and yet rooted in timeless truths.

Having plumbed the depths of their disagreements, the philosophers come to a common understanding. The garden, which echoed with their passionate debates, now shines in new harmony and reflects the timeless dance of art and life.

Challenge: Let them work together and formulate a common aesthetic theory, think about whether that would be possible

ChatGPT

⁃ Zeami Motokiyo: Given our different backgrounds and perspectives, it may seem difficult to formulate a common aesthetic theory. However, our discussion has revealed common insights. Perhaps we can begin to work out these commonalities.
⁃ Bharata Muni: At the center of our discussions is the experience of the viewer or audience. Whether it is the "rasa" in a performance, the "sublime" in a painting or the "yugen" in the Noh, the essence is the emotional and transcendental experience that is evoked in the viewer.
⁃ David Hume: That's right, Bharata. And although individual experiences are subjective, there is a universality in certain aesthetic responses. However, this universality does not negate the value of individual interpretations.
⁃ Immanuel Kant: Exactly. Universality does not lie in uniformity, but in resonance. The true value of art lies in its ability to transcend cultures and times, to touch on universal truths while leaving room for individual interpretation.
⁃ Gilles Deleuze: And this resonance is not static. It is a dynamic interplay between the artwork, the viewer and the broader cultural and social context. Art is not just a reflection of reality, but a force that shapes and challenges it.
⁃ Abhinavagupta: Our shared aesthetic theory could therefore revolve around the idea of "resonance" - the dynamic and cyclical relationship between art, the viewer and the cultural context. This resonance is both emotional and transcendental, rooted in tradition and at the same time open to innovation.
⁃ Brahman priest: And like the eternal dance of the universe, this resonance is cyclical - the known inspires the exploration of the unknown, and the unknown, once explored, enriches the known.
⁃ Zeami Motokiyo: This theory goes to the heart of our discussions, but is it possible for such a theory to do justice to the great diversity of art forms and cultural contexts?
⁃ David Hume: That is a legitimate concern, Zeami. However, the strength of this theory lies in its flexibility. By focusing on the idea of 'resonance', we create space for the coexistence and interaction of different art forms that enrich each other.
⁃ Immanuel Kant: Theory does not prescribe a fixed standard, but it does provide a framework. It is a lens through which we can appreciate and critique art in order to understand its value and impact.
⁃ Gilles Deleuze: And like all theories, it will continue to evolve. Just as art challenges and reinvents itself, our understanding of it will also grow. This theory is not the end, but a beginning.
⁃ Brahman Priest: A beginning that recognizes the divine in art, the cosmic dance of creation, preservation and destruction and the eternal search for understanding and connection.
⁃ Abhinavagupta: Formulating a common aesthetic theory for our different perspectives is a challenge, but not impossible. Our shared insights and the idea of 'resonance' provide a foundation on which we can build, research and develop.
The philosophers have debates and discussions behind them and work together on a theory that, while based on shared insights, is open to interpretation and development. The garden that witnesses their intellectual journey is a testament to the power of dialog and collaboration.

prompt: which would be the main classical texts that would support such an approach? List 12 with author, year and 3 sentence summary

ChatGPT
Certainly! Here are 12 classical texts that would support such an approach:
⁃ "Natyashastra" by Bharata Muni (c. 200 BCE - 200 CE)
- This ancient Indian treatise on performing arts discusses the theory of 'rasa' or emotional essence evoked in an audience. It provides guidelines for artists to achieve this essence and explores the relationship between performers and their audience. The text is foundational for understanding Indian aesthetics.
⁃ "Critique of Judgment" by Immanuel Kant (1790)
- Kant delves into the nature of aesthetic and teleological judgments. He introduces the concept of the 'sublime' and discusses the universality of aesthetic experiences. The text is pivotal for Western aesthetic philosophy.
⁃ "Of the Standard of Taste" by David Hume (1757)
- Hume explores the nature of aesthetic judgments and the idea of a universal standard of taste. He argues that while individual preferences are subjective, certain artworks can be deemed universally beautiful. The essay is central to discussions on taste in Western philosophy.
⁃ "Dhvanyaloka" by Anandavardhana (c. 820 - 890 CE)
- Anandavardhana introduces the concept of 'dhvani' or suggestion, arguing that the essence of poetry lies in its suggestive power. This text further develops the rasa theory, emphasizing the emotional resonance of literary works. It's a cornerstone of Indian literary criticism.
⁃ "Fushikaden" by Zeami Motokiyo (c. 1400)
- Zeami, a master of Noh theater, discusses the aesthetics and principles of Noh. He introduces the concept of 'yugen' - a profound, mysterious sense of beauty. The treatise is foundational for understanding the aesthetics of Noh theater.
⁃ "Poetics" by Aristotle (c. 335 BCE)
- Aristotle's treatise on drama and poetry discusses the concept of 'catharsis' - the purification or purgation of emotions. He explores the elements of tragedy and the nature of aesthetic pleasure. The text has been influential in Western literary criticism.
⁃ "Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry" by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1766)
- Lessing contrasts the aesthetics of visual arts and literature. He argues that each art form has its unique strengths and limitations. The essay is a key text in discussions about the relationship between different art forms.
⁃ "Abhinavabharati" by Abhinavagupta (c. 1000 CE)
- A commentary on the Natyashastra, Abhinavagupta delves deeper into the rasa theory. He emphasizes the transcendental experience of rasa and the union between the artist, artwork, and audience. The text is crucial for understanding the nuances of Indian aesthetics.
⁃ "The Republic" by Plato (c. 380 BCE)
- While primarily a work on political philosophy, Plato discusses the role of art in society. He critiques art for being an imitation of reality and explores its moral implications. The text provides insights into early Western views on art.
⁃ "The Birth of Tragedy" by Friedrich Nietzsche (1872)
⁃ Nietzsche contrasts the Apollonian and Dionysian elements in art. He discusses the transformative power of art and its connection to human experience. The text offers a unique perspective on the nature and purpose of art.
⁃ "Rasa Tarangini" by Bhanudatta (c. 16th century)
⁃ Bhanudatta's work is a collection of Sanskrit verses that celebrate the rasa theory. It provides insights into the various emotions or 'rasas' and their expressions in literature. The text is a poetic exploration of Indian aesthetics.
⁃ "Aesthetica" by Alexander Baumgarten (1750)
⁃ Baumgarten's work is considered one of the first modern treatises on aesthetics. He explores the nature of beauty, the role of sensuous knowledge, and the relationship between art and morality. The text laid the groundwork for later aesthetic philosophies in the West.
⁃ These texts, spanning different cultures and eras, provide a rich tapestry of ideas that can support the collaborative aesthetic theory discussed by the philosophers.

Prompt: and which key texts from the 20th century can be related?

ChatGPT
⁃ Certainly! Here are key 20th-century texts that can be related to the collaborative aesthetic theory:
⁃ "Art as Experience" by John Dewey (1934)
- Dewey argues that art is an integral part of human experience and not just a matter of formal expression. He emphasizes the communal and societal role of art, suggesting that art is a means of communication and a reflection of cultural values.
⁃ "Difference and Repetition" by Gilles Deleuze (1968)
- Deleuze explores the concepts of difference, repetition, and identity. He challenges traditional notions of representation in art and philosophy, emphasizing the transformative power of difference.
⁃ "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" by Walter Benjamin (1936)
- Benjamin examines the impact of mass production on art. He discusses the "aura" of artworks and how it changes when art is reproduced, leading to shifts in aesthetic and cultural values.
⁃ "The Structure of Aesthetic Response" by Victor Zuckerkandl (1970)
- Zuckerkandl delves into the nature of aesthetic response, exploring how art communicates and the intrinsic qualities that evoke emotional reactions in observers.
⁃ "The Poetics of Space" by Gaston Bachelard (1958)
- Bachelard examines the emotional responses evoked by different types of spaces, from intimate nooks to vast expanses. He relates these spatial experiences to art and literature, exploring the interplay between physical space and imagination.
⁃ "Aesthetic Theory" by Theodor Adorno (1970)
- Adorno offers a critical analysis of art's role in society, discussing its autonomy and its potential for societal critique. He delves into the dialectical relationship between art's form and content.
⁃ "The Intentional Fallacy" by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley (1946)
- This essay challenges the emphasis on an artist's intention in interpreting their work. The authors argue for the primacy of the text itself, suggesting that the artwork should be analyzed independently of its creator's intentions.
⁃ "The Death of the Author" by Roland Barthes (1967)
- Barthes argues against traditional literary criticism's emphasis on authorial intent. He suggests that the meaning of a text is created by the reader, emphasizing the role of interpretation in the aesthetic experience.
⁃ "Ways of Seeing" by John Berger (1972)
- Berger examines the cultural and societal implications of visual images. He discusses how art and images are perceived in the context of history, politics, and commerce.
⁃ "The Open Work" by Umberto Eco (1962)
⁃ Eco explores the concept of "open" artworks, which are incomplete and require the audience's participation to realize their full meaning. He discusses the dynamic relationship between the artist, the artwork, and the audience.
⁃ "The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths" by Rosalind Krauss (1985)
⁃ Krauss challenges traditional notions of originality in art, especially in the context of modernism. She explores the role of repetition, grids, and structures in modern art.
⁃ "The Condition of Postmodernity" by David Harvey (1989)
⁃ Harvey examines the cultural and societal shifts in the late 20th century, discussing the implications of postmodernism for art, architecture, and urbanism. He explores the fragmentation of aesthetic experience in the postmodern age.
⁃ These 20th-century texts provide insights into the evolving nature of aesthetic theory, reflecting the cultural, societal, and technological shifts of the century. They offer valuable perspectives that can be related to the collaborative aesthetic theory discussed earlier.

Manifesto

Dance-film festival

28 Jul 2023 to 30 Jul 2023

https://auroapaar.org/festival/

What has actually manifested itself? The moving images that emerged from the latent images and 'came to life' in their sequence of at least 24 frames per second, these images of dancers who, according to their genre, were already at the beginning of cinematography, these images were shown at the Dance-Film Festival Manifest from July 28 to 30, 2023 at the Alliance Française in Pondicherry.

During the 2.5 days of the festival in the Alliance Française event room, 40 short films were shown. I actually just wanted to pop in and 'support' the first set of films, as I know they are often not well attended. I stayed for 2.5 days and watched every film, every live performance and, as far as the program allowed, attended the master classes. I was electrified. I only know such an intense art experience from big biennials or media festivals.

I kept asking myself what manifests itself here. Various media theories came to mind: Dziga Vertov's Kinoeye and the universal language of film, which is not bound to any language and enables the world to unite in the sense of a proletarian revolution. Or Godard's famous quote that the truth consists of 24 images per second and the media-critical theories derived from this, which deal with fictionality, lies and representation. And, of course, Gilles Deleuze and his homage to Henri Bergson's theory of the cinematographer. Deleuze turns Bergson's critique of film into a hymn of praise by understanding the technical quality of film editing as active thinking, as pure philosophy. But none of this, not even the theory of the moving image, seemed to me to grasp the phenomenon of this dance film festival.

