Narrating the Catastrophe: An Artist’s Dialogue with Deleuze and Ricoeur

Narrating the Catastrophe

For Alan, India and Finn – my family

Narrating the Catastrophe

An Artist’s Dialogue with Deleuze and Ricoeur

Jac Saorsa

intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA

First published in the UK in 2011 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2011 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2011 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by

any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or

otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the

British Library.

Cover designer: Persephone Coelho

Copy-editor: Macmillan

Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire

ISBN 978-1-84150-460-5

Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Chapter 1: Act and Form

Introduction: first words – The journey begins –A meaningful psychosis – What is philosophy? – What is art? – The nature of the concept – The concept visualised – What is science? The pre-eminence of the rhizome over the metaphor – Root, stem and rhizome – 1st Articulation – The rhizome as a conceptual construct: map and tracing

2nd Articulation: Interpreting Process in the Flux: The Return of Professor Challenger

Chapter 2: Lost Worlds, Unfamiliar Landscapes: Conceptualising the Text

The Text and the ‘Other’ – Language – Hermeneutics – Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) – Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) – Hermeneutics and Visual Understanding Hans George Gadamer (1900–2002) – Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005)

3rd Articulation: The Dance of the Metaphor

Chapter 3: Language and the Line: The Geometrical Abstract Line of Becoming

Drawing on Conversation: Introduction – The relevance and irrelevance of language – Textual bilingualism – Interlanguage – Structure and the interpretation of the text – Depth – From looking to seeing: Alice and the architectural illusion – Narrative identity and ‘The Idiot’

Chapter 4: Drawing Out Deleuze

Documenting the Stone: The artist’s voice – Practice and process: i: a passion for the line – ii: process and its histories – iii: the phenomenographical stone – iv: the drawing act – v: time, movement, becoming, cause, effect and ‘confatalia’ – The shift: structure to figuration.

4th Articulation: Mapping the Mark

Chapter 5: The ‘Appleyness’ of the Apple: On Cézanne and the Figure

Head: Revisiting the shift: from figuration towards structure – Sensation – Love in two- dimensions – Superficial anatomy – Anatomical architecture – The consequence of the heart – Autoethnography: the echoing artist’s voice

Chapter 6: Ageless Children and Amputees

Amputee: In the valley of interpretation – An artist for scientists, a scientist for artists – Reflexion, interpretation appropriation – Reflexive philosophy, narrative identity and the teleological context – Time, self, and appropriation beyond narrative – Representation, figuration and the figure: a folded text

5th Articulation: Bony Landmarks

Chapter 7: Circling the Figure

The Dyer Drawing: Circling the Figure (Author’s note) – Introduction – The Dyer drawing and the drawing act – John Deakin – Deakin and Muybridge: subject, object, form, function – Moving towards sensation – Practice: through which the child becomes the man – An autoethnographic account – The ‘Diagram’ – The ‘Catastrophe’ – Rhythm – The Body Without Organs – Exit the artist

Chapter 8: Figuring the Circle: The Final Refrain

Introduction – The hermeneutic circle – The Deleuzean ‘Refrain’ – Shadows of the Self and the eternal paradox: The autoethnographic trap – Last words – The interpretive journey of Narrating the Catastrophe

References

List of Illustrations

Figure 1: Drawing on Conversation (detail): ink and graphite, (original) 4m × 2m.

Figure 2: Documenting the Stone (1): graphite, 297mm × 420mm.

Figure 3: Documenting the Stone (2): ink, 297mm × 420mm.

Figure 4: Mapping the mark (1): graphite, 210mm × 297mm.

Figure 5: Mapping the mark (1): graphite, 210mm × 297mm.

Figure 6: Mapping the mark (2): graphite, 210mm × 297mm.

Figure 7: Mapping the mark (3): graphite, 210mm × 297mm.

Figure 8: Mapping the mark (4): graphite, 210mm × 297mm.

Figure 9: Head: graphite, 120cm × 90cm.

Figure 10: Amputee: graphite and charcoal, 297mm × 420mm.

Figure 11: Life drawing: graphite 297mm × 420mm.

Figure 12: Life drawing: ink on trace, 210mm × 297mm.

Figure 13: Life drawing: ink on trace, 210mm × 297mm.

Figure 14: Arturo (detail): chalk, charcoal, graphite and ink, (original) 2m × 1.5m.

Figure 15: The ‘Dyer’ Drawing: chalk, charcoal and graphite 150cm × 120cm.

Preface

Who?

In his last book, Essays Critical and Clinical, Gilles Deleuze refers to an invented foreign language that runs beneath the original English in Melville’s classic, Moby Dick (or The Whale). This language is ‘OUTLANDISH or Deterritorialised, the language of the Whale’ (1998: 72, original capitals). For Deleuze, whale language demonstrates how conventional language can be pushed outside its own limits towards an ‘eloquent silence’, and it confirms further that the book an author writes is always the ‘inverse’ of another book ‘that could only be written in the soul, with silence and blood’ (1998: 72). As the author of the present book, I orchestrate the dialogue that is Narrating the Catastrophe, but at the same time, as the artist who has created the works that make up the visual content, I am also a fully involved participant in its exploration of a rhizomic interaction between visual art practice, autoethnographic account and academic discourse. The intertextual nature of the text therefore becomes intratextual, through the capacity of my self-reflexive approach to reveal the complexities of the relation between content and expression. In this way, the book does indeed come as much from the soul as from the ink.

