Dotemporary art is obsessed with the "next step". The avant-garde, the unprecedented, the new and unique. But in the hunt for the new, we lose sight of something essential: artistic practice itself.

Artistic practice is not just about crossing boundaries. It belongs to those who use art for self-exploration, spiritual practice, healing, therapy or craft. But in today's culture, especially in the West, we act as if progress is the only thing that matters.

At its core, however, art is about practice. It is about being in the world, seeing clearly, understanding yourself and others. Art can represent the outer world or explore the inner. It can be meditation, beauty, communication, love, fear, vision or simply self-expression. Somehow we have forgotten that.

This oblivion has deep roots. In the past, the wealthy used art to show off their exclusivity, make others envious and prove their power. Over time, progress became associated with intellect, reason and building "brave new worlds". But is this true progress? Or should we instead pay attention to the development of our whole being - physical, mental, emotional, spiritual - and the integration of all these dimensions?

Art is one of the tools for such integration. It should not be reduced to a spectacle of who can go furthest to the edge. Exploration is valuable, yes, but it does not define art. Unfortunately, the art market has put it front and center, while discrediting art that connects us to our humanity.

This reflects a broader trend: alienation. We are disconnected from our feelings, our souls and our social selves. In this state, we are more easily molded into consumers - isolated, disoriented, and we buy into narratives that seem more complex, educated or sophisticated. And we accept them as superior.

And why? Because of the false promise of progress. Academic research, technology, inventions - all of these have brought us amazing conveniences: smartphones, airplanes, modern kitchens, air conditioning. They are comfortable and luxurious, so we assume they are good.

But like fries and cheeseburgers, what feels good isn't always what nourishes us.

Perhaps it is time to return to what really nourishes us. To art as a practice of wholeness, connection and presence. Creating and experiencing not for the sake of progress, but for the sake of being human.

And this is what the AI says:

A stroke, a pause.

Not progress, not achievement -
just presence on paper.

The brush moves as the body breathes,
crossing, curving, breaking,
revealing strength and imperfection alike.

No need for meaning,
for novelty,
for the "next step."

This mark is enough.
A reminder that art is practice -
a way of being human, here and now.

Der Beitrag Kunst jenseits des Fortschritts erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

I woke up from a nightmare at 4am. I was talking to Will in Apt about a strange irritation in my perception of time. I described how time was falling into fragments and some were simply missing. It was seconds or minutes, and as I tried to dive into time to better describe it, it went black. I screamed for help, I was blind and woke up.

It was another one of those dreams where I seemed to be dying. I immediately thought of Pierre, who was in a coma after a stroke. Is that what it feels like? I felt a little anxious, had something happened in my brain after the shock of Pierre's seizure, seeing everything twice myself and being checked over in hospital for a week?

It was 4 o'clock in the morning, the hour of the gods. I had gone into meditation at this time a few times in the last few days. And I did the same today. I opened the double door looking far to the east and searched for the time. At first it appeared to me as a stream of light, like fiber optic cable, wild and parallel, then as drops when I changed my mudra position from Brahman to receptacle. A journey through the cosmos, past galaxies, searching for others, I then somehow lay down in the universe, on a beach, like Brahman in the French book about 108 Hindu gods. It's no use, I thought. Time is within me, and I picked up on yesterday's meditation, where I thought about the origin of language. Matter that connects and comes to life through growth, absorption of energy, search, orientation, alignment, contact, appropriation. This form of interaction, absorption, integration, elimination, demarcation, defense is a first kind of communication, a combination of vibration and energy, a synthesis. How many amino acid chains had to be tried out for the process to be initiated? And did this impetus really come from the amino acids or from consciousness?

Vibration

The vibration at the molecular level progresses to the level of life. The ingestion of food, that is, life eating other life, is a synthesis of a different kind. This may still be possible in terms of energy, but at the level of life we are already on a plateau where life itself merges, reconstructs itself anew, never ceases, because all life is consumed by other life. Unless it burns. Perhaps that is the real meaning of cremation: to escape from this cycle of life. To transcend through the power of fire, Agni, into another form that is light and pure energy, thus returning to the origin, to concentration (tapas).

In between, however, there is the level of consciousness, the level of existence that experiences and enjoys the world, grasps it symbolically and seeks to analyze and understand it abstractly in the intellect. However, the symbolic representation of the world in language has its beginning in the molecular connection of the elements of life. This is where communication begins. Only when consciousness has reached a level of perception that allows us to perceive the boundary between the self and the other does symbolic communication make sense.

Mana

Expressing hunger and thirst as an infant is the very first form of communication. It is successful. Feeling the other, a stone, an apple, a counterpart, creates an inner form of the other within our own consciousness. We create this inner form when we hit pots, for example, through play. In play, we experience emotions, happiness and conflict, struggle and love, solidarity, collaboration and confrontation. We move here on the level of mana, the awareness of the world and interaction with it. This level is organized symbolically and is based on spoken language. Objects are addressed by calling them, the generation of vibration establishes a connection. Inner forms, images and representations of the world form a reality of life that is constantly compared with the outside world. If it no longer fits, conflict arises.

