When I began reading the Upanishads, I realized that the inner path I had embarked upon was leading me into an extraordinarily beautiful inner landscape. Discovering that this inner landscape is connected to cosmic consciousness made me aware of the important work I must undertake-what people often call "inner work."

As I committed myself to this inner work, I focused on how I was feeling, who I am, and what I must face. What are my shadows? My insecurities? My fears? What patterns govern me? What are my desires and my purpose?

I saw that the world I had been participating in-one defined by professionalism, social recognition, and fulfilling others' expectations-was a fabric woven by societal norms. Once I began stepping out of that fabric and into a cosmic, timeless awareness-into a being aligned with nature, the cosmos, ancient stones, and forces that predate writing and culture-I truly contemplated the power of consciousness: how it connects, how it acts, and how it forms the very foundation of our shared reality.

In that moment of realization, I perceived that my soul, which inhabits this body in this life, is here to learn, to unfold, to explore, to embrace. Perhaps through many reincarnations, perhaps in forms I cannot yet imagine, my soul journeys toward greater self-realization. As I embraced my soul-Ātman-connected to Brahman, I began to perceive the tattvas, the elemental principles; the inner and outer senses; modes of action; and the layers of consciousness entwined with divine energies and the currents of time.

In meditation and in Oṃ chanting, I turn my thoughts to death and the fear it inspires-how to overcome such fear-and to knowledge versus ignorance. I place the mind into its proper place: far smaller and humbler than it craves to be. What opens up then is a vast landscape of the heart: the bliss of the body, the life in matter, pure consciousness, and existence itself. Through this, the mind-or consciousness-flows across different levels of being.

At times, this can be frightening, for it is all unknown. Spiritual awakening must orient itself within this vast playground; it is shy, it reexamines its patterns, it questions everything, and it learns to embrace and enjoy all aspects of experience. Insecurity, fear, desire to connect, to play, to fall in love-all these impulses require space and time to unfold.

As a result, I find myself less active in the worldly sense-less working, less producing-and instead spending far more time simply being. Perhaps that is why, even as a child, I felt drawn to monastic life: I sensed that this inner work had to be done.

Now, my life must become more integrated and aware-more aware of my body, of small duties, of performing every action from the heart, with intention, meditation, and full presence. This is daunting, for it demands that only the moment and presence matter-and that all the illusions the mind conjures-ego-feeding images and projections-fall away.

Yet, once the outer pressures of the world and the pursuit of stability are relinquished, residing in the present becomes profoundly rewarding. Perhaps this is the path of the sādhaka, the spiritual practitioner: we stop caring about external validations, and instead cultivate trust, surrender, and diligent work in the inner realm.

Der Beitrag Spritual growth erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Vconnection

Dn the last two years I have immersed myself quite deeply in the Upanishads, practiced a bit of yoga and got 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.

Der Beitrag Verbindung erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

(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

Der Beitrag Abstract art and immanence – on Deleuze and Kandinsky erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

GYesterday 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.

Der Beitrag Am Anfang war das Wort erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

One year of Auroville

II 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)

Der Beitrag Ein Jahr Auroville erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Et is so wonderful and also so sad to live in a world that sees the West as foreign. I am adopting this perspective more and more and no longer understand many things. The obsession with career, comfort, security, prosperity, accuracy, correctness, know-it-all attitude and arrogance, ignorance and intolerance. All of this is becoming clearer, it is almost evident.

I was sick for a few days and, as many people do, I watched movies, nothing inspiring. Series garbage. I hadn't done that for a year and I felt sick afterwards. My brain was overloaded, my synapses were firing, and the ideology of a perfect world that needs to be protected from the bad guys in order to strengthen the community and help the individual to be 'right' is actually unbearable.

But then I wanted a few nice memories of the culture that I left so far behind. That's always the music for me. And that's how I came across Purcell. It's not particularly original, but it's still beautiful.

A friend told me about her idea of love. It's so different from anything I know that I don't even want to outline it here. Chastity would be one word, but that's a complete misnomer. So I listened to Purcell Solitude... and I was again overcome by that feeling of self-pity that is expressed in such music. The pain of loneliness, the longing for death, comfort and fear, the search for stability that only finds peace in melancholy. This great feeling of Europe, melancholy, what would Europe be without melancholy? A joke?

Now that I was already listening to Purcell, I gave in and found Jessie Norman. I was tired of seeing beautiful young white women. And there she appeared majestically, in a universe of mirrors, begging to be remembered. And so this image became a symbol of the beautiful sadness of the subject exploring herself, largely without regard for others or anything else. A narcissistic disorder. Self-pity, melancholy and self-righteousness, and so beautiful. The head of Medusa. This whole culture is built on misunderstanding.

And before the music algorithm switches to French pop, I'll end this here.

Om

Der Beitrag Der Westen als Fremde erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Ahen I fell into the abyss of skepticism as a teenager after my first love of Plato (especially the Phaidon dialog) and the great Greek poets such as Sophocles etc., the path from Descartes' meditation to Hume, Kant and Husserl was rocky. I lost sight of the soul and followed the ideology of purely empirical science. Only what could be perceived with the five senses was considered 'material' for philosophy, and embedded in this was the doubt as to whether these senses could be trusted. Whether everything is not just an illusion. The arc from Plato to David Hume could hardly be greater.

Pictures

The idea that the world shows itself only in perceptual images led me to aesthetics, but I have never seen this as clearly as the other day when I was browsing through Aurobindo's text on the Upanishads. I am reminded of Willard Van Orman Quine's legendary and absurd example of unseparated rabbit parts: when a rabbit passes behind a tree and so two rabbit parts present themselves in my perception - a front and a back rabbit part - and yet I seem to have a certainty that it is a rabbit. So we could learn something here about the principles of our perception and language. Hume took this to an extreme when he said that we cannot be certain that the sun will rise again tomorrow (his point was to question causality). Here is Aurobindo's statement on this kind of philosophy:

"The sun rises up in the morning, mounts into the cusp of the blue Heavens and descends at evening trailing behind it clouds of glory as it disappears. Who could doubt this irrefragable, overwhelmingly evidenced fact? Every day, through myriads of years, the eyes of millions of men all over the world have borne concurrent and unvarying testimony to the truth of these splendid voyagings. Than such universal ocular testimony, what evidence can be more conclusive? Yet it all turns out to be an image created by Nescience in the field of vision. Science comes & undeterred by prison & the stake tells us that the sun never voyages through our heavens, is indeed millions of miles from our heavens, and it is we who move round the Sun, not the Sun round us. Nay those Heavens themselves, the blue firmament into which poetry and religion have read so much beauty and wonder, is itself only an imagein which Nescience represents our atmosphere to us in the field of vision. The light too which streams upon us from our Sun and seems to us to fill Space turns out to be no more than an image. Science now freely permitted to multiply her amazing paradoxes, forces us at last to believe that it is only motion of matter affecting us at a certain pitch of vibration with that particular impression on the brain. And so she goes on resolving all things into mere images of the great cosmic ether which alone is. Of such unsubstantialities is this marvelous fabric of visible things created! Nay, it would even appear that the more unsubstantial a thing seems, the nearer it is to ultimate reality. This, which Science proves, says the Vedantist, is precisely what is meant by Maya." (Aurobindo CVSA 18, p.379)

It is not only Aurobindo's poetic power that fascinates me here, the way he evokes this image of the rising sun and rolls it back and forth, weaving in the different positions in order to then reposition the problem itself. It is the power of being guided by one's own intuition and insight, by experience in the richest sense.