A new genre?

Through their work, the organizers posed the question of whether a new genre is forming here. What is a genre? What is formed in which manifestation? Dance! An archaic form of expression that goes back to the animal kingdom, and at the same time one of the most complex, as it understands the whole body as a medium of expression. Dance is the movement of a body in space. The connection of body, space and time, interwoven through rhythm, is perhaps one of the most complex and challenging forms of expression for a 2-dimensional, linear medium such as film. The predetermined camera perspective, the frame of the image, the technical structure of the apparatus - all this works against dance. And so, for me, dance films have always been experimental or banal. Banal when it was simply a recording of a performance, experimental when individual segments of an otherwise continuous expression were expanded and contextualized through editing and montage and often ended in a rather cryptic sequence of movement intervals that could only be understood by insiders.

Perhaps I'll start very specifically, with the place where all this is taking place. An event room that is wonderfully suited as a movie theater. A stage in front of it. The festival is in Pondicherry, a former French colony in India, this colorful subcontinent with countless languages and traditions. This multicultural subcontinent, which was rather arbitrarily united by the British in 1947 through a national border, has chosen dance as one of its central, unifying cultural forms. There is a lot of dancing, at weddings and temple festivals, in Bollywood and at village festivals. Dance is omnipresent in many areas of society in India. It was therefore all the more surprising to see that no major Indian productions were represented in the festival program. Dance was live on stage. That says a lot, but more on that later.

Rasa

The root of Indian aesthetics lies in the concept of rasa, often translated as taste, but less in the sense of an artistic taste and more specifically in the sense of the senses of taste. The activation of the inner senses, which gives the sensory impressions a kind of quality. The outwardly directed senses see, touch or hear SOMETHING, focus on SOMETHING. The taste of sweet or sour is more of a quality of WHAT tastes sweet or sourit has the Feature to be sweet or sour. These qualities correspond to an inner sensual experience. This can be transmitted through the expressive power of theater, poetry, music and dance. In the Natya shastra there are the four basic principles of love/eroticism (Śṛngāram), heroism (Vīram), anger (Raudram) and disgust (Bībhatsam)). Someone loves, is a hero, is angry or disgusted. The whole thing becomes arbitrarily complex, the emotional characteristics differentiate themselves, colors and costumes are assigned to them and gods correspond to their powers, culminating in dance.

At this point, I just want to point out that at the core of this aesthetic, which is still the basis of traditional dance in India today, is the inner emotional state. This emotional state is embodied and manifests itself through the performers and evokes the same feeling in the viewer. This is the basis of aesthetic theory in India.

It goes against the tradition of European aesthetics since Plato, with its focus on representation. This retinal The idea that art takes place in the eye gave rise to central perspective, the camera and the cinematographer.

Moving pictures

So what happens when the camera's eye focuses on the dancers? How is a dancer's expression transferred to the screen? What new narrative forms are opened up by editing and montage? In his 1935 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility", Walter Benjamin saw the loss of aura through new media such as radio and film as by no means only negative. Editing and montage freed 'performing' artists from the constraints of a theater space and made it possible to visualize what could otherwise only be evoked in the imagination. To me, this historical starting point seems promising when it comes to the question of a new genre of dance film. To a certain extent, the theater has been liberated by film; in the USA, for example, it has been almost completely replaced by movie theaters. Significantly, Broadway theaters, i.e. musicals, which retain dance as one of their central principles, bucked this trend. They are still popular today. The experience of dance theater as a live experience is highly valued in almost all cultures that have a stage culture. Even MTV's music videos have not been able to do much to change this.

What became visible in Manifest is not a new phenomenon. However, the focus of Manifest was deliberately directed towards the fusion of film art and theater. The decision to only allow films that consciously exploit the medium of film in its artistic expressiveness was strategically correct. In this way, something became concentrated and visible. Perhaps a new genre. It is something different from "Singing in the Rain" or Wim Wenders' documentary "Pina Bausch", nor is it Michel Jackson's MTV videos or Bollywood's "Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge". You could say that the 40 films selected at the festival were short films that chose dance as their language. An international language without words, as Dziga Vertov called for, and a language that contrasts the core of moving images, namely the language of movement. While Bergson and Godard accuse the cinematographer of lying, and Deleuze identifies truth purely in the materialized form of thought in film, the dance film attempts the impossible, the squaring of the circle: the concentration of film on movement as language in 3-dimensional space. This restrictive focus is tantamount to a manifesto, just like the numerous art movements of the avant-garde.

Room and screen

The Incubator Lab's hybrid film experiments were exciting. Dance choreographies were realized in films and performed on stage. The main aim was to feel the difference as an audience. What is the same and what is different? What works and what doesn't? The productions were small-scale experiments that invited reflection.

The festival catalog is available here: https://auroapaar.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/MANIFEST-2023-CATALOG.pdf

It's worth a look, I really liked the movies on the following pages: 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 41, 42, 56

Art begins not with flesh but with the house. (Deleuze)

I now practise meditation. It took me a long time to admit this to myself. I've somehow always done it, I just didn't know it. Like most people, I have phases in which I look inside myself or concentrate on something contemplatively, phases in which I try to calm my mind or find out what this me inside me actually is, phases in which I try to understand what my rational mind cannot understand (e.g. infinity, or the beginning of time, etc.).

I have done this when I have had a crisis (be it intellectual, emotional, biographical...) or I do this when I am clearing my consciousness (like clarified butter) or looking at what forces are at work in me, as if large animals are pushing forward and upwards in me, as if horses and cows are restlessly trying to free themselves and strive towards the light.

Light

In the face of light, then, when the mind has come to rest, the rational mind has made peace with the fact that it cannot understand everything and yet is able to grasp the world intuitively, a moment of unity with the world on a level of consciousness that transcends everyday life, there is that for which there are no unencumbered words in German: Wonne, Seeligkeit, in English Bliss, in Sanskrit Ananda.

But this state was always somehow uncanny to me. Because there I saw phenomena that I knew from kitschy New Age postcards, or from a roommate from my student days in London, who always painted on LSD... I think I did well to be critical of these visions, because it is a somewhat gimmicky distraction of meditative consciousness. Color, geometries, light, cosmic vastness... all these are beautiful experiences and images, but they don't take you very far. They make the small ego think it is something special. These images arise during a longer meditation, especially in the lotus position after half an hour or so, when the legs start to fall asleep. When the pain of the sitting posture subsides and the endorphins no longer have to control the body's stimuli, but can let off steam freely and wildly in consciousness, it's nice, but, as I said, it doesn't lead anywhere. So I was always suspicious of that.

Room

I find it more exciting when a space opens up in this consciousness and the mind's eye begins to see clearly. When the eyes are closed, the consciousness meditates on itself. It detaches itself from the stimulus-response pattern, as there are actually not many stimuli left (provided the meditation takes place in a really quiet room with few stimuli). Consciousness is now alone with itself. Where does it want to go? Into memory? Into reflection and problem-solving thinking? Into contemplative vision? Into imagination and creativity? Into the feelings, the heart?

To help and systematize this a little, there is the image of the 7 chakras (Sahasrara, Ajna, Vishuddha, Anahata, ManipuraSvadhisthana, Muladhara). I can visit these chakras in meditation and see if one or the other chakra needs a little attention. This can create a kind of inner balance. Again, I try to avoid the cheesy color circles. I don't find this helpful, but it may be different for others. But I digress, there are many such 'techniques'.

Concept, percept, affect

Where does consciousness want to go? Who or what is behind consciousness, where does it come from? Is there a soul? Is it immortal? Is it part of something bigger? Can I think of the universe, existence itself, with all its complexity and its many facets, as a unity?

This is where I quickly reach the limits of what is conceivable with my concepts (Kant's antinomies). My little brain, how should it approach this? As long as I hold on to the idea that my consciousness consists solely of sensory impressions - perceptions - generated by my body's sensory organs, I cannot leave this subjective perspective. However, my intuition and my creativity help here. There are affects in my consciousness, it is affected, it acts. For me, it is precisely this action guided by intuition and creativity that is the key to deep meditation. Concept and percept have their role and task, but they are limited in their range and capacity for understanding. Affects, however, are different. What is an affect?

"By whom missioned falls the mind shot to its mark? By whom yoked moves the first life-breath forward on its paths? By whom impelled is this word that men speak? What god set eye and ear to their workings?

That which is hearing of our hearing, mind of our mind, speech of our speech, that too is life of our life-breath and sight of our sight. The wise are released beyond and they pass from this world and become immortal." (Kena Upanishad)

Who hears when hearing, who sees when seeing, who thinks when thinking? A life force, an élan vital, a becoming, a change? When the vibrations of the senses mix (intermiscence), a percept arises. If this percept wants to express itself, it does so in language, another form of vibration. A concept emerges. These concepts are sometimes abstract, they may be ideas. But these ideas are part of a different reality. As early as Plato, this leads to an idealism which, however, withers away in Western rationalism to a transcendental phlosophy.

For Deleuze, however, concept, percept and affect remain agile; they arise when the body enters into an encounter with the outside world. Concept, percept and affect change, but are recognizable, they form patterns. They are the basic forms of vibrations, i.e. energetic patterns. They can also be communicated to a certain extent. Above all, however, they form an inner space that can be experienced in meditation.

Space is only to be understood literally to a limited extent. In meditation, the mind is free to move. Space and time are no longer limitations. Just as when associating thoughts, the objects of the thoughts are not moved along with them, in the space of meditation the mind can rush freely from one vision to the next. I think this is what is meant by the vision of the inner eye, which for some is heightened to the point of visions.

Visions

These visions, as I like to call them in the old-fashioned way, give access to more than just an inner world of experience. A house is built there, a city in which forces are simply forces, detached from causal chains. There may be neurochemical processes that take place when the mind is so active, and if you like, you can make a reduction here. But this is a very daring theory, not supported by anything, is pure science fiction - because we are dealing with correlations at best, a causal relationship cannot be proven. We don't even know what it is that we want to put into a causal relationship.

Let's just take consciousness for what it is: consciousness. Why this reductionism? I don't reduce my life to biochemistry either.