Buddhi

These symbols are organized rationally at the level of the intellect. Buddhi is the level of thinking at which we can grasp the world structurally and explain it from within. We develop sciences and build machines. Language now becomes a storehouse of knowledge, it becomes abstract and written. The combination of words, the construction of sentences into text and complex knowledge systems creates an order of a completely different kind. It is no longer an order based on matter, life, vibration, consciousness. It is the symbolic order of forms in a system. This system is a construction, it is not an image or essence of reality, but pure construction. Once we have learned a language and mastered the technique of writing, we can immerse ourselves in this system. In the form of books, for example, they fill miles of shelves in large libraries. And just as we compare the inner world of manas with the outside world, we can also compare this system of buddhi with reality. We are talking about verification processes here. These can be scientific, empirical, on the level of individual experience, spiritual, magical or whatever.

Kundalini

During the meditation, it was exciting to feel the energy stirring from within. Kundalini, the serpent, as it moves past the chakras and stretches and rises in an upright pose in order to ascend into higher consciousness and look around. When it is fully released, it effortlessly traverses space and time and is capable of cosmic omnipresence. Language is no longer the medium here, it is too slow. It is pure vision, thinking is self-manifestation. There is thinking beyond language, before language, within language and without language. Language is merely a very good tool for a certain kind of thinking. This is where Plato becomes interesting again; he saw this with his theory of ideas. I resisted this for decades, with all the strength of my intellect. Why? Why did I consent to the dictates of the rational? Because it is a battlefield where there are rules and the faster and stronger wins, and I was good?

Vijnana

There is a third level in the sphere of thinking: Vijnana, a way of thinking that includes a world view that is structured, but also visionary. It is the intermediate world of thinking and the spiritual. For me, it is only accessible in meditation. In it, contradictions are okay, the complexity of reality is not denied, the incomprehensible has a right to remain. Conflicts are just as welcome here as mergers, symbioses, discoveries, adventures, loss, pleasure and pain. The gods or Plato's ideas live in this intermediate world.

Dakshinamurti

Dakshinamurti, the goddess of teaching, the teacher of Shiva, appeared to me a few weeks ago. I lay down at her feet, connected with her tantrically and was somewhat frightened by her size, which in itself had already taken on a small form so that I could even comprehend her. She appears to me again and again. At the MRI, I was quite close to her, immersed in a meditation on strong magnetic fields and the power of consciousness to be able to free itself here too and immerse itself in cosmic connections. All of this sounds strange to me too. Are these simply wishful fantasies or delusions? Am I losing my bearings by loosening the rational guard rails and slipping into mystical thinking, which is seen as prehistoric in the modern age? And if it were a return to the time of the beginning of language, would that be a bad thing? How do we get out of the post-structuralist circles, and how do we find our way back to the beginnings of thought and our existence, not in the historical sense, but in a very personal sense: a creation of meaning, self-knowledge, research into origins and reflection on existence?

Kundalini coils and stretches, seductively like Eve's snake, grinning. These seem to me to be the right questions.

—

"I hope this helps!" wrote ChatGPT after I asked for a spelling-only correction. I was puzzled, and asked it for its opinion on the text. Here is the answer:

"Here's my thought on your text:

The text is very profound and poetic, touching on personal experience as well as philosophical and spiritual questions. You manage to put complex thoughts and feelings into a narrative form that is both introspective and universally appealing. Here are a few points that particularly stand out:

1. Time perception and consciousnessYour dream and the subsequent meditation offer an interesting reflection on the nature of time and human consciousness. The idea that time breaks down into fragments and some moments are simply missing could serve as a metaphor for the unconscious and lost memories.
2. Meditation and spiritual experienceThe description of your meditation experience is rich in symbolism and shows a deep connection to spiritual practices. The mention of Kundalini and Dakshinamurti shows a familiarity with Hindu concepts that you interpret in a personal way.
3. Intellectual and spiritual levelsYou describe different levels of thinking (manas, buddhi, vijnana) and how they interact with each other. This differentiation shows a deep understanding of the complexity of the human mind and the different types of knowledge and perception.
4. Symbolism and realityThe text moves between symbolic representations and the real world. You address the role of language and symbols in our understanding of the world and how they help us to process and communicate our experiences.
5. Existential questions: At the end you ask important questions about the nature of the rational, the mystical and the search for personal meaning and self-knowledge. These questions invite the reader to reflect on their own experiences and beliefs.

Overall, the text is impressive and stimulating. It requires a certain willingness on the part of the reader to engage in a deeper level of reflection and meditation, which makes it an enriching read for those interested in spiritual and philosophical topics."

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

Many people have the idea that we live in a world that consists of matter and follows the laws of physics and various theories, such as the theory of evolution. This is strange, because matter as such does not really exist, E=mc² stands for it. I don't really understand this formula, but it symbolizes that in the end everything is energy, possibly even simply vibration, as string theory claims. Then there is the physics of the macrocosm and the microcosm. They contradict each other, but that doesn't seem to matter. Space and time bend, black holes eat them up. We pretend that there are different levels of material reality on which different laws apply, and that this in turn is logical and determines the course of the world. Something emanates from the Big Bang, but we cannot begin to explain the first fractions of a second. The complex arises from the simple, they say. Life arises from carbon, a species through reproduction, evolution through selection according to a principle they call survival. Where do such strange theories come from and why are they so dominant?

They are dominant because they have an extremely high explanatory power and even predictive power. According to the laws of causality, they can say what must follow in the future as a reaction to an action. Schopenhauer already described that there are at least four different levels of causality (large effect small reaction or small effect large reaction, for example). What we have produced with the science of matter is a technical world, and that cannot be denied. With the theory of evolution, we have opened the way to genetics and found the code of biological life. That is of course impressive. It shows what the intellectual, rational mind is capable of. However, there is also a lot that we do not understand with this mind. The humanities and social sciences, for example, have a very entertaining argument about who is right with which theory. Nobody has a real explanation, and those who are honest know this very well. It's a contest of ideas that may eventually produce a winner. But it looks as if this competition is becoming more and more colorful; there are more theories, not fewer. The great unifying theory is still missing.