I learn from this:

• If we want to analyze the world as a mere phenomenon, please let the initial images be rich and powerful and not silly reduced like severed rabbit parts.
• If we then follow the method of the natural sciences and the rational mind, then please go to the end, where we see that it is actually this science that creates the very images it doubts.
• And finally the reversal of the problem, in a kind of dialectical twist. The world is undeniably real, but it is not as science describes it. Science itself shows this.

Every experimental setup is a simulation, a construction. Every theory is a description of the world whose hypothesis is subject to constant testing. In the Vedas we learn about the core of the world as we experience it: It is pure consciousness. My consciousness knows nothing other than consciousness. It is a crazy assumption that everything that contains my consciousness should be its opposite. It is not the case that our consciousness contains an image of a completely different reality. Rather, the world consists of consciousness, in the interaction of consciousness with other consciousness, in the differentiation of the one in its multiplicity, perceptions and images arise. They are connected by vibration. The Kena Upanishads describe that, the basic principle is OM in the Mandukya Upanishad, everything is connected by a rhizome on a level of immanence, as Deleuze describes it in his last essay.

Maya, the question of reality, reveals a paradox; it is the question itself that creates the problem. The mentalhe images that serve as the basis for rational analysis are maya - illusion. Our consciousness, on the other hand, is real, the only reality. This is the core of the problem of dualism dvaita-advaita

Om shanti, shanti, shanti

Der Beitrag ­Maya und die Frage nach der Wirklichkeit erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

In Auroville there is an international zone. An area in the city of the future that wants to give different cultures and nations a place to express themselves and come into contact with each other. People in Auroville should be able to experience these different cultures. The whole concept is quite vague, roughly organized along the lines of continents, with some focus on selected nation states. Aurobindo has written something about some 'national souls', he has tried to characterize them. However, these characterizations date from the first half of the 20th century.

I have always found the concept of the soul itself very problematic, and the concept of the nation is also problematic. A national soul, what is that supposed to be? And a German one at that. The whole world knows how badly that went wrong in Nazi Germany.

Aurobindo's philosophy is essentially about the illumination of consciousness. Not just of one's own subjective consciousness, which has remained in a self-assertive reflex since Descartes' skepticism, but of consciousness itself, as a phenomenon that can be experienced intersubjectively between different forms of life and spiritual realms of experience. Aurobindo's philosophy anchors consciousness in a global spirituality, describing it as divine consciousness. For him, consciousness is the starting point of all existence. This consciousness is real and can be experienced. Through mental and spiritual evolution, we can expand, enrich and transcend our own consciousness. This always sounds so esoteric, but actually only describes something that we observe every day. A person is born and learns, develops a personality and grows intellectually, emotionally, socially, creatively, etc.... At some point in the history of Western cultures, rationality has gained dominance and discredited everything that is alien to it. Taming this rationality and reintegrating it into a holistic context through the practice of yoga is the project of Sri Aurobindo's Synthesis of Yoga.

Sri Aurobindo anchors his philosophy on 7 levels: Matter, Life Force, Rational Thought, Intellectual Worldview, Spiritual Sensuality, Pure Consciousness and Pure Existence. You could say that rational thinking got lost in matter in the 20th century. However, in order to be able to connect all 7 levels, Aurobindo needs the concept of the soul, whose archetype is Purusha. This cosmic soul manifests itself in individual souls, be they mine or yours, or those of animals and plants, planets or nations. Everything is permeated by consciousness, everything has an identity, but the languages are very different.

I still find it very difficult to penetrate the implications of this. It's plausible in the intersubjective realm, and it's an inviting door to spirituality. But when it comes to the German soul, I really have my difficulties. Nevertheless, there seems to be something behind the cultural stereotypes. There are friendships and enmities between cultures, peoples, nations, and there are families of cultures and languages, e.g. the Indo-European language area, the Dravidian languages, or Afro-Asian languages and many others. There are religious spheres of influence that overlap with language areas, cultural areas and national borders. Behind the complexity of these overlaps, which are additionally mixed by colonialism, globalization and socio-economic dynamics, there is perhaps a kind of map of different spheres. Such a map can only be drawn up, if at all, in the spirit of unity in diversity. This seems to me to be the project of the international zone. Perhaps the German Pavilion could house a kind of research center for such a map.

-

"Collections with Maps | Maps | Library of Congress". n.d. Web page. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA. Accessed June 15, 2023. https://www.loc.gov/maps/collections/.

Der Beitrag Nationale Seelen erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

I was socialized in the divided Germany of the 80s. It was a time of maximum nuclear threat, nuclear winter was a daily possibility. It was the time of the Cold War, ideological bloc thinking. Capitalism or communism were the two options. Capitalism went hand in hand with a Protestant work ethic, communism with existentialist materialism. The rest was considered esoteric.

It wasn't easy to find your way around as a teenager. I lived in the West, the capitalist side, and if I showed an interest in communism, I immediately heard: then go over there. German guilt made things even more difficult. The Holocaust could not be forgotten, the guilt of the Germans had to be kept in our consciousness. We all bore the guilt, if not personally, then as a cultural community. How could 'German' culture bring about the Third Reich? The intellectual debates in post-war Germany revolved around this question. Can we identify something that led to this catastrophe? How can we look for it, and once we have found it, what can we learn from it? In philosophy, the Frankfurt School was the most prominent. To this day, Habermas is the intellectual conscience of Germany.

Negative dialectics

The essence of the argument is as follows: The German Enlightenment (Kant) gave wings to rational thinking. This rationality, still shackled by the categorical imperative in Kant, developed the momentum of modernity, a blind belief in progress was unleashed, which actually continues unabated to this day. Under National Socialism, this belief in progress was perverted by a racial theory, an ideology of master race. However, their instruments of power, war and concentration camps were 'perfected' in the sense of cold rationality. The gruesome example of this are the gas chambers of Auschwitz, which were technically effective, but were nothing more than the most brutal extermination camps of a systematic mass murder of all those who did not fit into the image of the 'master race'.

Negative dialectics subjected modernist thinking to radical criticism. Kant's table of categories was no longer the foundation on which an enlightened society could be built, but became a symbol of rationalist totalitarianism. The consequence was a philosophy that only knew criticism. Everything is questioned with regard to its totalitarian structures and left open to discussion. Adorno's infinite critical differentiation of the concept is exposed to discourse by Habermas. Only that which is accepted by consensus is valid. If there is no consensus in a society, there must be further discussion...

Beauty and delight

What kind of aesthetics should be derived from this for 'my' generation? Terms such as beauty and sublimity were of course taboo. They were branded as totalitarian, as they seemed to be based on a subjective and authoritarian feeling that defied rational justification and was not capable of consensus in discourse. A critical aesthetic appeared 'politically correct', i.e. an avant-garde that questioned everything that had gone before and replaced it with a new 'critical' position. Beauty in art became suspect, the critical stance its surrogate.

And yet these aesthetic positions bordered on the sublime in their exaggerations: Mark Rothko, John Cage, Yves Klein, Gerhard Richter, Pina Bausch, Bill Viola, Lucio Fontana... a long list of artists could be drawn up, which is of course influenced by my personal taste. The sublime here is not a show of the divine, but an aesthetic borderline experience.

Hymn of Creation

It took me a very long time to open myself up to a critically reflected concept of the sublime. My entire intellectual training resisted it. And only art that leads to an aesthetic borderline experience, which is not representative of its subject, allowed me to experience and name what I experience there as sublime: a white canvas, for example, cut through with a scalpel, the opening of which allows me to look behind it. Lucio Fontana's (1899-1968) 'Cut paintings' - they are sublime.