A space, i.e. an architecture, is created in this consciousness. Deleuze makes it sound like this:

"Interlocking these frames or joining up all these planes wall section, window section, floor section, slope section- is a composite system rich in points and counterpoints. The frames and their joins hold the compounds of sensations, hold up figures, and intermingle with their upholding, with their own appearance. These are the faces of a dice of sensation. Frames or sections are not coordinates; they belong to compounds of sensations whose faces, whose interfaces, they constitute. But however extendable this system may be, it still needs a vast plane of composition that carries out a kind of deframing following lines of flight that pass through the territory only in order to open it onto the universe, that go from house-territory to town-cosmos, and that now dissolve the identity of the place through variation of the earth, a town having not so much a place as vectors folding the abstract line of relief. On this plane of composition, as on "an abstract vectorial space," geometrical figures are laid out cone, prism, dihe-dron, simple plane-which are no more than cosmic forces capable of merging, being transformed, confronting each other, and alternating; world before man yet produced by man. The planes must now be taken apart in order to relate them to their intervals rather than to one another and in order to create new affects. We have seen that painting pursued the same movement." (Deleuze: What is Philosophy? p.187)

Yesterday I met with a gallery owner in Pondicherry. I want to learn more about the artists in the region, the inspirations, the artistic practice, the visual language, the spiritual depth, the narratives, the studios, the biographies, the temples they visit. At the same time, I am discussing a video format with some Aurovillians about the art landscape around Auroville. My training as a Western art historian is not always helpful, there is so much I have to forget first - 'unlearning'. I have always told my students the same thing: forget what you have learned in the survey lectures, that is the history of the victors and ideologues. Art is something else. Well, now I'm learning a little about myself, I'm being reminded and encouraged, I'm reaching my limits.

The conversation yesterday didn't open my eyes, but my senses. Again and again, it is the Upanishads that are the key. I often feel like a novice. Every serious conversation I have here brings to light many new concepts that I don't know. This gives my conversation partner an idea of how deeply I have delved into the Vedic scriptures, the meaning of the temples, the code of the Agama I got in. And of course I have to admit that I'm really only scratching the surface. But it becomes roughened, more permeable, dust and seeds collect in its scratches and traces, it starts to sprout.

My idea of art rejects the concept of representation. Kriti, my conversation partner yesterday, spoke of a retinal attitude in this context. European discussions are always only about what happens on the retina, not about what happens behind it. The vibration of the senses, the fire of cognition, the states of consciousness beyond the material navigation of physical reality.

At the same time, she says that India is often about visual storytelling. How does that fit together?

Body without organs

I think of Deleuze Logic of Sensation, how the eye merges with the canvas, the ear sees better, the forces of distorted bodies become visible on the canvas. And how the artist Francis Bacon's final splash of color at the end of the artistic process exposes the work to intuitive, cosmic, random processes to either complete or destroy the work. Deleuze talks about vibration, about surrender, about the fluid boundaries of the physical body, but also about a body without organs. His thinking is not so far removed from the Kena Upanishads. Elsewhere, Deleuze writes about 'body without organs' (bwo):

"Inscribed on the plane of consistency are haecceities, events, incorporeal transformations that are apprehended in themselves; nomadic essences, vague yet rigorous; continuums of intensities or continuous variations, which go beyond constants and variables; becomings, which have neither culmination nor subject, but draw one another into zones of proximity or undecidability; smooth spaces, composed from within striated space. We will say that a body without organsor bodies without organs (plateaus) comes into play in individuation by and haecceity, in the production of intensities beginning at a degree zero, in the matter of variation, in the medium of becoming or transformation, and in the smoothing of space. A powerful nonorganic life that escapes the strata, cuts across assemblages, and draws an abstract line without contour, a line of nomad art and itinerant metallurgy.
Does the plane of consistency constitute the body without organs, or does the body without organs compose the plane? Are the Body without Organs and the Plane the same thing? In any event, composer and composed have the same power: the line does not have a dimension superior to that of the point, nor the surface to that of the line, nor the volume to that of the surface, but always an anexact, fractional number of dimensions that constantly increase or decrease with the number of its parts. The plane sections multiplicities of variable dimensions. The question is, therefore, the mode of connection between the different parts of the plane: To what extent do the bodies without organs interconnect? How are the continuums of intensity extended? What is the order of the transformational series?" (Deleuze A 1000 Plateaus p. 507)

I think that the very broad Term 'body without organ' helps here. The Upanishads are essentially about the relationship between Brahman and the world. In order to experience itself, Brahman creates a self (atman), a consciousness (purusha), which is realized through nature (prakriti). The physical world is a habitat for the forces that emerge from Brahman - in Hinduism as gods. The configuration of this reality is Brahman, which experiences itself. Brahman is Atman, unity and diversity are not opposites, they contain each other.

There is a parallel in the orientation towards a philosophy of immanence a non-dualistic philosophy. How is the complexity of consciousness to be recognized as immanence? Aurobindo's first answer would be that rationality is not capable of this. It must be transcended, transcended. Only by giving up the small self, the ego, do truly meaningful experiences become possible. The states of Satcitananda allow us to participate in the unfolding of consciousness. It is this unfolding that Deleuze describes materially. What Aurobindo describes through the differentiation of consciousness, Deleuze describes through the movements and connections of thought and the senses.

Storytelling

So I ask myself, what kind of stories are these? What stories are being told? My impression is that many works by contemporary artists in India are not about telling autobiographical stories, even though their own experience and biography often clearly resonate. But that is not the issue. It is not about asking what the artist:in us wanted to say with it. That's why the Tasmai Gallery no explanatory text, not even names, titles etc... The works are simply on the wall, standing for themselves.

The images do not represent a story. It is true that in India, as in every cultural tradition, there are narratives of mythological, religious or imperial character that form the fabric of a 'cultural fabric'. In India, the many figures from the epics and temples are omnipresent. But it is difficult for everyone to always decipher them. There are so many local traditions, the subcontinent is huge, that it is not so much a question of Indians or non-Indians being able to decode the visual language. It is the artists' personal exploration of their own experience. These narratives are designed to allow points of connection - a rhizome, a plateau, a level.

When I see a work that may seem a little naive at first glance, I find myself thinking and categorizing retinally in my Western mind. Missed the mark ... Second attempt. What experience is being felt here? How does my eye move? How does my body move, where do I linger, where does a connection arise between my experience and what I see? What mental images arise in my mind, what spiritual experience is evoked? These are the questions that point me in the right direction.

What is happening here on an empirical level? The art historian in me wonders, how can I talk about this? Experiences of Satchitananda are difficult to communicate. I then fall back on Deleuze. The ear sees better. The logic of sensory experience is a logic that is not a logic. It is not a propositional logic, it is not about true or false. Nevertheless, it is not random, arbitrary. The senses are held together by vibration, and this is where the Kena Upanishad continues. Who thinks when thinking, who sees when seeing?

"That is full; this is full. The full comes out of the full. Taking the full from the full the full itself remains.
Aum, peace, peace, peace." (Invocation of Isha Upanishad)

Art is fundamentally misunderstood, especially by experts, art historians and critics. Art is not about what it represents or what it means. Art is not a riddle to be deciphered, nor is it an expression of artistic genius that can be explained by the artist's biography. Art is also not necessarily beautiful, or aesthetic, or sublime.

Representation

Art is not Representationthat is the great misunderstanding of modernity. It was this misunderstanding that gave rise to the avant-garde. Its aim was to constantly invent new forms of representation, to express new phenomena for the first time. I am thinking of the subconscious, the concept of four-dimensional space, synaesthetic perception, functionalism, enthusiasm for technology. These and many other phenomena from the 20th century became the 'subject' of art. If something is the 'object' of art, then art represents this 'object', it depicts it - according to conventional art theory. The understanding of art on which this is based is one that is attached to the belief in progress, postulates an objective development of a history of art and is based on principles of rational historiography. All these approaches have a certain explanatory power within a limited framework. They shed light on certain aspects. However, they misunderstand the nature of art.

If I go so far out on a limb and attack the common art discourses of the West in one paragraph, I must of course also briefly say what I would like to counter. These are some essays by Roland Barthes, a great semiotician or semiologist and French art critic. His texts show the limits of what can be represented in art. And of course I am thinking of Gilles Deleuze, who thought much further and more radically and characterized art as an encounter. I associate him with a radical critique of the dogma of the representational theory of art. Art actually has nothing at all to do with representation. The idea that something stands for something else is actually absurd. It leads to all the problems of dualism, its paradoxes and illusory problems. A text, a picture, a composition, a play, an opera or a sculpture, even a photograph, they all represent nothing. Rather, they are very special things in the world that give us a very special experience. The fact that they are sometimes similar to other things is trivial and hardly interesting.

Encounter

When I say that art is an encounter, or makes it possible, it means that the artworks are the result of a creative process. The difference between the artist as the producer of works and the viewer as the recipient is much smaller than is generally assumed. Art is not an object of communication between artist and viewer. Nor is art a medium between a sender and a receiver. Nor is art a sign that can be decoded.

Art is art. Let's try not to immediately reduce it to something. Art is created and becomes part of the world. It has an effect, just like everything else in the world. There are very different modes of action, I am thinking here a little of Schopenhauer's fourfold root of the law of sufficient cause. I vary freely: there is mechanical causal effect, there is the dynamic of living, i.e. biological systems and there is social interaction as an effect, there is inspiration and creativity. Their modes of action are different. I would like to claim here that they are irreducible.

Art is art. It is produced and is part of a context. We can encounter it. Encountering art is not only reserved for humans. Some animals also have it, albeit to a limited extent, and perhaps artificial intelligence will also make progress in this area.

With Deleuze we learn that:

• the Cinematograph creates and plays a movie that manifests thought (Deleuze 'Cinema').
• Art for us is not only like is a house, but a house is. As humans, we stand between earth and heaven - the cosmos. In this tension, we need a boundary, a home. We need a territory that we call ours, and we need to be able to leave it, to deterritorialize and reterritorialize. Art has a very important role to play here. In the encounter with others, with the earth and the cosmos, we build a house, that is the basic principle of art. We inhabit the house, visit other houses. Of course, this is meant both literally and metaphorically (Deleuze 'What is Philosophy').
• When we encounter art, our senses merge with the art itself. Our eyes, ears, taste and touch vibrate when we come into contact with vibrating art (Deleuze 'Logic of Sensation').

What Deleuze avoids, and only hints at in his last essay 'Immanence: A life', is a spiritual component. Part of our being-in-the-world is our relationship to the great questions of meaning. A life that is aware of itself - if not fully, then richly - sees itself as part of a whole. This relationship also becomes a theme in art. We can encounter the power of creation. With Aurobindo, art has the ability, Bhakti i.e. to be a medium of devotion - an encounter with the divine - not in the form of a representation of the divine as in Christianity, but as an object of meditation that facilitates the path of bhakti in contemplative devotion.

I am interested in the relationship between Deleuze's concept of art as a house and Aurobindo's concept of art as bhakti in the temples. There seems to me to be a parallel here. Both lead from the dead end of representation to a concept that does more justice to spiritual experience.

Here is a link to a long Presentation (35MB) with material on the question of why I, as an art historian, read Deleuze.

I have changed my world view maybe 4 or 5 times in my life. It's an exciting, thrilling and extremely exhausting process. I think that's a lot, some people may never have left the world view they were born into. Studying philosophy actually requires this. You shouldn't do it too often, and ideally you grow with every new change.