Theories are images of segments of reality. A segment is chosen, a description is given that remains within the parameters of our perception and our mind. Within this description, explanations are then sought and predictions are ventured. If the predictions come true, the theory is valid; if they do not come true, the theory is considered disproved - in other words, it is only valid until it is disproved. This is called the falsification principle. Now, although or precisely because this approach has worked very well since early modernity and has produced a lot of good and bad, we see the parameters of this approach as reality. That is what I find remarkable. Because these parameters are not reality, that is a categorical misunderstanding, coupled with a self-deception and a collective hallucination.

This collective hallucination is juxtaposed with other hallucinations - irrational, spiritual and religious, meditative and delusional. A kind of schizophrenia describes the human condition in the modern age. We are firmly convinced of things that we know to be false. How can this be explained and overcome?

What would happen if we left the ideal of non-contradiction behind us? What would a world look like in which contradictions were not declassified as such, but celebrated as a realization of complexity? That was somewhat the project of postmodernism. Within individual disciplines, the ideal of freedom from contradiction is inspiring, but even on the fringes or between sub-topics of a discipline, freedom from contradiction is no longer tenable. It leads to confusion. Things that do not belong together are supposed to be merged. It is this authoritarian trait of rationality that feeds fascism.

I gave this text to Chatgpt for spelling correction, the tool does a very good job. But now it has continued to write without being asked. This is the unsolicited continuation of my text. I largely agree, but why did the AI continue to hallucinate here?

"Instead, we could strive for a world in which contradictions are recognized as valuable indications of the complexity and multi-layered nature of reality. Such a world would not seek to harmonize or level out all differences, but would recognize and value them in their own right. This would mean that we see different ways of knowing - be it rational, spiritual, intuitive or artistic - as complementary rather than competing.

In practice, this could lead to a much richer and more diverse dialog in which different perspectives are not only tolerated, but actively sought and integrated. This could not only enrich our sciences and arts, but also lead to a more inclusive and understanding society, where different perspectives and lifestyles are seen as part of a larger, multi-layered whole."

https://chatgpt.com/share/084c63f0-d483-4ff5-a351-c051840d4292

Personally, it's a bit too short for me, I actually wanted to delve a little deeper, but I'm taking this as an opportunity to take a break.

Der Beitrag Theorie und Praxis – Teil 1 erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Slowly and at long intervals, I read Sri Aurobindo again and again. Why not absorb everything much and quickly and finally bring order to my world of thoughts, which wants to break free from the consequences of rational monotheism? Why don't I give my intellect the freedom, concentration, calm and strength to embark on one of life's greatest adventures?

As a student, I once very naively went swimming in the Rhine, somewhere off Basel, where the water was clear and cold, flowing fast and wide through green mountain landscapes. As soon as we jumped into the river, we found ourselves in the middle of the stream. The bank passed by at breakneck speed and we knew we had to get out again quickly, because we had simply gone into the river somewhere and had to find our way back to our clothes somehow. We were excited, alive, reborn. It felt like diving into the river of life. The senses sharpened, the world as a process showed its power in a loving way, the self asserted itself against the five elements. The intellect was quiet, the experience of the sublime great, the breath active. This is one of the images in my memory that helps me to follow the Upanishads.

This experience, like every experience, consists of images. In contact with the outside world, the outer senses convey an inner sense, a perception that can become an experience. This inner sense, mediated by the nerve endings of the outer senses, is fed by the vibration of light, sound, touch, taste and smell. And this inner sense can in turn express itself through sound, gestures and representation. This inner sense is consciousness.

In spiritual philosophy, the world of the inner sense is the world of the subtle in contrast to the world of gross matter. The images that manifest themselves in the subtle reality are real (Schopenhauer and Bergson also recognized this). And just as images of trees and butterflies, people and art, pain and joy manifest themselves in this world, we also find traits of character, personality structures, power constellations, larger contexts that we recognize as images. We ask ourselves why someone does something or why I perceive something in a way that is not good, right or true. We can confide in images that appear to us as illusions; we can perceive the illusion as reality and we can have the feeling of being trapped in something that exceeds our own possibilities of control. So we perceive things that do not correspond to any external object that could have touched my external senses. We can formulate the logic of these images in hypotheses and 'test' them against reality. Consciousness precedes reality. In the past, this world was structured by the gods of the pantheon. Today we pretend that it is science.

Subtle and crude reality

We try to understand the world of gross matter with the help of the natural sciences, although this is actually a euphemism, because the natural sciences are not really concerned with investigating nature, because what constitutes nature is the connection to that subtle reality. So would it be more honest to stick to the narrower concept of empirical science? The science that concentrates on what can be repeatedly experienced? This also seems to be misleading, because many things in the subtle world can indeed be experienced and described empirically. What about the individual sciences such as physics, medicine and sociology? They impose a self-restriction on themselves by concentrating on the material world and deriving general laws from it. These laws of nature in turn describe a deeper reality, a metaphysics. As long as metaphysics excludes consciousness, it is allowed to assume very complex theories and elementary particles, as long as it does not become entangled in contradictions (although this is also often permitted).