This reminds me of the Hymn of Creation (Rig Veda X.129). It begins with:

Aurobindo writes in "The Soul of Poetic Delight and Beauty":

"The earliest surviving poetry of ancient India was philosophical and religious, the Veda, the Upanishads, and our modern notions tend to divorce these things from the instinct of delight and beauty, to separate the religious and the philosophic from the aesthetic sense; but the miracle of these antique writings is their perfect union of beauty and power and truth, the word of truth coming out spontaneously as a word of beauty, the revealed utterance of that universal spirit who is described in the Upanishads as the eater of the honey of sweetness, madhvadam puruṣamand this high achievement was not surprising in these ancient deep-thinking men who discovered the profound truth that all existence derives from and lives by the bliss of the eternal spirit, in the power of a universal delight, Ananda"(CWSA 26, p.255)

Wow, I ask myself, can I get my rational thinking to open up to this view? Can I follow the spiritual path of the Upanishads without getting caught up in totalitarian thinking?

The hymn ends with:

Der Beitrag Schönheit und Entzücken erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

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)

Der Beitrag Kunst in Pondycherry: Ein Blick auf die Künstler, ihre Praxis und die visuelle Sprache erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Kart 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.

Der Beitrag Das Missverständnis der Kunst: Eine neue Perspektive ohne Repräsentation erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

II have changed my world view perhaps 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.

Der Beitrag Ein neues Weltbild erarbeiten erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Yesterday I ended the year with a joint meditation. It was wonderful, calm and focused. And right now I want to go to the sea for a little swim, which seems like a good start.

I let my mind's eye wander a little over the last few years and decades. I have lived in different places in different countries. It was exciting: different customs and traditions, languages, cultures, different sensory impressions, from nature and cuisine to architecture, celebrating together, etc. I enjoyed many things, wondered about many things, was inspired and told other people stories, changed perspectives. I thought I'd had an interesting life.

Performance

I have participated in a world that strives for progress and is committed to enlightenment. In order to participate in a certain form of prosperity, which everyone negotiates for themselves individually according to their desires and possibilities, a price is demanded: performance. This technical word, which reminds me of physics lessons and the horsepower of cars, is the unit in which everything is calculated. For most, performance is linked to wages; for those who can afford it or want it by adapting their lifestyle, it can be recognition. In any case, these are very external criteria; very few people consistently align their lives with their own ideals. But even this inner compulsion to be true to oneself still follows the performance principle.

I really wonder whether there really is no alternative to this organization of society.

Karma yoga is not capitalism

The Auroville experiment, in which I am participating here, is trying to develop an alternative. And yes, to agree with the critics right away: It doesn't pay off. But it would be a misunderstanding to focus on this perspective. Karma yoga is not capitalism.

I must and will also admit that I am in a privileged position to be able to afford to switch between different living environments. However, having lived in so many countries, I have to say that it is much easier to change your lifestyle than most people think. It also means making sacrifices.

But I'm seriously asking myself whether I still want the luxury of flexibility at all.

Der Beitrag Neues Jahr erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

A friend recently asked me about the relationship between Eastern and Western culture. This is of course a huge question, which I also ask myself and which of course nobody can really answer. But I would like to formulate a few thoughts:

The distance from an imagined center

The 'Western' world, based on classical antiquity, Christianity, the Enlightenment and materialism, is contrasted with the Occidental world of the Assyrians and Persians, Islam and the idea of a community that is divinely controlled. This is a perspective based on a historical conflict that, from a Western perspective, is characterized by Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire and the Crusades. It is a Eurocentric, colonial perspective that avoids a dialog between the West and the 'other'. The Eastern world, the Orient, which today is characterized by Islam, also had a missionary agenda (jihad).

The whole thing is much more complex, of course, but my point here is to point out the area. This mostly confrontational relationship takes place geographically between the so-called Western hemisphere and the Middle East. North Africa is seen as collateral in this perspective. This entire description stems from 19th and 20th century thinking and does not do justice to the realities of the 21st century. What is not mentioned here are the cultural spheres of China and India. In the brutal colonial tradition of thought, this is merely the Far East. So we have a geographical distance line on which cultural hemispheres are ranked and for which the distance to the center (Rome, Constantinople, Greenwich meridian) is decisive. This is absurd, but nevertheless ideologically real. Actually, one should not think any further here. This is an old ideology that belongs in a museum at best.

Metaphysical systems

It is more productive to organize them into metaphysical, i.e. philosophical and spiritual systems:

• Monotheism (largely associated with a purely dualistic worldview originating in the Mediterranean region)
• a thinking of Immanence (which runs quietly through all epochs and cultures)
• the capitalist, scientific materialism of the 19th and 20th centuries (whose limitations and ignorance are currently threatening the planet)
• the wisdom of the Rishis in the Rigveda and the Upanishads in India
• what the communist cultural revolution left behind.

My wording very clearly shows a personal preference. This is about worldviews, world views, self-relationships to the world. They are highly subjective. As these only appear to be knowledge systems, and not religious systems or ideologies, but fundamental attitudes to life, the debates here are particularly exciting.

The future is often described as a battle over the distribution of resources such as water, climate impacts, fundamentalists, geopolitics, capital flows, scientific utopias and dystopias. In the 21st century, however, it is about the very essential: our relationship as human beings to the world, and ultimately whether we want to remain in it, and if so, how. I am very aware of the urgency of this question here in India; in the West, this question is still ridiculed. This seems to me to be the really exciting difference.

The origin of language

To put it another way: The universal language is not mathematics either. It really is amazing how effective mathematics and the natural sciences based on it are at explaining things. And the empirical sciences also have a certain explanatory power, as they formulate observations in theories. But they are an abstract level of description of the physical world.

The real mystery remains language itself. In the beginning was the word, says Genesis. In the Upanishads, sound plays a central role. The vibration that creates sound, which in turn captures an idea and creates a form, is a central link between our senses and our mind. The spiritual sound OM is a deep exhalation that ends with the closing of the lips and captures the core of our existence. Language, the creation of meaning through sounds, connects perception, expression, mental representation, imagination and communication. In the beginning was not the word, but the sound. From it comes the word, whose medium is the mind.

Who has an answer?

It can no longer be a question of preserving the status quo, and the idea of progress has finally become obsolete. What can answers look like?

• The dominant variant is to think about how we can improve the system of globalization.
• A more individual answer is to align one's own life with maxims.
• Another is the transformation of consciousness: individual, collective, universal.

Once again, it seems to me that the wisdom of the Upanishads already has an answer. For these three essential levels of a search for answers belong together. They are reconciled in the insight of the rishis. Only when we unite our material existence with our ideals of life and the insight that consciousness does not exist in isolation do we have a chance.

The mantras of the Rishi are the oldest spiritual texts that have been handed down. They bear witness to a beginning that was not a beginning. They bear witness to a universal consciousness that is not fed by personal motives, but by the human spirit, a meditative introspection. The solution lies within ourselves. As trivial as that sounds, it is also the highest wisdom.

Der Beitrag Östliche und westliche Philosophie? erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

"Simplicity is complexity resolved"

Der Beitrag Simplicity erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

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

INow I remember that before I started reading Deleuze, I had been working on a process aesthetic. 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.