In order to say goodbye to a world view and embrace a new one, you have to leave many ideas behind. It is not easy to say goodbye to ideas that have guided you for years. It's not as if you wake up one day and think everything you've been convinced of for years is wrong. Rather, a feeling creeps in that something is wrong, that certain questions are still unanswered, that things you found interesting suddenly become boring. For me, the mantra is similar. Over the last few years, for example, I have had one thought almost every day: 'I am done with capitalism'. But what does that mean?

The transition

For me, this meant that I could no longer support certain things. In practical terms, I no longer felt comfortable working for an expensive private university. I was also no longer interested in things that purely followed the logic of capital, which also meant that I lost interest in certain topics. I looked at the many shelves of my books and found very few of them interesting ... At the same time, I was attracted to new ideas. Specifically the books by Sri Aurobindo. I've been reading him slowly, but only him, for years ... His ideas take me into a completely different world of thought and experience. I am then very careful. Some authors are seducers, have quick answers and try to impose a world of thought in a somewhat missionary way. I find that dangerous. You have to be careful.

How can you build new beliefs that contradict old beliefs? In order to let go of old beliefs, I simplify them. I ask myself, what is the core and why have they lost their appeal for me? I reduce complexity, simplify in order to gain clarity. That is the beauty of Simplicity. Since my world views have always consisted of solid philosophical systems, I could not simply find fleeting errors in my thinking. Rather, I am interested in weighing up the implications. What does a worldview mean for the planet? Or which questions within a worldview come up short, or are only dealt with evasively? My small category of Kiss goodbye entries here is a small collection of anecdotes.

So today I realized something. As I said, this is about radical simplifications. Reading Aurobindo's commentaries on the Isha Upanishad, I have the feeling that it is all clear, that something is being expressed here that contains a higher truth. I find that almost uncanny, because the world of thought is complex, comes from a different culture, assumes an incredible amount, and you can't really understand it if you don't know Sanskrit. I am therefore infinitely grateful that I can read these texts here with a friend who is not only a real Sanskrit expert, but is also a kind of guru for me, who gives me orientation in my attempt to find my way around Aurobindo's world of thought. So today I realized something. In the great traditions of thought in the West, there are different basic attitudes. A kind of axiomatics, i.e. fundamental assumptions on which everything is based. I am familiar with the following traditions of thought, for example:

• A world view based on Empiricism in other words, on things that are given to me through experience. These experiences are the starting point for understanding the world. Everything that is given in my experience must be rationally explainable. 'Trust only your senses' is the short-sighted mantra. This world view is dominant because it has become the driving force, especially outside philosophy. Politics, economics and the natural sciences are driven by it.
• Another world view is based on the Rationality. Only that which can be rationally explained is valid. This sounds almost identical to the first, but has radically different implications. This is about the structures of our thinking, the transcendental structures: logic, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, a priori assumptions, etc.... A wide variety of ideologies can be derived from this type of rational thinking. If you change the premises by looking at a different set of data, but at the same time leave the lines of argument essentially unchanged, radically different world views emerge - communism, capitalism, fanaticism, fascism. They all have their own rationality, which in colloquial terms is not rational at all. I think the Second World War illustrates where this can lead.
• A third cluster of world views follows the basic assumption that there are local knowledge systems. A postmodern worldview that endures contradictions and values change. For me this is procedural thinking. It is constantly changing because the world is also constantly changing.

This is certainly only a small selection of possibilities. However, I think that these three paradigms are sufficiently clear-cut, as there are also many disputes in the specialist literature.

It now seems to me that in Aurobindo's thinking all these ways of thinking converge, albeit under different auspices: Empiricism is given by a profound analysis of the senses, which is phenomenologically precise in the sense that it covers the constitution of different states of consciousness and levels (Kena Upanishad). It is rational in the sense that Aurobindo unlocks the mystery of the Vedic scriptures and shows that the spiritual knowledge of the rishis is rational, but also goes beyond rationality without becoming irrational (Isha Upanishad). It just includes other forms of knowledge and states of consciousness. And his thinking is linked to processual thinking, as it describes the evolution of the mind (The Life Divine). In Aurobindo's analyses, all three forms of thinking always come together. His 'system' is intertwined. Everything is interrelated, and it must be so, the world, consciousness, full consciousness, nature, the gods, the self - Maya, Purusha, Satcitananda, Prakriti, Brahman, Atman...

It seems to me that this is roughly how a world view can shift or be replaced by another one. This means that the previous world view is transformed in personal thinking.

Help with this: Meditation, living in a different country in a different society, spiritual growth and the courage to take a gap for the moment.

p.s.: Instead of a reductionist view of consciousness, and instead of an orientation of meaningfulness along the accumulation movements of capital, the basic principle of vibration is found in the Vedic scriptures. It is the energetic principle of the universe, it is the basic principle of sensory perception. The synchronicity of vibrations in perception allows for conscious perception and translation into sounds and language. Our consciousness is what significantly shapes our existence as human beings. It is differentiated on at least 7 levels, and the attempt to reduce it to information processing seems masochistic, self-denying, externally determined and misguided to me.

There was a time when a Studium Generale was part of the academic world. I did it for a few semesters. The idea of a systematic science always seemed somewhat absurd to me. 

In my philosophy studies after the intermediate examination in Heidelberg, I became more systematic, but I was still a 'colorful dog' in the seminar. I always found counterexamples or strange observations that contradicted the theories. That was invigorating for the discussions in the seminars. I was argumentative and didn't give up easily. However, I didn't have much to counter the power of systematic thinking in the tradition of German idealism in the long run, and so I took refuge in aesthetic theory. 

Aesthetic theory

Everything that is perceptible is potentially the subject of aesthetic theory. The more colorful, the better. However, here too I was caught up in the systematic and analytical way of thinking. We were reading modern thinkers, not postmodernists. Art history had remarkably little to contribute to the discussions. And so I surrendered to the idea of the avant-garde. A new idea quickly became an old one and was replaced by an even more radical one.

The tragedy of this movement, which is often (mis)understood as progress, is the analytical reduction. Mystical thinking becomes mythical, then enlightened and finally critical thinking. The object of art is reduced from the cosmos to the religious/ideological, then to the scientific and finally to the critical, sometimes cynical. The semiotic reduction was followed by a compositional reduction, then a reduction to the act of perception, a further reduction to the idea (concept). This process of analysis, fragmentation and resynthesis was accelerated by media theory. It was accompanied by the development of printing technology, photography, film, video, computers, AI...

The divisive power of science (scienzia) reduces the act of creativity to finding new elements. The 'ism' of art history: Impressionism, Futurism, Cubism, Symbolism, Dadaism etc... Isolate forces of creativity and radicalize them until they have found an expression.

This brief outline is of course a trivializing, radical abbreviation. Art also became richer through the inclusion of phenomena from the social sciences, psychology and the natural sciences. Inter- and transdisciplinary approaches led artists into laboratories, politics, the streets and activism. Individual forces such as 'the spiritual in art', kinetics, synaesthesia, geometry, emotion, kitsch - all this and much more was concentrated, distilled and mixed. 

Thought pictures

To me, the different art movements always seemed to represent different ways of thinking. I really thought that! I thought that the original reason lay in thinking. I shared the idea of the great Western philosophers that philosophical systems are just that: Systems that provide different interpretations of a reality that cannot itself be explained. In other words, the idea that only a representation of the world can be created within thought, but that the world itself is not accessible.

I was therefore always suspicious of the assumption that art is an act of creation, i.e. that it is creative. How could a subject be a creator if it was understood rationally? That sounds naïve, but it is actually only honest. The West talks about 'creative' artists in a materialistically and capitalistically oriented conception of the world in which the sacred, the sacred, the divine has no significant value. The subject is thus stylized as the creator, who is granted a creation that is denied to the divine. It seemed to me that this contradiction could only be resolved one-sidedly. I opted for the rational, which seemed more coherent within Western culture. 

Within this way of thinking, art then takes on the role of a representation or perhaps even that of a laboratory where new experiences can be made. In postmodern discourses, the power of art - to be able to reach the world beyond thought through the sublime - is radically expanded. In deconstruction, post-structuralism and the rhizome, the world opens up beyond systematic patterns of thought. The systems are transcended, so to speak (even if the main proponents would probably strongly object to this). In the brutal distortions, the search beyond the signs, in the free combination of the incompatible, something new emerges. This is where I felt at home for the first time. To this day, I find comfort and inspiration in Deleuze's writings.

But only now am I really beginning to see. Because this whole movement of thinking within the rational does not lead very far. The limits of the rational are quickly reached. Then come the warning signs: Beware, this is not scientific, or cannot be justified. 

How can thinking and the world be reconciled? This question shows the arrogance of this tradition of thought. The world is faced with a small thinking mind that wants to grasp the entire cosmos with all its fascinations. And the whole thing is only based on itself. It's actually so stupid that I wonder why I didn't see it much earlier. And why did the so-called 'great thinkers' who knew this not say it more prominently, but hide it in little posthumous notes (see Kant and Hume, for example)?

The way out of this dilemma is to take a broader view of our being than simply reducing it to rational thinking. We must allow ourselves to understand ourselves as matter and life, as consciousness and rational mind, as intuitive and spiritual. Only if we allow the complex inner images that interweave these and other levels can we understand ourselves as part of a reality that includes us, and the images that arise there are substantially different. They require a completely different language.

I found the following quote from Aurobindo today:

"A certain difficulty arises for our mind in reconciling these different faces or fronts of the One Self and Spirit, because we are obliged to use abstract conceptions and defining words and ideas for something that is not abstract, something that is spiritually living and intensely real. Our abstractions get fixed into differentiating concepts with sharp lines between them: but the Reality is not of that nature; its aspects are many but shade off into each other. Its truth could only be rendered by ideas and images metaphysical and yet living and concrete, - images which might be taken by the pure Reason as figures and symbols but are more than that and mean more to the intuitive vision and feeling, for they are realities of a dynamic spiritual experience." (The Life Devine p.372)

It seems to me that this is an indication of a different understanding of art. I will look into it.

A major show of the woks from Amitabh Sengupta is on display at Kalakendra Art Gallery, Bharat Nivas, Auroville. In cooperation with Sarala's Art Center 70 paintings predominantly from the last decade can be seen. For the opening of the exhibition on Dec 16^th 2022 the secretary of Auroville and the director of the Alliance Français lit the candle.

Amitabh Sengupta was born in Calcutta in 1941 and graduated from Govt. College of Arts & Crafts, Calcutta in 1963. From 1966 to 1969 he received a scholarship for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he was witnessing the 68 student revolts. From 1977 until 1981 he joined the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria, where he became Head of Creative Arts. He exhibited in India, Nigeria, Europe, and USA and currently lives in Calcutta.

The works by Amitabh Sengupta show a vast spectrum of styles. It is impressive to see how much he engaged with western modernist tradition and yet maintained his roots in Indian traditions. We can see this in the colors, the traces of written words, the iconography. Going through the exhibition there are echoes of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Cy Twombly, Anselm Kiefer, Pierre Soulage, Jasper Jones, Paul Klee and many more.