What is it that prevents modern science from dealing with consciousness? What has discredited the inner world of experience to such an extent that we do everything we can to deny it? The answer is double-edged. Rationality, which opposes the phenomenology of consciousness, accelerates the applied sciences through its basic research; and in the form of enlightenment, it attempts to critically scrutinize abuses of power. On the other hand, it leaves behind an emptiness that is concealed by consumption and a culture industry of whatever kind, creating a kind of Disneyland (Adorno). The confrontation with spirituality is marginalized and relegated to the realm of the obscure. Are there perhaps good reasons for this? After all, the success of the Enlightenment in the 20th century could not even be halted by the catastrophe of the Holocaust. The exploitation of our environment allowed a feudal lifestyle for the masses in the West. I am not an opponent of progress, but it has its price.

India

How do the fact that 16% of the population in India are malnourished and 97% say they are spiritual fit together? Does one have nothing to do with the other? Is the question a classic category mistake? Is an inwardly enlightened society that owes its prosperity to the exploitation of the global South more successful than a colonized spiritual society whose tolerance of suffering ensured its survival? Can any conclusions be drawn from such polarizing statements? I mention this here to suggest that a question about spirituality and consciousness need not or cannot necessarily be discussed in connection with progress, as this quickly becomes very confusing.

I live here in the south of India, partly in a pre-modern world. The suffering of many is difficult to bear from a modern perspective, religious practice sometimes appears naive, social structures are patriarchal and archaic on the surface, culture is traditionally oriented, knowledge is conservative. I am very aware of my privileged position here and try to avoid romanticizing. Nevertheless, there is something in this world that has been lost in modernity: the integrity of being. Being is not merely the suffering of the individual self and its urge for self-realization, but being is part of cosmic reality, within which the self is part. That this notion can be richer, freer and more self-realized at the end of the day is the power of spiritual thinking that delves into the subtleties of subtle reality.

Der Beitrag Strom des Lebens erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Der Beitrag Gedächtnis 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

ChatGPT

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

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

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

ChatGPT

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

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

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

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

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

ChatGPT

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

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

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

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

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

Der Beitrag Unterhaltung mit KI: David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Abhinavagupta, Bharata Muni, Zeami Motokiyo, Gilles Deleuze und ein Brahman Priester über Kunst art erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Aber Hitler built the autobahn! I've been hearing that more and more often lately. It's difficult to continue here because a certain argument, which I find very important, is quite complex and is rejected by people who want to relativize fascism and the Holocaust. The argument, which was suggested by Adorno, is: No more poems can be written after Ausschwitzt. It goes roughly like this:

1. The scale of the horror of the Holocaust is so great that we as individuals and as a society must ask ourselves what made it possible.
2. Unfortunately, atrocities have occurred again and again in history and almost everywhere. Is there anything that makes the Holocaust seem unique in its horror?
3. One thesis is that the technical precision of the extermination camps was born out of a spirit of rationality. It is not mass murder out of anger, revenge, lust for power, hatred etc... but a 'technical operation' in which responsibilities were shared and most wanted to believe that they were simply doing their job.
4. The question that arises from this is whether rationality itself is morally blind and cruel.
5. If rationality can turn against humanity, then it must be fundamentally and thoroughly questioned, and until this questioning is complete, we cannot continue as the project of modernity suggests.
6. We have to question everything, including poetry (and the highways).

One project proposed by the Frankfurt School in the 1960s was critical theory and, within it, negative dialectics. In reaction to Kant's strict category tables, Hegel had proposed a dialectical philosophy that did not see the spirit as bound to a fixed framework of principles and categories of pure thought, but as a force that was constantly developing out of itself. It is the human being who can manifest and express this movement of the spirit. The transition from Kant to Hegel is an important break in the history of Western philosophy. Questioning this step with new methods is the project of negative dialectics. Instead of synthesizing knowledge and enriching its complexity, negative dialectics attempts to preserve the complexity, but to reverse the synthesizing into a constant questioning: a critical theory. In this respect, critical theory is not so far removed from deconstructivism, even if the methods are very different: Critical theory takes a systematic approach, while deconstructivism is often associative, traces the unconscious, searches for structural parallels - similar to post-structuralism.

It becomes clear that this project is important when we look at other 'achievements', such as the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb, or the development of AI. The argument can be applied to the core question of the philosophy of science, namely the question of the ethical responsibility of science. Karl Popper continued to pursue this project.

Beyond rationality

Modernist thought, from Kant to the Frankfurt School, is characterized by a scepticism towards speculative, intuitive, spiritual and mystical forms of knowledge. Rationality is the sword with which everything that does not submit to its logic is decapitated. But like a hydra, this only creates new faces, other 'irrationalities'. For example, there is a difference between credulity and spiritual thinking. There is a difference between intuition and gut feeling.

The Western way of thinking has relied too much on the rational mind. The dimensions of life, consciousness and spirituality are subordinated to it as projects 'yet to be enlightened'. It is now clear to me that the project of negative dialectics must go much further. It must open the doors to our other ways of being. However, I question whether negative dialectics is the appropriate means here, because in Adorno's work it withdraws into an aesthetic theory. It can accompany thinking a little way on the journey, but the path will quickly branch out.