Der Beitrag Labyrinth – Prozessästhetik erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

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)

Jvery 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

Der Beitrag Diagramme – philosophisch erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Yesterday I went to sleep expecting to get up early and meditate. I set the alarm for 6 o'clock. In the evening, a French yoga teacher and mountain guide told me about the early morning hours in India, that they are the best for meditation - that they are good for Ryas I already knew that. She also told me about the morning chants in the cities, I remembered the Mantra songs in the temples.

I woke up at 5:30 am, temple chants could be heard in the distance, no it wasn't a dream. I followed them, walked across the countryside in the dark, and to a place where the paths were already being cleaned at 6 a.m. on Sundays. The women were washing clothes, cleaning, looking after the animals, although the goats and cows still seemed to be asleep - in the courtyards of the small huts. The men were in the temple. There was a loudspeaker that could be heard for miles around. I greeted the gods and went back.

On the way back, I passed a burial site from the Iron Age. The megaliths are 2500 years old. The burial site on which Auroville was built is 60 hectares in size.

I had breakfast and went to bed. A wonderful sleep welcomed me and I dreamt of Auroville. I had now also arrived here in my dreams. It is these transitions between waking and sleeping states, in which the consciousness merely changes its state but actually remains in a continuum, that are the greatest happiness for me.

There are so many types of sleep:

• Sleep of exhaustion, when the body demands its right to rest.
• Sleep to recover, e.g. at lunchtime and to increase concentration and process what has been done
• Sleeping together after a beautiful meeting of bodies.
• Waking sleep, in which the self is merely conscious in a different state.
• Daily sleep of habit that follows tiredness.
• Sleep while traveling, on a train, car, plane, train station or park bench. A moment of rest and lingering while the body moves.
• Sleep of intoxication, when the senses are confused and the self loses itself, drunkenly associating and suffering.
• Sleep in the seminar or at school, where I still continue to listen to the teacher. But now I hear something with a very strong filter, because the absorption of facts has reached its capacity limit.
• Sleep of the insomniac, when sleep seems impossible and only small moments of exhaustion demand a restless short sleep. The sleep of the nervous... This can also be very unhealthy, and perhaps help is needed here.
• Sleep in Forest or under the starry sky, where consciousness expands and almost completely withdraws from everyday life.

The list could certainly go on, but the point seems clear. Sleep is a very special state of consciousness. It cannot only be experienced by remembering dreamers, but is an intermediate state of consciousness in which the self visits other spheres of consciousness in order to regenerate, sort, learn, process, see...

We generally call some of these experiences dreams, but they are much more complex. I like to sleep a lot and I don't feel guilty about it. Sleeping is a central part of my existence. I don't understand at all when people try to sleep less. They deprive themselves of many wonderful forms of knowledge.

In the Prashna Upanishad (p.32) speaks of this. "When a man sleeps, who sleeps?"

But above all in the Mandukya Upanishad. in: Aurobindo Vol 18 p.193ff. (unpublished by Aurobindo)

The comparison of 10 different translations into English is also nice:
"Mandukya Upanishad". Accessed November 28, 2022. https://realization.org/p/namedoc/upanishads/mandukya/mandukya.html.

Here is an excerpt from Aurobindo's translation:

Der Beitrag Schlafen erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Curry! Every morning there are mildly spiced, wonderful Indian dishes. They are light and complex, there seem to be 1001 spices in them. At lunchtime, Solarkitchen, the community canteen, is simple, vegetarian and good. The principle is healthy food for everyone, everyone can afford it. In the evening, these wonderful dishes again. What they don't serve: Alcohol, meat or fish, sugar. Eggs are a luxury. I used to eat a lot of chocolate in Germany, but now it's far too sweet for me. I treat myself to a complex vitamin B supplement.

The exciting thing is that it changes my whole body. In Ayurvedic medicine, nutrition is a central aspect. I understand that now. This healing process is not a cure for any disease, I am actually quite healthy. But many things are coming to light. Old wounds, for example. My hands have lots of small scars from cuts with kitchen knives. I'm not particularly careful, I live dangerously in the kitchen. These small scars all appear, more every week. My metabolism is changing. It feels great.

Media

In addition to this change (I don't want to call it a diet, because the number of vegetables, spices, proteins and carbohydrates, fruit and quark is so much more varied and nutritious that it is actually more of a feast, a frenzy, a feast), there is a real reduction in media. I don't actually watch movies or videos at all, there is no TV or internet connection in the room. The dining hall isn't suitable for that either. I still follow the news, but not as panicked as I was in Europe. I sleep well.

In the evenings after dinner, I talk to lots of strangers about all sorts of things; we've been playing cards for the last few days. Because everything in Auroville is closed at 8 pm, unless there's a concert, a performance or a movie. Which is often the case.

In addition to my little scars, there is also a sadness, but it feels right. The hectic pace and superfluous consumption of recent decades in Germany, France and the USA may have been fun, but it wasn't just bad for the planet, it wasn't good for me either. Living in luxury is actually sad. I feel that now, and that's good. And here is the healing process. I think that's what we mean by diseases of civilization.

p.s.: The Auroville Bakery is the place of my sin, which is unfortunately irresistible 🙂

Der Beitrag Heilen erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Today I was at a place for village children with special needs (Deepam). Someone from the guest house here had invited me to accompany her. It was a kind of ceremony as part of Navarathri in honor of the goddess Saraswathi - she stands for education, prosperity and success. In India today, the objects needed for work were purified and consecrated as a form of thanksgiving. Offerings were brought to them and songs were sung. In the therapy center, in addition to figurines, books and other toys, these were also the accounting books with the donation file. In a second stage, the school bus arrived. It drove over lemons and pumpkins were smashed on the road.

I have taught for many years, sometimes lecturing, often discussing with students, occasionally criticizing. I tried to inspire, to share knowledge and skills, to give advice and to help with the search. I never taught, nor did I educate. I considered it a privilege to be allowed to teach. I rarely punished students for wanting to learn from me. That's absurd. If they didn't do what I expected, then either I wasn't clear enough or I had the wrong expectations.

Doors

Some teachers see themselves as gatekeepers, they want to determine who meets arbitrary quality standards. If you want to position yourself at a door, then my idea has always been to give the people who want to go through this door a good idea of what to expect and to think together with them about whether they want to go through this door or whether they would rather take another one.

I am not a teacher, and certainly not a special needs teacher. But what I saw today gave me a lot (to think about). I was happy to be able to share this space. I saw so much joy, laughter, consideration, attention, intuition, fun, togetherness and confidence that my heart became very light. What is happening here? What words can I use to describe it? And what does this have to do with teaching? Some young and committed people started 30 years ago to look after people with special needs under a tree. Now it has become a very solid and inspiring place - another moving story.

Who is actually learning from whom here? And what are we actually doing in all the other schools all the time?

Der Beitrag Lehren erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

On a boulevard in Paris, café and bad music, sun and lots of people. So many people want to be seen. They are busy, sexy, cool, knowing, adventurous, sporty, educated, cultured or indifferent. Many want others to take notice. They see themselves as what they want to be. Perhaps they live their lives in a certain way, happy and content, or alienated and bored, outcast or privileged. That's the beauty of Paris and other big cities, that people show themselves how they want to be, how they want to be seen.

Open spaces

Of course, this also somehow reveals an alienation, a dissonance. The free spaces that we take for ourselves contrast with the - usually larger - spaces in which we are not what we want to be. This gives rise to a whole industry. You want to be different? Try it, for a price. Express your individuality by buying something very special that others haven't bought. This is capitalism and consumerism. It's common knowledge, and we all think we're above it, and of course we're not.