I was wondering about that rich reference and the echoes of western modernity, and found the answer in Amitabh Sengupta's writings. In his 'Memoir of an Artist' from 2014 he makes several times a reference to Rabindranath Tagore, most people will be familiar with his name as the first Nobel Prize winner in India. At the end of the chapter 'Indian Contemporary Art - an alternative modernity' Amitabh Sengupta writes: "In the absence of social dialogue, art is facing another challenge. The priorities of art commerce and global marketing are imposing pressure to remain 'modern' as constant reference to global trends. This was predicted by many, for example, Tagore, expressed admiration about western cultures, at the same time warned against the risk of coercion, which they saw a built-in process in the system." Amitabh Sengupta being part of the Bengal Art school takes Tagore to heart.

Art historical narratives

We can recall Rabindranath's poem Namaskar to Sri Aurobindo published in 1907 as it is well known. Rabindranath admired Sri Aurobindo's fight against colonialism and oppression and supported him during his time in prison. Aurobindo's book Renaissance in India with articles from 1918-21 comes to mind. But while the western eye can learn from Aurobindo how to see Indian Art through the Indian perspective, Rabindranath warns of the power of modernism in the visual arts for Indian Artist.

Here lay the roots of the negotiation between western modernist and Indian culture in the 20th century^th century. We see why the big show of Amitabh Sengupta fits into the Kalakendra Art Gallery, Bharat Nivas, Auroville. His work is informed by these discussions and addresses the struggles which western academic art historian theories have with not western art. Sengupta's oeuvre speaks to the difficulties Indian artists faced during the middle of the 20th century^th century to be seen internationally.

In 2021 Sengupta's "The History of Modernism in India" was published, a 200 pages thick book that celebrates diversity in India and warns of the misconception by the west of a "uniform and monolithic Hindu structure". Chapter 6 deals with Rabindranath Tagore's Dialectics of Art. How should the art of a young nation like India, that also has one of the oldest cultural histories in the world, respond to the dominating western modern concepts? We know that western modernism drew inspiration from its colonial exploitation of the other parts of the world (the prominent examples are Van Gogh, Picasso and Gaugin). That mistake may not be repeated by artists in countries that gained independence through painful paths.

Fluid mixtures

On Dec 20 2022 there was an artist talk planned. Art historian Dr. Ashrafi Bhagat gave an introduction lecture on the relevance of Amitabh Sengupta for the defining decades of the 1960ies in India. Artists had to find their voice, while connecting to the dominant western discourse, maintaining, and developing their own style. It was difficult, as there was criticism from all sides, either it was too western or not western enough, too traditional or not traditional enough, too subjective or not expressive enough... Amitabh Sengupta was an extraordinary productive artist, who masters many techniques like painting, drawing, printing, writing on the highest level. He is rooted in Indian history and its visual language and creates pictorial spaces that contain cultural memories, realistic spacial representation on an abstract plane, juxtaposed with remanences of signs and geometrical forms.

Ashrafi Bhagat-on-Amitabh SenGupta

Walking through the exhibition, one sees that the pictorial spaces in his series called 'Pyramids' or 'Inscription' are abstract composition with semiotic echoes, that activates an inner space that is associated with the path of mediation since the Vedic texts. Amitabh Sengupta's art is not explicitly spiritual, but it becomes sensible that the inner experience, the conscious mind, the creative expression, and the pictorial representation are interlinked within his body of work. Amitabh Sengupta however does not shy away from commentary on global issues with his drawing relating to the Covid-19 crises or his paintings relating to topics of urbanization and globalization.

Amitabh Sengupta voice is strong and manifests an intermiscence, i.e. a mixture of sensations, styles, thoughts, signs, space and memory that reminds me of movement of thoughts in Gilles Deleuze's philosophy and Sri Aurobindo's commentary on the Kena Upanishad. There that strange word of 'intermiscence' appears at a place that explains the creations of rhythms and forms.

For Deleuze art is thought in matter, it is also a territory in which we build our home - literally and metaphorically. The different material elements in Amitabh Sengupta's work, the planes of composition, the connection of signs, the yantras of geometrical shapes, the pictorial space and memory invite the viewer to explore his/her inner space, where one defines home. It doesn't matter from where you come, Amitabh Sengupta's work invites everyone on that journey. Whether this is some sort of 'post-post -ism' is not relevant. That is the power of art that dares to address existential questions.

Further readings:

I have just returned from a devotional meditation. It's the anniversary of Sri Aurobindo. He left his body 72 years ago, as they say here.

I have been thinking and talking a lot about his commentaries on the Kena Upanishad over the last few days. I came across the word 'intermiscence'. It is almost only used by Aurobindo. I asked all the people I met what the word meant. A friend here found a translation into German as 'ineinanderfließen' (it describes the mixing of liquids in German).

This word appears in such a central place in Aurobindo, and it is so unique that my academic mind has become curious. Why such an unusual word in such an important place?

Kena Upanishad

What is it about? In the Kena Upanishad, the central question is who thinks while thinking, who hears while hearing, who sees while seeing... Aurobindo's commentary is a philosophical analysis. He describes a whole philosophical system, a sketch of epistemology, metaphysics, empiricism, philosophy of language, theory of consciousness.

The Upanishads repeatedly deal with the question of who or what we are. Our spirit, our individuality, our soul, what is the world, who created it, how does the cycle of life work. Similar to Deleuze, many things begin with vibration, then comes rhythm and then grouping, differentiation and movement. Strength and finally form emerge through stabilization. This is the secret of creation, the vibration, the elemental force.

In the rational world, this vibration is understood scientifically. In the spiritual world as consciousness, a primordial consciousness - Brahman - that differentiates itself in order to recognize itself. The world exists as a manifestation of this primordial consciousness and everything is ultimately one. Aurobindo's philosophy could be described as an attempt to identify the different levels of this differentiation in the different levels of consciousness: Life force, which we find even in the smallest creatures, various forms of perceptual consciousness and their synthesis, reflective and linguistic consciousness, intuition, cognition. They form different relationships to the world (Aurobindo refers here to vijñāna, prajñāna, saṁjñāna and ājñāna).

How does that which thinks while thinking connect with that which is thought?

A central question is who or what has 'my' consciousness, how it is synthesized and how it relates to the primordial consciousness Brahman.

The paragraph in which the word 'intermiscence' appears describes a deepening of contact. Contact here can be understood as broadly as possible: Contact between energy (rhythm), matter, consciousness, sensory perception etc... The addition of 'intermiscence' to contact describes what we cannot actually understand, i.e. the connection between consciousness and matter. And it makes sense to use a word that is theoretically not preloaded, a fresh word so to speak.

"But this vibration of conscious being is presented to itself by various forms of sense which answer to the successive operations of movement in its assumption of form. For first we have intensity of vibration creating regular rhythm which is the basis or constituent of all creative formation; secondly, contact or intermiscence of the movements of conscious being which constitute the rhythm; thirdly, definition of the grouping of movements which are in contact, their shape; fourthly, the constant welling up of the essential force to support in its continuity the movement that has been thus defined; fifthly, the actual enforcement and compression of the force in its own movement which maintains the form that has been assumed. In Matter these five constituent operations are said by the Sankhyas to represent themselves as five elemental conditions of substance, the etheric, atmospheric, igneous, liquid and solid; and the rhythm of vibration is seen by them as śabda, sound, the basis of hearing, the intermiscence as contact, the basis of touch, the definition as shape, the basis of sight, the upflow of force as rasa, sap, the basis of taste, and the discharge of the atomic compression as gandha, odour, the basis of smell."

This became clearer to me today during my devotional meditation.

OM, peace, peace, peace

If you would like to delve a little deeper into the Kena Upanishad, please refer to this: Sri Aurobindo Vol 18 , p. 58

"the eye thinks even more than it listens" (Deleuze)

I now remember that before I started reading Deleuze, I had been working on process aesthetics. I made a 100-page manuscript, with notes, quotations, structural sketches. I wanted to get away from the idea that art consists of objects that are perceived in a particular way, because this gives rise to two essential strands of thought: 1) what constitutes an object that we call art, and 2) why is the perception of art different from everyday perception? There are countless theories on both strands, some combine them, some opt for one, others for the other.

But somehow I was always suspicious of this: the relation Art object perceiving subject. There is this dualism again, which some have tried to radically resolve by choosing one of the two sides of this relationship at the expense of the other. A dispute between idealism, materialism and empiricism. Philosophy, it seemed to me, had become quite bogged down. The field of philosophical aesthetics is not wrongly considered unmanageable, sometimes soft and inconsistent, something for philosophers who enjoy the adventure of thinking more than the search for truth. And that's what it's all about, the pleasure.

Art

I have found a way to do this without having to abandon aesthetic thinking. It seemed to me that the only way to counter this dualism was a different ontology. An ontology of process. I read H. Bergson and N. Whitehead and searched the art world for works of art that addressed this. Works of art that had time as their medium suggested themselves: Film and interactive installations. It seemed to me that an essential aspect of this art was the transition from one state to another, from one image to the next ("Film is the truth - 24 times a second", Godard).

Or between letters. Here I found Paul de Marinis Messenger (1998) and contrasted this with Nancy Holt & Richard Serra's "Boomerang" (1974). Both are works that stretch language to such an extent that the spaces between the letters and words become perceptible. A deeper reflection then showed me that these spaces are actually just as meaningless as the letters and words themselves. Meaning, sense, statement, beauty, reflection of - what exactly? They point to the process of thinking and communication itself. For me, this was the approach to art that is not based on any kind of representation. Because here, too, in this fatal concept of representation is the fall from grace of dualism.

"This is the dark thought I have had about representation for so long: we are immersed in it and it has become inseparable from our condition. It has created a world, a cosmos even, of false problems such that we have lost our true freedom: that of invention." (Dorothea Olkowski, p.91)

It was this sentence that suddenly opened the door to a different way of thinking for me. I wanted to go back to the origin, the origin of language and expression, not as something strictly defined, but as an act of creation.

Process aesthetics

This creative act is a process that always remains a process, it does not produce an object or subject, but a never-ending process. Creating art, receiving art, documenting and preserving art are all just phases of a process within which what we call art manifests itself in different ways. There is no art, only an aesthetic process, the reflection on which I call process aesthetics. As I mentioned above, I had gotten myself quite tangled up.

In essence, however, I hold on to the direction of thought, and found a kind of echo in the thoughts of Gilles Deleuze:

"Something in the world forces us to think. This something is not an object of recognition, but a fundamental encounter." Gilles Deleuze - Difference and repetition p. 139

This encounter, what is it? On an everyday level, we are familiar with it when a work of art somehow speaks to us, whatever that may mean.

I think that thinking about process aesthetics and Deleuze's adventure have now led me to the Upanishads. Here, in a cyclical and interacting thinking, the self encounters myself. It is perhaps also precisely the tautology that is at the heart of idealistic theories of self-consciousness such as Hegel's.