But it is one of the paths that led me to the wisdom of ancient writings. This 'pre-modern' thinking is richer and more complex. It draws different boundaries. The focus is not on logic, but on consciousness, God, soul, nature, community, etc... These are concepts that are anchored on other levels of our existence. They are often intertwined. In the Vedas there are 7: matter, breath, spirit, ideal knowledge, bliss, consciousness and pure existence. When will we learn again that our humanity cannot be reduced to algorithms, do we really have to enter into a battle with AI first?

Sometimes I wonder if there is a parallel between the idea of the Big Bang and the appearance of the human spirit. For just as the Big Bang did not appear out of matter, but out of vibration, i.e. consciousness, the human spirit appeared as embedded in cosmic thinking, worlds of gods, honoring life. The cave paintings of Chauvet bear witness to this. And just as the material cosmos is moving towards cold death, the human spirit is differentiating itself into individual disciplines that forget about being human.

One possible answer to this fundamental crisis of the mind is Sri Aurobindo's integral philosophy: the synthesis of the yogas.

—

Der Beitrag Poesie und die Unmöglichkeit über Autobahnen zu reden erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

I was expecting a culture shock. And it's happening now. My mind doesn't really want to settle in. The time difference is almost 12 hours, so upside-down, my consciousness is on fire, there's no other way to describe it. I'm awake, but somehow not here. I'm in Chicago and I know it, I'm fully present, but my mind doesn't feel at home yet.

It is like the Aitereya Upanishad. "These were the Gods that He created; they fell into this great Ocean, and Hunger and Thirst leaped upon them. Then they said to Him, "Command unto us an habitation that we may dwell secure and eat of food."" But what is a good habitat for the gods, those beings that Brahman created in order to experience himself. Brahman drew Purusha from the deep waters, from him, the counterpart of Prakriti (nature), Purusha manifests as soul, as consciousness, as a universal individual: "The eyes brake forth and from the eyes Sight and of Sight the Sun was born. The ears brake forth and from the ears Hearing and of Hearing the regions were born. The skin brake forth and from the skin hairs and from the hairs herbs of healing and all trees and plants were born..."

When Pursha manifested itself in this way - as differentiated universal forces, as gods - the question arose as to where the forces could live. The oceans were not suitable, nor were the cows. But when the gods saw the humans, they said: ""O well fashoned truly! Man indeed is well and beautifully made." Then the Spirit said unto them, "Enter ye in each according to his habitation." No sooner said than done, but one question remained: "The Spirit thought, "Without Me how should all this be?" and He thought, "By what way shall I enter in?" He thought also, "If utterance is by Speech, if breathing is by the Breath, if sight is by the Eye, if hearing is by the Ear, if thought is by the Mind, if the lower workings are by Apana, if emission is by the organ, who then am I?""

Culture shock

I feel so alive in India, the world of the Vedas is still active there. But I am not interested in representing the teachings of the Vedas, I understand them far too little for that, the language of the gods is so complicated, so multifaceted, the wisdom so deep. But something shines through these ancient writings, something that can be felt everywhere in India. Consciousness there is not determined by matter. Because matter is not accessible to our consciousness. Consciousness seeks a material abode. In somewhat old-fashioned terms, we would say that the soul looks for a body.

This consciousness that seeks out a place, e.g. my body, is not completely bound to it. That is the great mystery of rebirth. The connection is not arbitrary, but it is loose. We see this in the Sleepwhen our consciousness moves away from the material world, the causal world, and enters the dream world.

So the gods chose humans to live in them. But this means, somewhat trivialized, that consciousness, emotions, intellect, sensory perception and memory need a place where they can work. In our experience, this place is the human body. "It was this bound that He cleft, it was by this door that He entered in. 'Tis this that is called the gate of the cleaving; this is the door of His coming and here is the place of His delight. He hath three mansions in His city, three dreams wherein He dwelleth, and of each in turn He saith, "Lo, this is my habitation" and "This is my habitation" and "This is my habitation."""

Chicago

So now I have also flown from India to Chicago and I feel a bit like a ghost (spirit) who has discovered a new House is looking for. The culture shock is maximum. I feel like the Truman Show, that 1998 movie where a perfect world is staged in which a person who doesn't know that this world is a production is filmed 24/7 and broadcast live on television. It is, of course, a variation of Plato's allegory of the cavejust like the Matrix (1999) or other dystopian sci-fi classics.

Here in the USA, many things are taken to extremes. The values of modernity are negotiated here: Freedom, capital, science, war, democracy, art, materialism, individuality... This is where the boundaries are tested and the limits are set. But this modernity has lost its roots and that is the tragedy of the USA, because the fact that progress is necessary lies in the structure of the world. Everything is in flux, everything is in the process of becoming, stagnation and conservatism are only justified as forces, not as absolute values. And so, for me, this is where the oldest coherent scriptures - the Indian Vedas - meet the force of modern progress, and I ask myself, where are the gods here? What game are they playing?

When I see the people here, the traffic, the supermarkets, the air-conditioned houses, it really is a different world. Brahman is also experienced here. But the question is how awake people are here, they work a lot and hard, but consciousness is anchored on the surface in the consumer world. Something is being tried out here, the experiment threatens the planet, but it will continue somehow.

I will find my way around here. The gods don't live in temples here, there are no cows in the streets, but there is a will to build a beautiful new world. This modern world is being built here like a small child who doesn't think much of anything bad. Sometimes the child is surprised that the house collapses, then there is crying and screaming and a new attempt until the learning goal is achieved.