I find the urge to want to show off, to be noticed, to get attention, much more exciting. Why do we do that? We are probably looking for Encounterswant to greet the other - Namaste. We probably want to overcome loneliness, or at least interrupt it. We don't actually want to participate in capitalism, we want to take part in the adventure of consciousness, celebrate it with others, share it. And we want to dissolve into it - in intoxication and ecstasy, Dionysian. We want to put the logic of the system, its functioning and efficiency up for discussion. Nietzsche sends his regards, but also Bataille.

So I'm sitting in a café in Paris, my backpack packed, tonight I'm flying to Auroville. And of course I ask myself why I have to write this in a blog now. And why I have to fly to the other side of the world. Check your privilege. And why am I writing so much in the first person?

Goodbye

I seem to be serious about this. Many years ago, I told anyone who would listen that I was done with capitalism. Just as I have been saying goodbye to Christianity for even longer. But for me that meant living in the wrong place, because I didn't manage to develop a real alternative for myself. There are not many places on our planet where this is attempted. It's not enough for me (anymore) to have a critical attitude, and I also don't find it acceptable for me to collect resources within the system in order to redistribute them individually. Giving comfort is not my style either.

We have to act, it can't go on like this. It's bad for the environment, but it's also bad for us. This is so often glossed over in today's debate. It's not just about saving the planet, it's about saving ourselves. We don't just need new ideas from engineers, but also from philosophers and spiritual thinkers and seers. Perhaps we don't need new ideas at all, but could remember old ideas and think about how we can adapt them in an increasingly complex civilization. What would a world without capitalism and without colonialism and crusades look like? Why do so few people think seriously about this?

I have no idea what to expect on the next stage. On verra, we will see. Aurobindo sang about fire, it is essential for seeing. I hope that I don't emerge as a phoenix from the ashes, as the same as before. That would really be a tragedy. Rather, I want to become fire myself, to remember that we are made of molten stars.

Der Beitrag Aufmerksamkeit erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Yesterday, after many years, I finally went to the village center of Roubion. Vilém Flusser lived here for many years. I quoted his books a lot in my seminars and used them as a basis for discussion. Especially his philosophy of photography. Flusser is a wild theorist. He wrote a lot about images, media, language, technology, signs, history... It seems to me that he was always thinking about how thinking works. How words and images are created in our heads and how much this has to do with technology, e.g. photography or digital media. He talks about the universe of technical images.

Imagination

Our thoughts often move in images of the imagination... They correspond to a medium: when we communicate, we use language, text, images, photography, film, sculpture, in short media, technical and artistic, scientific and fictional. These media are always based on a technique. Writing and drawing, printing, an algorithm, digital representation, etc. How is this connected? Our thinking, the media and their technical conditions? How does our thinking change technology (progress), and how does technology change the production of new media? And how do these new media in turn change our thinking?

This whole process is not at all clear, and anyone who says he or she has understood it has basically not even seen the problem. Flusser is always alive in his thinking, he has a deep historical dimension, a great understanding of technology, he understands the dynamics of media use and the social effects. His philosophy attempts to grasp the core of human thought technically, semiotically and historically. This is an incredible project. It is not modest, nor is it without contradictions.

Flusser has always been an inspiration to me, but at the same time I have always missed something. His thinking is basically materialistic. His philosophy is one of the most exciting in the field of semiotics and media theory. He sometimes talks about a historical consciousness and a magical one. He always talks about it very abstractly. He is not a consciousness theorist. His world is technical. It is important to read him in order to understand our time. Personally, however, I am now concerned with other thoughts.

If you are now in the mood for Flusser, you can find more here... https://www.flusserstudies.net/

Der Beitrag Flusser erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

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?

Der Beitrag Wissen erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

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.

Der Beitrag Begegnung erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Highways have always been special places for me. Most of the time I wasn't under time pressure, I rarely had to get from A to B in a certain time. Rather, highways are travel routes. I find myself there in intermediate states, a kind of no man's land with an infinite number of possibilities. That opens up thinking spaces. They are often simply empty. The brain is busy moving safely in traffic. It's a pleasant way to keep busy, the mind is busy and alert, a mistake would be fatal. If I am understretched or tired, I drive a little faster or slower, or take a break. This creates a kind of equilibrium.

In this equilibrium, other thoughts can sort themselves out and spin away unnoticed. Only occasionally does my consciousness hold on to a thought. This allows thoughts to find their way without immediately encountering the usual thought filters. I always get to know myself a little anew on the highway, or remember a former self.

Then there is the physical space. This is either familiar and therefore triggers associations that are triggered from outside, so to speak. Or it is a new space that invites you to dream and arouses curiosity. Personally, I always find this positive. I don't really experience any fear or unpleasant feelings on the highway, although I do sometimes think about unpleasant things, that's for sure.

This space of movement, travel, association, gentle stimulation and alertness almost always makes me think about my childhood at some point. After all, I grew up in a country where people drive a lot. It would be nice if that changed soon, and I'm trying to drive less myself. It's no longer in keeping with the times, and it's actually a bit irresponsible.

So this space is a given space. It is not creative or free. It is a space with strong conditions. I like to immerse myself in this space to see what other spaces I actually want to free myself from. It's probably the case for many people that we dwell on our thoughts while driving and want to change our lives in some way.

I like being on the highway. Traveling on the highway is a metaphorical place, a physically metaphorical place - a physical metaphor. I used to think a lot about theories of linguistic metaphors. What do they mean, what is their linguistic reference, how do they work... especially in art and literature. Metaphors are words that mean something different in a certain context than they normally mean. That is exciting!

Traveling on the highway is the opposite of a simulation, and yet these spaces function similarly: simulation spaces and travel routes. Both spaces mean something that they are not actually.

Der Beitrag Autobahn erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Life is so complex and there are so many different ways of living. There is no right or wrong way to live. Life is a gift.

But what do you say about the negative energies, the destruction and aggression, the greed and resentment? That's all part of it. There is only acceptance. But acceptance does not mean approving of everything, nor does it mean tolerating everything. If a community decides to establish rules and sanction the violation of these rules, then this is also a form of acceptance. As humanity, we signed the Charter of Human Rights with the United Nations in 1945. A lot follows from this, above all how we should treat each other, what is ok and what is not. Acceptance does not mean that we should not and cannot try to change the world.

The excluded

In recent generations, so many discriminated minorities have fought for their rights because they have either violated the norms or been exploited, or both. This discrimination is, of course, the exact opposite of acceptance.

But when a person decides to change their life and leave the so-called status quo. Then the status quo society speaks of a dropout. But isn't it much more the case that people who have decided not to change the status quo have dropped out of life? They remain in a state of rigidity. We probably somehow need traditions, rituals, structures and rules in order to function as a community. And part of these structures may be that they cannot be changed arbitrarily and individually.

There is a relationship here. People who are excluded from mainstream society and people who want to leave it. Why are some not allowed or do not want to participate in this discourse in a society? Is this merely a question of the normal distribution curve (Gauss), or are there structural blind spots in the majority society?

Decay and preservation

History shows that there have been many societies that have fallen, some of which were defeated by enemies or destroyed by natural disasters, but some of which also fell due to decadence, internal conflicts or bad decisions. Above all, however, it shows that there are an infinite number of different forms of society and that value systems can change radically.