The whole thing is a process that has no essential meaning at any time, it stands for nothing, it represents nothing, it merely exists in order to experience itself.

Om Namah Shivaya

Olkowski, Dorothea. Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

I am slowly approaching Sanskrit. On Thursdays, Nishtha holds a seminar on the Rigveda. The joint recitation in Sanskrit, the detailed analysis of the translation, Nishtha's philological reflections and the explanations on the psychology of the gods open up access to these 'sacred' texts.

I remember my Latin studies, the Indo-European roots, the sounds that echo in the ragas, phonetics as a declaration of existence, language as sound and vibration, communication as rhythm. The breath of life, yoga, vitality, thinking in levels of movement and the transcendence of this level to the Self (Atman) held in the Self (Brahman). All of this is fueled by my study of the Upanishads. So much so that yesterday I took Gilles Deleuze off the shelf again. In his book "What is Philosophy"The second chapter is called 'Plane of Immanence'. It is this 'Plane of Immanence' that philosophically built the bridge to India for me, purely intuitively, because I didn't understand it. I talked about it for years because I wanted to understand it. I knew I didn't understand it, now I see why.

Language

I have never really thought about concepts. That sounds strange, because I have analyzed language (Frege, Saussure, Derrida, etc.), I have dealt with the content of language (Husserl, H.N. Castaneda, Quine, N. Goodman, etc.), I have analyzed the aesthetics of signs (Pierce, Danto, Welsh, Bense, etc.). In my reading, language is always part of consciousness, only as conscious speaking, reading, listening does language make 'sense'. Ultimately, then, it is about theories of consciousness. In short, I have thought about the function of language, its reference, the ability to communicate, its social, political, sociological implications, without really thinking about the nature of concepts. What do I mean by that?

Ideally, language is structured in grammatically 'correct' sentences. These sentences have a structure (in the simplest form subject - predicate - object). They correspond to a meaning, i.e. the content of the sentence that we are trying to communicate or that we think we understand. The dominant 'Western' language-analytical philosophy is now primarily concerned with the question of which sentences are true and which are false. To do this, of course, it must first be determined under what circumstances sentences can generally be true or false. It is therefore a question of the relationship of propositions to the world and the relationship of propositions to their meaning, and the relationship of meaning to the world. This is no easy task, and in order not to lose the thread, philosophy is oriented towards logic. The common root of logic and language lies in propaedeutics. All other sciences can then be tested for their claim to validity on this foundation.

What's wrong with that?

Diagrams and concepts in teaching

I thought a lot about diagrams when I was teaching in the US and used them in my seminars. I was skeptical about them during my studies. It seemed lazy to me to express a lack of conceptual acuity through diagrams. Diagrams - so I thought - are always shown when something complicated cannot be expressed clearly. I had been trained to believe that this conceptual clarity was achievable as a long-term goal - a core idea of the Enlightenment. The term 'Term' is thought of in very technical terms. (See Frege Function and concept from 1891). For Frege, terms are predicates capable of truth, or something like that... there is unspeakable trench warfare.

Deleuze, on the other hand, says very clearly that concepts are not unambiguous, that they overlap and have anything but clear boundaries. They exist on one or many different levels (planes):

"Philosophical concept are fragmentary wholes that are not aligned with one another so that they fit tgether, because their edges do not match up. (...) They resonate nonetheless, and the philosophy that creates them always introduces a powerful Whole that, while remaining open, is not fragmented: an unlimited One-All, an 'Omnitudo' that includes all the concepts on one and the same plane." (p.35)

"Concepts are like multiple waves, raising and falling, but the plane of immanence is the single wave that rolls them up and unrolls them" (p.36)

"Concepts are the archipelago or skeletal frame, a spinal column rather than a skull, whereas the plane is the breath that suffuses the separate parts." (p.36)

Every great philosopher, every epoch has its own plane. There are many planes. The Renaissance is different from Romanticism, Kant is different from Nietzsche. It would be absurd to think that the same terms mean the same thing in different contexts. In his late work, Deleuze is concerned with the different levels (planes). The 1000 plateaus were perhaps the experimental kit for this.

Levels (planes)

What is a level and what is a concept? I think that this is the core of Deleuze's thinking. For him, concepts are agile, planes are the 'dimensions' in which they operate. The level (plane) of immanence is absolute. Deleuze's thinking is alive, it changes, not only for him, but in itself. Film is thinking - also a plane on celluloid. How does a concept emerge, how are connections created between concepts, how do thoughts constitute a view of the world?

For me, Deleuze is a philosopher of immanence. How do habitats (territories) form from geological strata? How does a living being define its habitat and how, when and why does it leave it and how does it then transform itself? What does it become (Becoming)? Can it come back (territorialization and de-territorialization)? How does communication take place within it (rhythm), how are milieus formed?

My suspicion?

My suspicion is that Deleuze's thinking is not so far removed from the Vedic worlds of thought. The project is exciting. The Vedic scriptures were only passed down orally for centuries before they were written down, and they are still little understood today. I like Sri Aurobindo's reading, which contrasts the Western reading of soulless scholars with the elemental force of spiritual thought in India. Whether this is always philologically correct is not for me to judge.

In any case, Aurobindo activates the Vedic scriptures. He brings out their philosophical rigor, embeds them in human experience and spiritual thinking and shows that this is the beginning of philosophy. This beginning does not appear in the form of a delicate emergence, but powerfully as a vision of essence, as an enlightened vision of a spiritual truth that attempts to answer the central questions of our existence. In this sense, the Vedic scriptures are more than philosophy for Aurobindo. They contain philosophy but go beyond it, not irrational, mythical, ritualistic and barbaric, but clear in their address to our existence. Where do we come from and what is our task? To answer this truly is the attempt of the Vedic scriptures.

I see resonances in the levels (planes) of the Vedic scriptures and Deleuze's levels (planes). The gods of the Vedas and the unleashed concepts of Deleuze are not so dissimilar. The philosophy of immanence feeds both. Everything is one. It is about understanding life.

OM TARE TUTTARE

It was a magical four days. The Auroville Film Institute has a residency with Ustad Bahauddin Dagar was organized from 7 to 10 November 2022. It took place in the Bhumika Hall, Bharat Nivas Auroville.

Dhrupad - the movie (1983)

Ustad Bahauddin Dagar is a rudraveena player. His family has been playing the instrument for 20 generations! His father and uncle (Zia Mohiyuddin Dagar and Fariduddin Dagar) were true masters. There is a wonderful movie about it Dhrupad by the Indian director Mani Kaul. Mani Kaul is strongly influenced by the forerunner of the Nouvelle Vague Robert Bresson, among others. Mani Kaul's film is a milestone in Indian film history. His film opens with a shot of Ustad Bahauddin Dagar as a young boy. It was a charming idea of the Auroville Film Institute to invite Ustad Bahauddin Dagar to Auroville to learn more about Dhrupad Gayaki and the Rudraveena.

Ustad Bahauddin Dagar radiates incredible modesty. He stands on big shoulders and only started learning the rudraveena late in life. He gives international concerts himself and is a true guru. He brought two of his students with him. Among the participants were many music students who had been waiting for this workshop for two years, as it had been postponed several times due to the coronavirus.

Master class

At the beginning and end of the workshop, Ustad Bahauddin Dagarist played the Rudraveena. The recordings are linked here. I have been listening to ragas for a very long time without knowing much about them. I learned a lot about the origins, the connection back to the time of the Vedic scriptures. We learned about the complexity of the instrument, which has been perfected over thousands of years. Ustad Bahauddin Dagarist illustrated the music theory and playing practice on the Rudraveena himself.

On two days we learned about riyaz (practicing): Early in the morning before sunrise (on Wednesday at 4:30am and on Thursday at 6:30am) the voice was 'warmed up'. This started with Kharaj, practicing the lower register of the voice. Singing OM together has a very meditative component through the voice formation effect and lung capacity training. This was followed by complex rhythm and melody exercises.

I suddenly realized how rich this tradition is and that it is sad that this form of music is still seen as something exotic. For me, after this workshop, it is part of the world's cultural heritage. But it may take a while before it is recognized as such.

Closing Session - Residency with Ustad Bahauddin Dagar from 7th to 10th Closing Session - November 2022 session Opening Session - Residency with Ustad Bahauddin Dagar from November 7 to 10, 2022 session On Practice - Residency with Ustad Bahauddin Dagar from 7th to 10th November 2022 Afternoon session - Residency with Ustad Bahauddin Dagar from November 7 to 10, 2022 session

Film - Dhrupad - Spirituality

It was a revelation. Philosophically, I was interested in the fact that the rhythm in the ragas was described several times as flight - in the film and in the discussions. This reminds me of Deleuze, his idea that rhythm is an element that connects, things that vibrate in rhythm are connected. A rhythm that is perceived attracts, starting with mating behavior in the animal kingdom, if not geologically and cosmologically in the orbits of stars and pulsars.

Mani Kaul's film works with random elements, it is not narrative. The music and the images interact respectfully, the organization of the shots is complex, individual elements refer to each other within the film's timeline (line of flight). It is clearly musically conceived. It is a film that captures and preserves the philosophy of the ragas. It is itself music, thought, spirituality, concentration and insight. For Deleuze, the Filmstrip itself, i.e. the medium of the film, concrete material thinking. In Manu Kaul's film, it is pure spirituality... immanence.

Dhrupad

Follow Ustad Bahauddin Dagarist on Instagram and its Website.

I didn't take much with me to India, a backpack full of clothes, books and technology. But I packed a good pair of headphones and have now bought an external cell phone hi-fi sound card from Tempotec for the USB-C output, it wasn't cheap, but it's excellent. I was delighted when it arrived today and of course I tried it out straight away. What a mixed experience.

The music immediately evoked memories, I revelled in the music. I thought of Husserl, who describes very nicely how present consciousness always consists of memory (retention) and expectation (protention). This also makes a lot of sense for music, it is important to remember what has happened in the last few seconds or minutes and it is important to anticipate that it will continue, even if perhaps in a completely different way. Otherwise you simply can't listen to music. But this seems to be the exact opposite of what meditation is all about.

Listen

In order for me to shed my little self, I have to realize that the self does not actually exist, that its senses do not belong to it, that in seeing there is only seeing itself, in hearing only hearing itself. The mind has thoughts, but they themselves are only thoughts. The now-consciousness, as Husserl describes it, cannot belong to any ego. So who is listening? The small self that takes itself far too seriously?

Consciousness can only be true in its surrender to the Self - Brahman. In the old and new scriptures this is called bliss. Listening to music in a state of meditation, what can that be? The recognition of structures, composition, expectations and memories, all these are the very elements of consciousness that need to be stripped away. So is listening to music a path that leads away from cognition?