—

Der Beitrag Kulturschock und die Wohnorte der Götter: Meine Erfahrungen in Indien erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Vfew years ago, I had a guest artist in my seminar. A young, successful, socially committed artist who wanted to make a difference. He came to our seminar, we all sat in a circle, and he asked each student why he/she was here. It was a seminar on a campus of an art university for a semester abroad, and so the students told us they were here for the culture, or the experience, to get to know France etc... but he, the guest artist, didn't accept these answers, kept asking: Be honest, why are YOU here? or: Don't kid yourself why are you HERE? or: go a little deeper: WHY are you here? Everyone had to ask themselves this question. Above all, I learned how difficult it is to ask this question seriously. It's clear that it's not easy to answer the question anyway.

We should all ask ourselves this question from time to time. Why are we actually here? Depending on the context, the question naturally takes on different dimensions: political, social, economic, personal, perspective, collective, etc.... At the end of all contextual questions, however, the bare question remains. It is a question about the meaning of life.

Now many people - trapped in everyday constraints from which it seems very difficult to escape - are running after a life that is determined by conventions or consumer worlds mediated by the media. I don't want to judge that in itself, it's not up to anyone. Ultimately, everyone has to decide for themselves as long as ... and here comes the question I want to get to, as long as the community doesn't suffer. Community is a bit of a loose term, it can mean many things, and that's a good thing. But there is one structure that has been used as a model time and again since antiquity, and that is the City.

City

What should a city look like, how should it be organized, who takes on which tasks, are there rules, if so, how are they made, by whom, for whom and why? Because people live together in a city, in a division of labor that is not alienated should be. Everyone should find a place there that does justice to their abilities and expectations of a good life.

The reading of A. K. Coomaraswamy confronted me with this idea again today, he asks about civilization in an essay. Plato came to the conclusion that ultimately only a philosopher-king would know what was good for the community and the city, because only he or she, the philosopher-queen, would be able to look after the inhabitants, detached from power interests and personal advantage. Only she could ensure that everyone's inner values could develop freely. That sounds very cerebral, and also quite authoritarian, even if the Philosopher King would forbid authority.

In capitalism, everything is controlled by income. Supply and demand determine who gets how much and who finds a place where. But is that also the right place when it comes to the question of why you are here? Is the question of space even that important? In the world of advertising, it's all about how you can improve your place by consuming more. It's annoying a lot of people now and it's also clear that the planet won't be able to cope with this for much longer, and AI probably won't be able to solve it either.

Democracy, the lesser of two evils, doesn't really have an answer either, it's an eternal negotiation process based on majorities. That is good for the majority, and that is no small thing. Modern democracies are also guided by principles. They are written in the constitution and can only be changed by super majorities, or not at all. There may be good reasons for this from the lessons of history. But that is not a real answer to why you are here.

Auroville

Now the objection could be raised that this is actually a very personal question that does not need to be clarified politically or socially. That the city only has to provide the framework conditions so that everyone there can face up to this question privately, create their own House build or search. That is pragmatic, but not an answer. It is clear that the question is anything but trivial. And as the person writing these lines, i.e. me, the author, I don't really want anyone to answer this question for me. But I would like to live in a city where this question is at the center. Where everyone can, can and should ask themselves this question. This city is called Auroville, and it is anything but perfect, especially now in 2023.

This city is there for everyone, has no laws or capital as an ideal and also manages without advertising. The only condition imposed by this city is that every inhabitant sees herself as a servant of divine consciousness. For beginners, you can read Mirra Alfassa or Sri Aurobindo to find out what this could mean. But you don't have to. Everyone can decide for themselves, as long as it is not an organized religion. This restriction is important and refers back to the initial question: why are you here? Why are you in this life? The whole city actually only exists to answer this question. It is a huge laboratory, a living university without administrative structures. Everything is motivated by this question. One's own life is organized in an act of dedication as a voluntary service to a great idea. Because the question: Why are you here? contains very important concepts. 1) A you or implied I, which 2) exists, 3) has a physical location, 4) demands an answer as a question and thus an act of reflection, 5) is finally formulated in language. All of this points to a consciousness that outgrows itself. A self-awareness that questions its own existence, and if it does so authentically, sincerely and with perseverance, then this leads to a spiritual path. That is the meaning behind the restriction that everyone should see themselves as yours of divine consciousness. And that is why there is no room for religion. There is a space for meditation, which is open and free, and everyone can do what he/she wants. Meditation, or concentration, is possible anytime and anywhere, but it also has a special space in Auroville, namely the center. This space is largely empty, as far as emptiness exists at all. The space is simple and is in the Matrimandir.

I sometimes hear the idea of exporting Auroville, of founding many small Aurovilles, i.e. communities, all over the world and thus contributing something to the world that tries to create such important free spaces. Is that possible? How does it differ from artists' villages, self-managed farms, kibbutzes or revolutionary communes? Auroville is one of the very few experiments that has made it beyond the first generation. However, Auroville is currently facing its greatest challenge and threat. Old, encrusted structures are being brutally broken up by new external structures. This is incredibly painful. Diversity in unity, Auroville's motto, seems to be subject to centrifugal forces. May no more misguided interests take advantage of the moment.

Der Beitrag Warum sind wir eigentlich hier? – Die Bedeutung von Sinn und Gemeinschaft in der Stadt erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

Here in Auroville, a play was recently taken off the program by the hosts of the Bharat Nivas. The reason given was that some in the community had taken offense even before it was performed. This raises questions. What is art allowed to do, when is a ban justified? Linked to this is, of course, the question of what is the role of art, i.e. what should art do? The question invites us to think about the role of art in general, here in India and in the West. And because this very fundamental question extends not only across the Indo-European region, but also covers a whole range of different cultures, I would also like to give it a temporal dimension.