Most societies have functions of priests, philosophers, artists, shamans, intellectuals etc. who have a special position. They are not involved in the distribution of tasks in everyday life, the production processes and distribution mechanisms and have a reflective function. They keep the archives, develop new ideas, offer interpretations in conflicts. Ideally, they are the protectors of wisdom, of knowledge treasures. They are involved in a different time, have access to a different consciousness. They see the before and after of societies. They are therefore essential, revered and feared at the same time.

Radicals

These special positions that they occupy are free spaces in a society. New rules of the game are tested here. These playgrounds are subject to special protection. Changing their places is vehemently defended by society. Not everyone is allowed to play along. And if someone 'drops out'? Then he or she is also saying that this system of free spaces no longer works. The most sacred place in society is being called into question. This is also vehemently defended.

And the dropout? Has she not tried hard enough and just not found the right place within society? Did she just give up too soon? Maybe she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and would have found her place in another life. Or maybe not. Maybe there is simply no place for her in the current society. Maybe there are these blind spots.

Hermits, autonomous communities, monasteries and gurus mark positions in the world that elude current societies. They cannot be assimilated. In this respect, they are radical. (I am talking here about peaceful positions and not revolutionary positions). These peaceful positions occupy a satellite position.

They have a luminous power and show the cosmonauts the way.

Der Beitrag Aussteigen ist eine Frage der Perspektive erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Our brain is not the seat of our mind, but the medium with which we can reach the spiritual. When I heard this for the first time many years ago at a conference on media theory, I was amazed. Were they really serious? Is it crazy or brilliant? There is this wonderful old-fashioned word 'subtle'. Our body is a medium with which we can achieve this.

What our media theories generally have in common is that they are conceived in technical terms. There is a technical medium that is used to share information between different participants. Claude Shannon was the first to define media theory in this way. Now there is much discussion about what a medium is, what information is, who sends it, why and to whom, with what intention? Media are material, technical objects that can store information. Of course, information can also be read, which is the only way it makes sense to us. This is the only way media become part of society.

What actually is information?

I have been looking for a useful definition of information for years. What is it supposed to be? A structure, a process, an energy? Is it abstract, like mathematics? The number 2 doesn't exist in the real world either, just two apples, for example. Abstract theories describe reality with the help of concepts that do not exist in so-called reality. That makes me suspicious. And it makes me even more perplexed that most people are not perplexed by this. This is science and technology, and it works. Without a doubt, but how?

What if we put this technical concept of media to one side and look at moist media instead? Bodies, plants, animals, (viruses and fungi) are wet media. Their DNA stores information, just like the technical media, but we would probably say that the individual living beings cannot be reduced to their DNA. They are more than that. This stored information must first blossom, so to speak, before the wet media are activated. Only when this technical information is alive can it interact with the world and perceive it. And yes, we are currently trying to recreate this very principle with artificial intelligence and autonomous interactive systems.

Moist media

Many wet media have consciousness and therefore access to a part of reality, only they are really able to perceive reality. In contrast, technical systems process information in a simulation which, if it is good, corresponds to reality. Wet media therefore understand communication not merely as information processing, but as genuine interaction; they are part of reality. Through access to consciousness, to the subtle (?), moist mediums can recognize the cohesion of the universe. The interaction of all elements with each other can be thought of here. Moist mediums can see themselves as part of reality because they have a bridging function between the material and the subtle, between matter and spirit. They are not a simulation, they are not hyperreal. They are real.

Wet media are far ahead of technical media. Many have awareness, a sense of context, they are anticipatory, emotional, holistic, improvise, are creative and playful. Wet media train their bodies, repair themselves, are adaptive. But above all, they are communicative, collective, social. At the moment, they are still so much more complex than technical media.

The future is wet.

Der Beitrag Feuchte Medien erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

I love complexity, but sometimes I also love radical simplification - to get some clarity. For example, the history of ideas in the visual arts. In Europe, after the great migration of peoples, the history of art can be sketched as the history of ideas in a woodcut:

• In medieval art, stories were told visually - mainly the stories of the Bible. Most people could not read, let alone Latin or Greek. The wood panel painting of the altars is therefore a kind of comic, and just as free in the spatial order, perspective and relationship of the objects.
• In the Renaissance, construction principles of the mind were applied: Central perspective, color theory, visual effects such as sfumato, etc... The point was to show that artists could construct an illusion.
• In the Baroque era, the space was contained. The church space was folded, the senses stimulated, the painting seduced, the (art) objects stood for themselves.
• In the Rococo period, the nobility was amused. Sometimes very poor taste and interior design served as a spectacle - courtly, decadent.
• Classicism was an ethical correction. The classical values and principles of antiquity were revived.
• Realism was now, for the first time, really about artistically capturing the world as we think it is. Pretty and ugly, banal and uplifting...
• In Impressionism, then, the philosophical reflection on our own perceptual apparatus. After all, we can only depict what we perceive. The reality beyond our senses eludes representation.
• Abstraction, which is not really an abstraction at all, is about inner forms of the mind.
• ...

A list of such radical simplifications could be made as long as you like. But it is nice to see that there is a dialectical movement here. Something new is tried out until it is recognized that a limit has been reached. The design principles are reversed. This is progress, we say. The 'European elite' is getting 'better'. There may be something to this history of ideas, but what is visible here? What cannot be formulated at certain times and why? Are Delacroix's drawings not pure Impressionism? Is Grünewald's portraiture not pure realism? And is the formal language of medieval art not pure, concrete art?

Art theories

Who told this story? Vasari, Gombrich, Panofsky? Why was it told this way? And who had previously collected and sorted it out in the cabinets of curiosities, the private collections of lords of castles and priests in church halls? And what was burned during the revolutions that we never saw again afterwards?

I have always had a philosophical interest in the media of art. I rarely looked at artists' biographies. I always found the philosophical art criticism of Roland Barthes, for example, more exciting, or the philosophical theory of Danto, Deleuze or Foucault. Here, too, a long list could be compiled; here, too, it is not about the individual details. The perspective is important. Art is created in the viewer. For me, art has always been not only an aesthetic experience but also mental work. That has now changed for me.

The history of progress or reflection, of expertise and contextualization, philosophical media analysis and any kind of value creation, ideological superstructure and power structure are increasingly losing my interest. Art is dead, long live art. This was a popular motto not only in the avant-garde era. It expresses how a society deals with art. It is an object, a very interesting object, but an object. The spiritual in art, as Kandinsky, for example, saw it, is lost in the history of ideas. The museums as secular temples of art and the galleries as capitalist, ideological amplifiers drive the spiritual out of art. If art lies in the viewer, then it is everywhere, but least of all in museums, galleries, churches and collections.

Expectations

But perhaps my expectations are simply too high. I learned that art is the highest good in our culture. It is where human experience, knowledge and education, perfection, pleasure and reflection come together. Art is the highest art. It deserves respect, it is inspiration, perfect in genius and incomprehensible to ordinary people.

Perhaps we should take art off this pedestal again and let it lose itself in arbitrariness as a craft. But perhaps we should also expose art for what it is, always a lie. After all, I can't eat a painted apple. But for me, art is one thing above all: an object of meditation. Art is concentration and openness. Art demands interpretation through contemplation. Only then is it alive. I can find it everywhere, including in museums, galleries, churches and collections.

Der Beitrag Ideengeschichte erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

It is definitely time to rethink. What our fathers and grandfathers called progress is destroying our planet. Science is not an end in itself, not everything that is technically feasible is good, not everything that is fun and satisfies our senses is useful. Now we keep hearing from many quarters that we should concentrate on the small steps ahead of us, that this is the only way we can move forward together. This may be true at times, but it distracts us from the essentials. Where do we actually want to go?