Or is there a higher function in listening to music? Is being immersed in music, the state in which we are completely music, gliding through time with it without thinking, but still completely and utterly in music, a state similar to meditation? Is this fulfilled listening to music bliss? Of course, it is only rarely possible to immerse oneself in music in this way. Sometimes it can take on a trance-like state, sometimes a highly concentrated awareness of a world context. It is created by the interplay of a composer's composition or a tradition, the performers and the listeners. In the technical recording, the relationship is distorted, but still exists in principle. From a semiotic point of view, music is always an abstract reference to the world and at the same time the most direct of all communication - birdsong.

Shafts

On another level, we are dealing with sound waves in music (light waves in visual art). We ourselves are probably made of an atomic lattice that consists of 99 % of nothing. There is no ego that perceives something else. There is only the level of immanence, pure existence in which these forces interact. It's nice that this creates the illusion of an ego. I like that, but it is a fallacy, or at least a truncated view. This ego that shines forth in these force fields is an ego that transcends immanence, it can establish connections with distant things, across space and time. This is perhaps what Deleuze calls deterritorialization and the flight of the line. So I listen in this network. Perhaps to listen to music is to become aware of oneself as selfless.

Atman

But is it possible to reach the level of Brahman consciousness with music? Is the round dance of the gods, are the heavenly sounds, the requiem and oratorio witness to a divine consciousness? In Christian church music, it is probably only ever a sound space of the afterlife, a space that can only be reached after death and of which the music provides a foretaste. That is a little sad. I have an image of harp-playing angels sitting on clouds.

The task of Atman in Brahman, the realization that everything is only one, is quite another. India is loud, the fanfares in the temples screaming, the Ragas on the other hand, contemplative and meditative. I always have the feeling that it's not about an artist, but that something is being manifested here. A bit like the OM choir. It's the opposite direction. It is not the human being who creates a baroque space in which the divine is sung, but the divine consciousness descends through the performance. Or to put it another way, immanence flows through, flows through itself.

P.s.: I am writing this while listening to Schubert's String Quintet in the recording with the Quartetto di Cremona hear.

Yesterday I saw two millipedes mating. It was pretty much the most fascinating thing I've seen in a very long time. The creatures intertwined, rubbed and entwined, there was rhythm, devotion, engulfment. The two met by chance and after a few minutes moved on in different directions. An encounter. They were two life forms that united to give birth to more life.

A Life - One life

I then reread Deleuze's last essay today: "Immanence: A Life", Deleuze wrote this shortly before he threw himself out of the window, he was seriously ill. I read this essay many years ago, around the time my father died, if I remember correctly. Now, reading it again, I realize why I was so moved at the time, and I also realize that I really didn't understand almost anything back then, as the 'wrong' underlining alone shows.

I've had a bit of a crisis over the last few days, wondering whether Sri Aurobindo's ideas aren't perhaps a little too crazy after all. And at the same time I also wondered whether Deleuze's thinking in its monistic, empirical orientation might not be the opposite of what I am discovering here in India on my journey into spiritual philosophy. And then this essay begins like this:

"What is a transcendental field? It can be distinguished from experience in that it doesn't refer to an object or belong to a subject (empirical representation). It therefore appears as a pure stream of a-subjective consciousness, a pre-reflexive impersonal consciousness, a qualitative duration of consciousness without a self."

The rest reads like a commentary on the Upanishads.

Brahman

I keep coming back to it because these writings are simply incredibly profound. Deleuze describes the self here as subjectless consciousness, as a pure flow that forms the transcendent field. This field is the ground of everything - Brahman (?) - everything is formed out of it. Subject and object together, the subject never without an object to which it relates. Experiences, experiences, memories, moments and episodes are formed here. They are born in immanence. Deleuze writes one page further:

"Were it not for consciousness, the transcendental field would be defined as a pure plane of immanence, because it eludes all transcendence of the subject and of the object."

I know that this all sounds very complicated, these are terms that often seem suspect because they stand for a way of thinking that many do not understand and those who move within it argue a lot about it. It's just that in the context here, these make a lot of sense to me. I was at Matrimandir this morning, I didn't know I was going to open this book today. A friend here came along, he found the whole thing quite elitist and unnecessary, he was referring to the architecture. I found it exciting, in my practice I focused on the chakras.

Immanence

Meditation is ultimately about sharing the very consciousness that Deleuze describes as pure immanence. Whether this is really possible remains to be seen. Mediation is, however, an attempt at approximation. If it succeeds, according to the Upanishads, then we experience immortality at least for that moment. And that is the only way to jump out of the window. I'm serious, it's really not the most obvious conclusion, and not recommended for imitation. But it's amazing how close Deleuze comes to the Upanishads here, it's as if his entire philosophy is based on them.

"This indefinite life does not itself have moments, close as they may be one to another, but only between-times, between-moments; it doesn't just come about or come after but offers the immensity of an empty time where one sees the event yet to come and already happened, in the absolute of an immediate consciousness."

Further reading:

I've been reading in India for three weeks now: Deleuze, Upanishads, Sri Aurobindo. Sometimes I meditate in between. The rest is still a remnant of everyday life in the New World. Reading the news, consuming entertainment media, organizing things that don't really have any meaning here, but need continuity so that they don't break down in old Europe and the New World.

So reading... It seems to me that I have been preparing myself to read here for decades. My thinking oscillates between Deleuze and the Upanishads. This wisdom in India, that everything is one, and the whole universe exists only because the self wants to know itself, is so incredibly strong that I still only guess how deep this thought is. Schopenhauer's title 'The World as Will and Representation' starts to make sense, Deleuze reference to Spinoza as a spiritual thinker of immanence also makes sense. I don't yet dare to read Deleuze's book on immanence again. Instead, 1000 Plateaus... This book, which is not a book at all, but a machine, a thinking machine (Professor Dr. Dr. Dr. Augustus van Dusenalso The thinking machine sends its regards)...

I have designed seminars with the book without ever really understanding it. In fact, it's hardly even readable. It's more of an instrument. An attempt to think about the world in a fundamentally different way. Conventional capitalist, dualistic, categorical thinking is challenged on every page. I have always wondered how Deleuze and Guattari arrived at such a level of consciousness. How did they manage to move so far away from the prevailing ideology that they seem like prophets of a more inclusive way of thinking? I wanted to find out together with my students. We failed, of course, but we were fine, and we saw the world differently afterwards, and that's what a university is all about, isn't it?

Deterritorialization

But now the worlds of thought connect. The biological references, the central position of art (which is much more exciting with animals than with humans), thinking in immanence, the flying lines, territories and abstract machines. For me, all of this can really only be understood from the Upanishads. And today I found a quote that I would like to share. It's about deterritorialization. A complicated term that builds on many other complicated terms. But the basic idea seems to me to be that the world is made up of its elements. These are first formed in strata/layers (e.g. geological layers). Within these layers, the elements resonate with each other, they form a rhythm and thus create a milieu. This can be visualized quite vividly in the animal kingdom, e.g. birdsong, there are refrains and rites... This milieu creates a territory, a home. The self in this territory, where it is at home, is shaped by the layers, milieus, rhythms etc... and creates a home through the creation of art, for example. It expresses itself, creates signs and symbols, it becomes semiotic and enters the realm of art (this can be the pattern of a butterfly, the house construction of a Bowerbirda house. Within this territory there are then movements, including movements of thought, that lead out of it. Life, thoughts, the earth deterritorialize them. So now the quote in a DeepL translation of the English original (D stands for the function of deterritorialization):

"This is already evident in the mystery of "birth", in which the earth as a glowing, eccentric or intense focus lies outside the territory and exists only in the movement of D. Even more, the earth, the glacial land, is deterritorialization par excellence: therefore it belongs to the cosmos and presents itself as the material through which humans tap into cosmic forces. One could say that the earth as deterritorialization is itself the strict correlate of D. This goes so far that D can be described as the creator of the earth - a new land, a universe, not just a reterritorialization.

This is the meaning of "absolute". The absolute does not express anything transcendent or undifferentiated. It does not even express a magnitude that would transcend all given (relative) magnitudes. It only expresses a kind of movement that is qualitatively different from relative movement."

I will spend the next few months trying to understand what that really means.

Here is the original:

"This can already be seen in the mystery of the "natal," in which the earth as ardent, eccentric, or intense focal point is outside the territory and exists only in the movement of D. More than that, the earth, the glacial, is Deterritorialization par excellence: that is why it belongs to the Cosmos, and presents itself as the material through which human beings tap cosmic forces. We could say that the earth, as deterritorialized, is itself the strict correlate of D. To the point that D can be called the creator of the earth-of a new land, a universe, not just a reterritorialization.

This is the meaning of "absolute." The absolute expresses nothing transcendent or undifferentiated. It does not even express a quantity that would exceed all given (relative) quantities. It expresses only a type of movement qualitatively different from relative movement." Deleuze 1000 Plateaus p. 509

What should I take with me to India? I want to live a different life, in a different society, with different ideas and goals. It's warm there, life will be simple. Apart from the basics like a few items of clothing, I'll need my technical devices such as my laptop, cell phone and camera. And what else? A good flashlight, because the country lanes there are not lit. And books... There will also be a number of libraries there. I haven't read for 'pleasure' for a very long time. I read a lot of 19th century novels as an undergraduate: Brontë, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Goncharov... In high school it was the ancient dramas of Sophocles or classics like Shakespeare, but also Hesse. I enjoyed reading plays, they were intense, fast-paced and stimulating.

Since I have been using the Internet, and I have been doing so since the beginning of the Netscape browser, my reading has changed. I read less linearly, jump around more, read a lot at the same time. As a result, I sometimes feel dizzy and need books as an anchor. The books that accompany me are always books that are highly condensed in theory. I also read them very slowly, usually only a few pages, then I have a lot to think about again. I don't understand how people devour complex books. Books that interest me represent a whole cosmos of thought. Such a cosmos is difficult to grasp. It's a bit like traveling. Some people want to see everything, to have been everywhere, they collect stories and photos, and yet they haven't really been there. Other countries, cultures and languages take time. You have to approach them slowly, wait for an invitation, be polite and respectful.

Once again, consumerism is probably the guiding principle here. It is linked to capitalist exploitation, which apparently serves self-expression and earns social points. I've always been suspicious of that. Sure, I also like to be entertained and consume media because it's fun, distracting or simply generates great feelings. But this distraction is not sustainable for me. I don't remember movies or books or places etc... I'm interested in how something has changed my thinking. How I have become something else. Encounters with books and places trigger a change, I am a different person after a real encounter, or a different animal, or a different work, depending on who wants to perceive themselves and how...

24 books, an interweaving, an experiment. An artificial juxtaposition. What would a dialog between Deleuze and Aurobindo have looked like? Would they have had anything to say to each other?

There was a time in Europe when people spoke of universal scholars. In Germany this would be Alexander von Humboldt or Goethe, in France an Enlightenment philosopher, in Italy the Renaissance man Leonardo da Vinci. In antiquity, Aristotle. There are certainly wise people in many cultures and epochs who history tells us knew everything that could have been known at the time.