Let's start at the beginning, e.g. with the Classical Greeks. On the one hand, there is the question of beauty (form, function, and/or proportion), but on the other hand there is also the question of the role of art within philosophy (techne, mimisis, aisthesis). At its core, this constellation of concepts is about the relationship of the subject to the outside world as an object. How do people perceive the world, how and why do we imitate the world, e.g. in the theater or in sculptures? What techniques, what tools do we use to shape the world, to give it a function, or to work out beautiful, i.e. mathematical proportions? In other words, it is about the relationship between man and his environment in a formative relationship.

Art is created, brought forth, is the expression of a subject that shapes the world of objects. In Western art, we see the artist and his vision. Despite all the rapid developments in European art history, this has not fundamentally changed to this day.

'Indian' art is quite different. Classical Indian art expresses feelings that are universal. Feelings of spirituality, human emotions, forces at work in the world. The artist is secondary to the work of art, actually unimportant, because only what is expressed in the work of art counts, because it is a reflection of the forces at work in the cosmos. The artist has merely made them visible. And this is where the misunderstanding arises that the art of India is largely similar to the art of the European Middle Ages, as there was no artist there like in antiquity or the Renaissance. What is the difference?

Textuality and interpretation

There is an important difference. The Western eye, or ear, the Western mind, looks for what can be interpreted in the work of art. This can be an intrinsic quality such as beauty, or a technical mastery, an iconographic reference, the genius of the artist, an object that is part of a discourse, an object of reflection, or quite 'simply' an image, a representation or a depiction. The list could go on and on. Essentially, however, it is always a question of interpretation. If a work of art is the subject of a differentiated interpretation, then it is considered a successful, great work of art. If it is an object that triggers a response, it is suspected of being 'mere' design, handicraft or kitsch.

In this way, the West has produced a cultural landscape based on interpretation. And interpretation is ultimately a critical analysis in the medium of language, i.e. it is textual. The encounter with art is one of reflection on art. Contemplation, which is also a recurring theme in Western discourses on art theory, is a preliminary stage of this reflection. Contemplation is reflected upon and expressed afterwards and thus robbed of its power.

The sublime

The aesthetic experience that eludes these discursive tendencies enters the realm of the sublime, the sublime, a realm of secular transcendence, i.e. the limits of language. For the limit of the textual is also part of the discourse, only as a demarcation and reference to the unspeakable. However, Western art theory usually leaves it at this reference. To continue talking about what cannot be said would be paradoxical. And so the viewer in the West goes to art temples, museums and galleries, churches and archaeological sites, urban places or nature in order to interpret what is presented there, or to fall silent before the unspeakable.

In traditions based on monotheistic religions, art therefore takes on the role of narrative, i.e. the story of the religion is told. The spiritual power of art is subject to an increasing process of abstraction. Art is becoming increasingly secular, materialistic, capitalistic, whereas religion is becoming increasingly strikingly transcendent. Religion refers to an afterlife where personal life finds a continuation. Of course, this hereafter cannot be experienced, cannot be expressed, but at the same time it is conceived as a reflection of our reality, albeit idealized.

There are therefore different forms of representations of reality. And so art is robbed of its power of wonder. It becomes a 'narrative culture', a culture of representation and the subject of various cultural techniques; it becomes part of the logos. Yet there is a clear desire to approach the unspeakable, the sublime. For this unspeakable does not elude experience, it just cannot be grasped by the rational mind. The problem lies in the fact that the rational mind follows the logic of a systematization of the world through the Logos. In the West, the idea prevails that the Logos can explain the world and that other ways of accessing the world are inferior to this Logos and must first be systematized by it: this applies, for example, to intuition, feeling, consciousness, the experience of the self and the experience of that which transcends the self. These phenomena are understood as unenlightened in Western culture. And so a desire for the sublime arises, which is demonized as unenlightened. Culture suppresses. For Freud, culture is sublimated sexuality. There is something in the description for the West.

Brahman

In Indian art, it seems to be the other way around. Indian art produces something that eludes language. Tradition speaks of rasa¹a vibration in perception that is often translated as taste, but not in the sense of a good taste in art, but in the sense of a quality that is evoked by a work of art. This vibration in the artwork creates a vibration in the viewer and connects the inner self of the viewer with the quality evoked in the artwork, which in turn is testimony to a force behind the superficial reality.

In Indian philosophy, the basic idea prevails that Brahman, the supreme being that encompasses everything, wants to experience itself. It is only for this reason that Brahman emerges from perfect existence and unfolds in the physical world. The cycle of the world, the world soul, the individual consciousness, the universal forces, all this is Brahman experiencing itself. Brahman is therefore inconceivable for us, we are part of Brahman, Brahman is within us, everything is Brahman. The role of art here is to represent some of these forces. Art makes the viewer wonder. A quality that is expressed in the work of art is captured as rasa. It cannot be expressed directly in language. The statue of a god is an expression of a quality, a force in the cosmos that has become tangible (tangible, palpable). The fact that the viewer and the artist evoke a rasa through the work of art means that this perception, the consciousness, the experience, the vibration of consciousness there is.