Does it make sense to fly into space and burn up our Earth in the process? Is it really a good idea to jeopardize our extremely complex biodiversity here in order to search for water on a desert planet and think about how we can artificially create the most basic conditions for life there? Why do so many people believe that this makes sense?

Knowledge structures

There are indigenous peoples who have lived in harmony with nature for thousands of years. The wealth of experience grows very slowly and is passed on orally from one generation to the next. This oral tradition is a bottleneck. On the one hand, oral tradition requires narratives. Secondly, the flow of information is limited. Knowledge dies with the bearer of knowledge. Only what is passed on and remembered survives. There is no significant accumulation of knowledge. Outdated knowledge dies out and is replaced by new knowledge. There is a concentration of knowledge and selection.

In 'advanced civilizations', on the other hand, knowledge is archived. Everything is stored in knowledge repositories, such as libraries or networks. It is accessible to many people and allows for extreme specialization. This specialization loses sight of the context. Arbitrary maxims become leitmotifs: Wealth, power, pleasure. Knowledge is instrumentalized to serve these maxims. We call this the freedom of science. Knowledge has been detached from the grand narratives and liberated. We call it secularized or modernized (Galileo).

Now we have this tower of accumulated knowledge. In a Babylonian confusion of languages, we no longer know where we want to go. We are breaking the master narrative and releasing micronarratives. We call this plurality or postmodern (Lyotard).

Much has been written about all of these. We have created a world that is wonderfully complex. There is a dazzling tolerance in many places, our creativity has been unleashed and our minds have been given wings. We have technology that allows us to transform our knowledge, our communication, our bodies, space and time. There is certainly no point in trying to turn back time. Not everything was better in the past.

Biological and mental knowledge repositories

What seems important to me is the direction of view. In the industrialized nations, we focus on technology. What is on the Internet is real. We have long since arrived in the hyperreal (Baudrillard). Only slowly are we (re)recognizing the complexity of biological and mental knowledge repositories. If knowledge is stored in living 'archives', then it is part of life. This does not mean that it is always good, on the contrary, it is probably value-neutral. But it is part of a complex system. However, we should not understand this 'system' in cybernetic terms. The aim is not decoding and imitation or simulation (biomimicry). Rather, the aim should be to reintegrate ourselves, to become part of nature and consciousness again.

I don't think this has to be a step backwards. I just doubt the belief in a technological singularity. The Silicon Valley ideology that the next big step will be to transfer consciousness to a hard disk, to integrate it into the network or hyperreality will really help us. For biological humans, it would be more of a nightmare. The question remains as to why we are striving for this. The dream of immortality is the driving force, in essence the preservation of the self. But it is precisely this illusion that needs to be overcome. If we succeed in doing so, whose part do we want to see ourselves as? Computer processors, nature and/or consciousness?

Der Beitrag An einer Utopie arbeiten erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

The Kena Upanishad describes how the self as such does not exist. Who sees in seeing, who hears in hearing? This cannot be answered. In the Christian tradition, a self has been constructed for this purpose. I see, I hear, cogito ergo sum, imago ergo sum.... What is this cogito (I think), the imago (I imagine)? The I that creates identity, has responsibility, acts and interacts.

It seems clear that thinking, if it is conscious of itself, needs a point of reference. I write this, you read this... But this point of reference is a consciousness that constitutes the self in the first place, as an illusion. Recognizing consciousness and overcoming the self is the central core of Eastern meditation. Focusing on the here and now, perceiving sensory impressions and understanding them as such is a central part of spiritual practice. But where does imagination come from? Why can I conjure up memories, be caught up by them? What is the force that controls thought and creatively brings forth something new?

Bringing this restless self to rest is the first step towards bliss, a step towards nirvana. And yet it is this self that allows us to be together with others, that gives us an awareness that there is a consciousness beyond our self.

Stages of consciousness

Consciousness is general, i.e. it exists as such in the world. We participate in it. We can participate in it unconsciously, selflessly and contemplatively, acting and interacting. A self can be constituted that is not conscious of itself, but is its point of reference. It can grow beyond itself. Consciousness can transcend, dissolve and immerse itself, merge and empathize. Consciousness travels in the world of sensory impressions, memories and ideas. It connects and disintegrates. When we sleep, where is it? Who or what is dreaming? In a dissociation, a schizophrenia or a delusion, is consciousness torn apart?

In contemplation, consciousness is the other, in transcendence it is the resting point of clarity. In volition it is agent and in interaction it is self.

Der Beitrag Imagination erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

I have been thinking about Marx for so many years. Who hasn't? The idea of an equal and solidary community, free of ideological superstructures or irrational will-o'-the-wisps. A world that knows only matter and sees in it a scientific, progressive movement. Their goal? A world in which humanity is perfect, i.e. harmonious, without envy and resentment, in solidarity and with equal rights, without alienation and heteronomy, which alone enables the development of the individual within a collective.

This dream of a better future, which, following the course of history, will inevitably be achieved - albeit in the future - encourages struggle and revolution, but for others it also encourages serenity: what can stand in the way of history?

Consciousness is determined by matter, according to Marx. The world as will and imagination, on the other hand, according to Schopenhauer and Kant, ultimately... Why should the world either arise from my imagination or have nothing to do with me? What is wrong with that?

The unfolding of the spirit - based on Hegel - why think so small? In the spirit of the Enlightenment, the aim was to establish a world view that is based purely on science. This protects against charlatans, ideologies, magicians, seducers, warriors and other deceivers.

We have chased away the spirit and replaced it with money, success and power. The wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita, the Sermon on the Mount, the shamans and seers, for example, can no longer be found in our cultural identity. They have been declassified as superstructures. The intersubjective, the anchor of one's own consciousness in another consciousness, leads to the path of meditation. Empathy not only shows us that we are not alone, but that we are part of something that goes beyond us.

The color on a canvas means more than just that. As in Jackson Pollock's last painting, it gives us a glimpse of the beginning. Heterogeneity arises from looking at it.

Der Beitrag Marx erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

When the Internet became accessible to the public, i.e. in the mid-1990s, there was a phenomenon of people putting their deepest secrets online. The anonymity, simplicity and speed were seductive. Confessions were quickly made, anonymity was largely preserved and there was perhaps even a little thrill that someone you knew might read the secrets without knowing who was behind them. These tele-confessions were cathartic. Today it's the other way around: everyone should see what you're doing without knowing what you're really thinking. Anonymity has also changed.

Writing something without using your own name is similar. Of course, anyone could find out the identity of the domain owner, but that's not the point. Public writing is exciting. Putting your own ego in the background and letting your thoughts organize themselves. It is perhaps even a kind of meditation, which is also very much about overcoming one's own ego consciousness to a certain extent and immersing oneself in a larger collective. This fascination also radiated from the Internet in the beginning. In the 60s, it was the cybernetic systems that stimulated these thoughts.

Many sci-fi books and films are based on this technical level of networking: Dune, Matrix, Neuromancer... There is, of course, a whole literary history of net literature. In Silicon Valley, this has developed into a 'technology spirituality' of radical rationality in the spirit of Ayn Rand in the form of a technical Tower of Babel. It has turned into a dystopia in which the individual becomes a slave to technology. Giorgio Agamben wrote about Homo Sacer. Our 'soul' becomes an economic object.