That's nonsense, of course. But this narrative serves a longing. We want to know everything, but we feel - rightly - that we can't know everything, and we have a romantic longing for a time when this was apparently still possible. It doesn't bother us that knowledge itself was limited - there and then. But it reassures us that it would have seemed possible to know everything. Mount Olympus could be climbed, the mountain on which the tablets of the law would be received. And yet there is already the story of the Tower of Babel.

Tower of Babel

In Babel, people wanted to know everything, they built a tower that was supposed to contain all knowledge. The result was a confusion of languages. Knowledge was divided into many languages. Nobody speaks them all. The Bible describes this as a punishment from God. Arrogance was punished as a warning and man was shown his limits. But if we had not supposedly been punished by God, might we not know everything after all? This is the central question. Would it have been possible in principle? Or will it be possible in the future due to the singularity?

In philosophy, the question of the beginning of knowledge arises. On what foundation can we build knowledge? Logic, ethics, aesthetics? Science is about the great unifying theory that brings the microcosm and macrocosm together. When it comes to the question of human nature, things become quite confusing. Do we want to approach this religiously or spiritually, or perhaps Darwinistically or in terms of information technology? We are completely lost when it comes to our aesthetic thinking. Plurality and media overkill offer a pure sensory overload that we seem to enjoy. Ignorance is bliss.

Driving force

It seems so clear that we can't know everything. So why do we keep trying? What drives us? A longing? Have we really been driven out of paradise and are looking for a way back? Or are we evolutionarily wired in such a way that we can't help ourselves? Does the feeling of knowing a lot give us satisfaction, power or peace of mind? What makes us think that our small brain of just over 1 kilogram, which is quite modest compared to elephants (4 kilograms) or sperm whales (9 kilograms), can decode the universe? Are we perhaps actually in a simulation and reality is not what we think it is? The different varieties of skepticism offer some nice thought experiments here. Maybe my senses are being manipulated from the outside, maybe I am alone in the universe, maybe I haven't even woken up yet and am waiting in an anteroom for the next level...

We follow an achievement mania. If a person has produced something that is new, he or she is celebrated by society. This drives us on. We are fascinated by high performance. We worship them or enter into a competition. Only a few are indifferent to it. Perhaps this is what sets us apart from our intelligent fellow inhabitants on the planet.

We create needs in order to satisfy them: Knowledge, culture, pleasure, sensuality, sociality, power... We strive for more. Buddhism sees this as the root of suffering. The only way to end this suffering is to bring wanting, striving and desire to rest.

Deleuze contrasts this with becoming. Instead of continuing to systematize the world and giving free rein to our pathologies, we can pay attention to what we can become, become different, be instead of have. We are flexible, fluid, moist.

I have the feeling that the Upanishads still have a lot to offer here. Wanting to know everything also contains a longing for unity. In the 20th century, we experienced that there is something very totalitarian about this unity. When was this unity broken? When were we expelled from paradise? Can this be determined historically? Is that an absurd question? Can the fall of man be reversed or dissolved?

I have been waiting for some time. Actually, I like waiting. Waiting is a space and a time in which there is nothing else to do but wait for time to pass. As a rule, you can't do much else except read or talk or think. Waiting times are therefore always free spaces for me. I prefer to wait in community centers, for example, where everyone is equal. Together with others, I am in a room where there is nothing to do but wait for time to pass. This shared waiting allows for real encounters.

There is always something amazing about an encounter. An encounter takes place when there is a counterpart who reciprocates. The most beautiful kind of encounter is one that is completely free of objectives or expectations. In this context, Deleuze also talks about encounters with art. That surprised me at first. Because an encounter, I always thought, is intersubjective. Two questions now arise: can art be intersubjective, and are art spaces such as museums perhaps also waiting rooms?

A new life

My wait at the moment is a long wait. I have been waiting for a few weeks to start a new life. The waiting is determined by applying for a visa. This visa application process - embassies and consulates as well as other government agencies - is in a different time dimension anyway. It has something Kafkaesque about it, its own logic, which has become quite detached from the processes of the outside world.

So this long wait makes encounters possible, but again in a completely different way than I thought. People react very strongly to my waiting. Many perceive my move to start a new life as a challenge. They reflect on their own situation or have the feeling that they can now tell me things that they might not otherwise tell me, as I am leaving their world anyway. But perhaps they also hope to get to know a different perspective through me. Whatever the case, I have quite intense encounters. I pour my heart out and others open up.

An encounter, meeting, participating

Participation seems to me to be an important element of the encounter. In order to encounter the other, this openness is important, to leave oneself (Deleuze sometimes speaks of a de-territorialization) and to become something else (Metamorphosis). When I'm traveling on the train, for example, or looking around me at a concert, sitting on a park bench or in a café, I often see people who are also looking around them. Many are looking for an encounter. We are often too shy to actually talk to each other, but the first encounter has already taken place: Opening up to the other, and the perception of the other.

It seems to me that we have forgotten how to really participate. A smile or a brief word, a bit of sympathy. In India, people say NamasteThe encounter is expressed in this greeting. It is not about wishing each other a good day or greeting God, but about seeing that the other person is also part of what makes me who I am.

What does that have to do with art? Everything.

During meditation, I often watch my thoughts, let them come and go and try to slow them down. Thoughts come and go, and often I don't understand where they come from and why they are replaced at some point by a completely different thought. What chain of associations is at work here? These chains of thought seem to be random, triggered by experiences that still resonate and are processed further.

It reminds me of a philosophical thought. It starts with an observation by Henri Bergson. He describes the cinematograph, an apparatus from the late 19th century that can both record and play back films. The cinematograph records many images per second. In film theory, we talk about 25 frames per second, so let's take this figure. In other words, 25 images per second. When so many images are projected one after the other, we have the illusion of movement, that is the magic of cinema. Of course, the movement is only in the gears of the cinematograph, the perceived movement of the objects on the screen is a lie. Bergson is very clear about this. Cinema cannot capture life. The Elan Vital is not found in the movie theater. That makes sense at first.

Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin was somewhat more optimistic. The work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility is concerned with this. Photography threatens painting, perhaps... I'm not so sure. The aura would be lost in the technically reproduced image, yes, probably... but this is where Benjamin's reception often ends. But it gets interesting with Benjamin afterwards, when he talks about the cinema. The 25 frames per second free the actors from the constraints of the stage, other narratives can emerge through editing, space and time become the object of artistic creation. Art makes creative use of the cinematographer's possibilities.

Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze takes this to the extreme, so to speak. His books on cinema are legendarily incomprehensible. He begins with a discussion of Bergson's cinematographs. Deleuze shares Bergson's analysis, but Bergson's mistake was not to have thought the idea through to the end. The individual images, which can only create movement as an illusion, do not have the task of copying reality, of being alive. They are, according to Deleuze, thoughts on celluloid. Cinema is pure philosophy, the filmstrip is fixed thought. Nowhere else is thought captured in such a real way as in the cinema. Thinking about cinema is therefore doing philosophy. This is why Deleuze's analyses of films are so incomprehensible. If we are looking for the story behind the movie, then we are completely wrong with Deleuze. But if we understand film as a philosophical medium, then Deleuze has set the bar very high.

When I meditate, I sometimes watch my thoughts. This reminds me of Deleuze's 'film theory' (he would probably never have called it that). With Deleuze there is no theory, for him there is only thinking itself. He has contributed a lot to this, and as he himself says in his ABCDaire, you can consider yourself very lucky if you have found a handful of new ideas in your life. The movement of thought is an adventure, philosophy is its purest form. Theory: your death. Reading Deleuze means thinking him differently. To refer to him would perhaps even be an insult.

In 2016 I went to India for the first time, I called the trip ReadingDeleuzeinIndia2016, I removed the year and it became the title of this blog. Why in India? Because Deleuze's way of thinking is ultimately deeply spiritual. He would disagree, but perhaps he would be pleased.

The forest is a wonderful habitat. I recently heard a little story about a man who whistled a tune whenever he entered the forest. The animals recognized him after a while and accepted his presence. They no longer ran away and sometimes even greeted him. We usually don't see the forest as it is because we often disturb it. Today I was in the forest. Instead of going for a walk as usual, I meditated a little and then took a short nap on the forest floor. It's dry here, so dry that there are hardly any ants, the ground is soft, the air is clear after the brief rain yesterday. It is cool in the shade, the streaks of light pleasant. The trees do not wander, they are rooted in their being. They are not restless. They grow differently in a collective than when they stand alone. As a collective, they take each other into consideration, give each other space, which can be seen in the canopy, the branches and the spacing and in the root kingdom. There is a kind of altruism in the root kingdom. Large trees help small ones to grow, as the small ones do not yet share the light in the crowns. A tree as part of a forest is in communication. Trees seem to communicate with each other through scent messengers. I become calm in the company of trees. Life is possible without running around.

There is something incredibly calming, timeless and connected about sleeping in the forest. In the forest we find rhizomes: similar plants that connect, but also different plants that connect. Gilles Deleuze did not use the rhizome merely as a metaphor for thinking, but thought as part of a rhizome. As a philosopher of immanence, trained by Spinoza, he is an elusive, materialistic, non-reductionist creative mind that I would like to read in India. My suspicion is that his philosophy resonates with the spirituality of India, the Hindu complexity and philosophizing in the forest of the Upanishads.

Today I heard a quote from Sri Aurobindo. He said that each of us has several selves. That was clear to me. It has been my experience for decades that the different aspects of a personality are many and that the idea of a subjective identity is a construction. I always saw the principles of construction as ideological, serving the logic of passports, individual responsibility and jurisdiction, but also of guilt and atonement, the idea of a soul in the Christian context, etc.

My reaction has always been to resist this constructive principle of individuality. Aurobindo now says that it is precisely when people feel that they have many aspects, many 'I's within them, that the task of sorting them out is difficult. Some people live in their own orbits and have found a way to somehow unite the contradictions. Others have so many 'I's that it is difficult to sort them out. How is this sorting supposed to work?

What is new for me is the idea that the many 'I's can be organized around something that is bigger and different. A greater consciousness. For many, this is perhaps a divine consciousness. For Deleuze, perhaps immanence. No longer being oneself as I have 5 years of philosophy studies to overcome here. And 20 years of art theory, which focuses on the individual.

Mnemosyne Atlas

This is a personal blog. However, it is also about a transformation of consciousness. Consciousness does not exist singularly within people. It only exists in connection with other consciousness. Consciousness is communicative. A journey into consciousness is therefore always more than just a personal journey. It is a manifestation.

I traveled to India in 2016. I wanted to read Gilles Deleuze there. I had a hunch that it would open up a new level there. I read slowly. Thoughts are complex entities. Understanding other people's thoughts means questioning your own thinking. An encounter between worlds of thought takes time. Understanding is not absorbing knowledge. Philosophy is not (just) abstract thinking.

It was a metamorphosis of my thinking.