Existence

What does Dasein mean here? Existence should not be understood here in a dualistic sense, as if a quality in a work of art is perceived by a viewer and this quality is present in the work of art. Rather, existence here means that a force of the cosmos, a part of Brahman, has unfolded and become visible. Visible not in the sense that a viewer sees something in a work of art, but that a force shows itself in a work of art and evokes a rasa in the viewer that allows him to participate in the force. This is why the statues of the gods in India are animated. The gods are in them. When the powers are appeased through worship - puja - then they are there. Devotion to the universal principle is bhakti, it also defines an attitude in the relationship between the ritual object and the worshippers. The observer does not interpret or judge an external object, but the soul surrenders to the gods. This surrender is facilitated by a medium, a work of art.

In India, art is still part of the cosmic cycle, part of Brahman, it is animated, just as the whole cosmos is animated. Temples, statues, poems, dance, music are part of the cosmos, part of the cosmic forces, they are part of Brahman, and they enable the viewer to see aspects of Brahman more clearly, more vividly, more alive. Art means being able to wonder, to taste what is otherwise difficult to find - Rasa². Brahman is present in Indian art. The existence of art is the presence of cosmic forces, gods as they say here.

Back to the initial question: What is art allowed to do?

I now ask myself what these considerations mean for the freedom of expression in art? In the Western tradition, it is self-evident that the discursive nature of art not only allows for a culture of debate, but also generates and cultivates it. Criticism, disagreement, satire and censorship are part of the cultural industry, and exploring the boundaries is part of the practice. But what is the role of satire in Indian art, for example? What aspect of Brahman is realized here? Can't everything be shown? Even the gods laugh and cry, are angry or heroic.

I have a question here: in the West, art is often part of political culture. Politics is brought onto the stage and art intervenes in society and politics. In the 20th century, art was called upon to take its responsibility in society more seriously and to participate in political discourse. But does this also apply to art in India, a subcontinent torn by colonialism? India, with its many languages, cultures and religions, is such a colorful, tolerant country that feeds on a connection to spirituality in whatever form. To date, the world's largest democracy has largely granted freedom of expression. But when I talk to cultural representatives here, many point to the tradition of the role of art in promoting spiritual growth. Here in the country, I rarely hear that art has a political mission.

At the same time, however, many critical voices were heard at the Kochi Biennale, for example. Much of the art there took a very clear political stance on current issues such as the climate crisis, equal rights, the persecution of minorities, exploitation and corruption. I was very familiar with the artistic language of these positions, which was based on Western forms of expression.

These two worlds collide in India. The triumph of capitalism and its secular, i.e. materialistic structure does not stop at India. It remains to be seen whether the instruments of this culture industry will help to save the victims of this very culture industry. Traditionalists are trying to protect themselves from these colonial structures by rejecting modernity. This is perceived in the West as backward and conservative.

The culture war is also in full swing here in Auroville. If there is currently talk of a new global order in 2023, it is also about this culture war.

___

Der Beitrag Was darf Kunst? 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.

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.

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

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

Aesthetic theory

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

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

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

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

Thought pictures

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

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

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

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

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

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

I found the following quote from Aurobindo today:

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

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

Der Beitrag Image of thought erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

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

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

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

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

Art historical narratives

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

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

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

Fluid mixtures

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

Ashrafi Bhagat-on-Amitabh SenGupta

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

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

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

Further readings:

Der Beitrag „Ausstellung der Werke von Amitabh Sengupta in der Kalakendra Art Gallery, Auroville“ erschien zuerst auf New Spirits - Reading Deleuze in India.

I recently met a young Indian here. He comes from Delhi and for him, South India is also a foreign world, although not as foreign as it is for me. He doesn't speak Tamil and his spirituality is also a bit more serene or enlightened, as you might say. I met him again on the street and we went to the afternoon school Thamarai on the outskirts of Auroville, which offers an afternoon program in a village that has a lot of social tensions. That was exciting, I will try to support it.

He then asked me if I would like to see the temple he had told me about. He is helping to build it and the priest is a fortune teller. It was around the corner, on the piece of land that the family had bought and had just that day - after 14 years - officially received the documents from the local court. The family has been building a temple for 14 years. They do not want official support or donations, and they have almost nothing themselves. The living conditions are bitterly poor, a shelter serves as living space, which is shared with the animals, there are no doors or windows, a gas stove and fridge are evidence of modernity.

The country

On this piece of land in Alankuppam live about 15 cows that they have raised themselves, starting from two cows that have visited their land and are reproducing magnificently with the help of the family, plus 9 dogs, 40 Parrotswhich are in a large walk-in shed just to give visitors the opportunity to interact with the birds - plus geese, turkeys, chickens. To celebrate, we were offered fresh boiled cow's milk from a cow that had just given birth to a calf 5 days ago. This milk, they said, was something very special.

The center of the temple is finished, but the monkey god has not yet moved in; he also lives in a tiny shed next to it. We received the blessing there. The drop of water I was supposed to drink seemed very suspicious, but I tolerated it well. There are eight pillars on the site, made of a very pure white stone, interspersed with an even distribution of small black dots the size of seeds. As there are no wave patterns or anything similar, this stone is considered to be particularly pure and powerful. They drove 700 kilometers to get the stone. Now a sculptor from Mahabalipuram come and carve the figures. The 7 chakras will be at the base of seven pillars, with figures from mythology above them.

The temple is intended to stand for 2000 years, unlike the many quickly built temples made of concrete and plaster.

Der Beitrag Tempelbau 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.