Der Beitrag Beichten erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Today I dreamt that I was cutting myself off. I changed something in my life because I could no longer go along with it. My dream provided me with an image that I could easily understand. Dreams have always preoccupied me. I dream a lot, colorful, whole stories, I work through situations, dream of things that I would like to do, but which are impossible in so-called reality.

I was at a conference a few years ago. There was a dream trauma researcher there who invited us to come together in the morning and explore collective dreaming. We associated images in order to penetrate a collective subconscious. It was rather playful, without any scientific pretensions. But it made us all think. Is there another reality that we can reach in this way? I find the idea exciting. More interesting than Freud's macho reduction of dreams to ancient images of sexuality. I always had a problem with Freud, that women were hysterical, that culture sublimated sexuality, that we all suffered from an Oedipus complex and so on. That's pretentious, indoctrinating, know-it-all, patriarchal, etc... Of course, that's very abbreviated now. C. G. Jung had more to say: the collective unconscious, a common visual language of human consciousness, an ocean of shared experience and wisdom. With Freud, everything seems to boil down to the fact that a therapist heals his patients because he knows the problems and puts them right in his patients. A bit like a mechanic fixing a car. The mechanic knows the bodywork and can fix the car if something has gone wrong or something has broken.

Why is it so difficult for us to imagine that there is a consciousness in which we merely participate? A consciousness that is capable of becoming aware of itself, but is not reduced to it?

Der Beitrag Träume erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Many communities around me are going through a stress test at the moment. The word midlife crisis is often used. I think it's a stupid word because it suggests that life, individual life, is in crisis. This perspective disturbs me. Why should life have a crisis? It seems more likely that communities are being called into question. A breakout, a desire for freedom, self-realization, wanting to catch up. This is another idea that is disturbing. Was the past wrong? That would be a worrying idea. How can the past be wrong?

Rather, perhaps something has changed. This change upsets the familiar, the stable, the status quo. The question is rather this: Why do I want to change and where do I want to go? Is the change I want to allow into my life a good thing? Only from this question does it make sense to cite the concept of crisis. What if the change is good, what if it is bad? Who has the crisis then?

We are constantly growing, growing out and beyond. We should support each other in this. Because this growth causes growing pains. It causes stress at the breaking points. This is where anger and disappointment, fear and insecurity arise.

Bringing about an external change is perhaps more of a skip. In this case, life may have been asleep for a little too long and not noticed the change. Mindfulness is required here. Listen to the growth in order to prevent a crisis.

Der Beitrag Wachsen erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

I am currently undergoing a metamorphosis. At a meeting the other day, someone said that this was a wonderful group of caterpillars. I was taken aback. He said, yes ... soon these will be butterflies.

A friend once said that metamorphosis is proof of God. How else could it be explained that a butterfly emerges from a caterpillar in purely evolutionary steps? Is such a leap in complexity even comprehensible in evolutionary terms? I am not a biologist and I was only interested in this as a thought experiment. I don't believe in a Christian God anyway.

However, the idea of metamorphosis has been with me ever since. Something very complex is transformed into something else extremely complex. I am interested in how this works with ideas. How can one idea give rise to another? Does this have anything to do with creativity? Does the 'old' idea have to die to make way for a new idea? Does the caterpillar die when it becomes a butterfly?

In the West we have the idea of the subject, thoughts arise from it, ideas are in it, its energy is the driving force... That seems unlikely to me. Is it not perhaps rather the case that it is a greater consciousness, a divine consciousness or absolute spirit, an immanence that acts cosmically? Isn't it perhaps more likely that everything has always existed simultaneously? All possibilities are real and we can only experience a small part of them?

Can we immerse ourselves in this great consciousness and become aware of our participation?

I've been asking myself a lot lately what I should do with 'my' old ideas. Should I write them down, preserve them, transform them, allow them to metamorphose and document them? It seems to leave its mark here on this blog.

Der Beitrag Metamorphose erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

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.

Der Beitrag Viele ichs erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Some time ago, I was talking to a friend about the fact that I was saying goodbye to many ideas. I told her that I - quite unscientifically - visit my memories and think about why I no longer find certain ideas interesting, that these are often ideas that I dealt with in my studies. Great ideas! From Kant and Hegel etc. She was quite taken with my story and asked if I was writing this down. I said: Why? I'm saying goodbye. She was disappointed. Did she want to check whether I was right to leave these ideas behind me? Did she want me to share myself so that others could follow, or did she just want me to become a fellow writer? SHE advised me to start a blog.

The idea I said goodbye to when I talked about it was no small idea. It was Kant's idea of the transcendental ego. The idea that there must be an ego that can accompany all my thoughts. This ego not only makes me aware of these thoughts, but also integrates them into an identity. At the same time, however, this ego is not merely part of my conscious world of experience, in which case it would be fleeting, lost in sleep. I realized on a long train journey to France that there must be something similar. An anchor point, so to speak. From here to Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit. However, I realized that I was no longer interested in idealism. Especially German idealism. Consciousness in Germany is romantic and dangerous. It is subjective.

That's why I now read books from India. I find cemeteries fascinating and suspicious. Strange anchorages.

Der Beitrag Abschied erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Ahen I returned 'home' from India for the first time, I looked at my library and saw that almost nothing in it interested me anymore. What had happened? What is in this library and what is not?

My library is that of a philosopher and art historian who has taught in Europe and the USA. It contains many books that deal with the discourses of modernism and postmodernism - theoretically, historically, analytically, comparatively... Many of them deal with the topic of representation. What is depicted, for what purpose and in what context?

But in this structure of representation lies a fundamental misunderstanding, an evil. It is what Plato calls a lie. I can't eat the painted apple. The still life serves reflection. However, what I take as the object of reflection is an image, a representation, and stands for something else that is 'truer'. So why, I ask myself, concern myself with representation?

Buddha

This question came to a head for me when I read Sri Aurobindo. For him, art is essentially devotion (bhakti):

"Not only the face, the eyes, the pose but the whole body and every curve and every detail aid in the effect and seem to be concentrated into the essence of absolute adoration, submission, ecstasy, love tenderness which is the Indian ideal of bhakti. These are not figures of devotees. But of the very personality of devotion. [...] Yet while the Indian mind is sized and penetrated to the very roots of its living and embodied ecstasy, it is quite possible that the Occidental, not trained in the same spiritual culture, would miss entirely the meaning of the image and might only see a man praying." (Sri Aurobindo on Indian Art)

Plato's caveman left the movie theater when he/she was freed by the philosopher. She turned around and left. My library is now in a place where I no longer live.

Der Beitrag Repräsentation erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

II grew up in the country where cars were invented. The roads and cars here seem safe, or at least everything is done to make them safe. The accident is anticipated, the risk is calculated, possible collisions are calculated and the damage is minimized through modular design, so they say. We want to be prepared for everything here.

This logic of hedging, risk calculation and prevention is why I want to leave this country again. There is no room for the unexpected; this is only staged in high culture. But it would be much easier to open up to the unpredictable. To give room to improvisation, to allow the unpredictable and the unseen. Experience certainly teaches us this. We learn from accidents to build in such a way that it will be less bad the next time, and if we don't do this, then lawyers are waiting to sue: I sit in a technically highly complex device, and if something happens, I first ask the designer whether he/she could not have known this beforehand and who is to blame.

After all, machines are there to make work easier or to expand our senses. But here they are embedded in the social sphere and negotiated as such. Technology and its interaction dominate the discourse.

It is refreshing to see that in many parts of the world, technology is simply technology. It is accepted in its imperfection. It is sometimes smilingly called fate.

- make do -

Der Beitrag Technik erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.