Narrating the Catastrophe constitutes a hiatus in a perpetual journey, a moment of respite in an ongoing passage through time and inclination. It is a conflation of visual art practice and philosophical discourse, a ‘narrative’ of a journey through unfamiliar landscapes of becoming where Being is defined as act rather than form. I am an artist and philosopher, or at least I call myself these things at the same time as I am fascinated by the exploration of the ways in which we understand ourselves as existing in, and establishing meaningful relations with, the world around us. This is the world that is silent, tasteless and odourless, and within which we are deaf, dumb and blind until we discover meaning through our senses, and are discovered in turn by meaning. This is the world in which I have travelled four decades and more, always driven towards unfamiliar territories by an inescapable engagement with practice and an enduring philosophical concern with the relationship between the art and meaning.

Why?

In writing this book I have climbed to the edge of a high, exposed plateau, from where I can look out over the textual landscape below as it spreads wide across a vast flat plane. (The reason for my use of the term ‘plane’ here instead of the more immediately appropriate ‘plain’ will, I hope, become apparent as you move further into the text.) Over the plane I see other plateaus on distant horizons, the horizons that I have already made, and am yet to make for myself in my travels as an artist. Their reality on the plane demonstrates that Narrating the Catastrophe is not the end of a journey but rather a significant connection on the way, a multiplicity that acts as a primary locus of interrelation between other plateaus, other multiplicities that must always occur where art practice and philosophy meet. As I look out over the plane it occurs to me that I have written this book many times before, and in many different ways, and there are yet many more ways, always more besides, and even within.

What?

Narrating the Catastrophe is a philosophical discourse based on the exploration of elements and dimensions of figuration in visual art, as manifested in my own creative drawing practice. The discourse is written in the form of a ‘dialogue’ between myself and two ‘giants’ of contemporary French philosophy, Gilles Deleuze and Paul Ricoeur. As an artist, the conceptual philosophical framework that Deleuze constructed, both alone and with Felix Guattari, and most especially as it is expressed in his aesthetics, has long since influenced me. Moreover, my fascination with his work has deep roots in my appreciation of the wider context within which it is situated, that of Continental philosophy. This is of course the same context within which Ricoeur is also a major contributor.

The existence of this wider philosophical context is testimony to the perhaps quite obvious principle that nobody works in a vacuum, and as such, both Ricoeur and Deleuze have their own influences, as well as their own ideas and reservations about each other’s work. Sheerin confirms how Ricoeur for example, acknowledges Deleuze’s work on Nietzsche, and Deleuze, in turn, praises Ricoeur’s concept of the ‘aborted cogito’ (Sheerin 2009: 4). But, despite certain mutual precedents, neither directly influences the other in any acknowledged way, and indeed, their respective conceptual frameworks can quite easily be understood as demonstrating insurmountable differences. My aim in bringing them together here, however, is not so much to provide an explication of their conflicting views, much less to produce a fulsome interpretation of their works as a whole, but rather to demonstrate how their differing passions in relation to the concept of self-understanding through interpretation may, together with my own autoethnographic account, create a synthesis of ideas that extends our understanding of the nature of understanding, and even create conditions from which new understandings can emerge. On a journey through this text therefore, part of the task of developing a meaningful understanding of our own way of being-in-the-world in relation to the content that draws primarily on respective formulations of both these key thinkers must be to acknowledge their potential connections, as well as their obvious differences. Only in this way will we encounter them, if not on an equal footing, at least on level ground. Only in this way can we interpret and communicate on the multiple levels necessary for the ensuing dialogue to become a creative and self-generative construction in which objective intellect and subjective emotion are of equal status and mediated in their relation by the text itself.

So, as I ‘narrate the catastrophe’, Ricoeur’s phenomenological hermeneutics, my own autoethnographic account and the conceptual framework of Deleuzean aesthetics create the foreground and background for a panoramic view of understanding through art practice, but it is in the middle ground where explanation and understanding engage in a dialectical relation mediated by interpretation. The middle ground is where objectivity and subjectivity interrelate in the narrative, and where the creative process becomes simultaneous with the meaning process. The middle is where, for Ricoeur, the interpretation of the text constitutes the interpretation of self, which in turn is constitutive of meaning. The middle is where, according to Deleuze, things pick up speed.

How?

Speed, velocity, is a defining quality behind my disinclination to offer here any static explanation or interpretation of specific philosophical perspectives or concepts. Such indolence would only give credence to a supposed distinction between objective scientific explanation and subjective historical interpretation. More, and further than this, I aim to generate a dynamic discourse within which relations between conceptual structures are exploited, extended and elaborated. As the reader, the interpreter of the text, you will not encounter here any reliance on a philosophical ‘golden section’ because Narrating the Catastrophe is not driven by predefined maxims. It is driven rather by the will to develop new concepts, to do philosophy, in the same spirit as Deleuze argues that philosophy is not contemplation, reflection or even yet, communication, but rather the creation of concepts that sanction these actions or passions.

This text is therefore a ‘map’ with which you, the reader and traveller, can explore the textual landscape, both in its conventional and visual form. But, as topography is always subject to change and influence, the line on the map that defines the contours of the land is meaningful and permanent only in the sense of its insignificance and temporality, and just as a line is redrawn according to changes in the land, a journey through this text follows a map of experience, changing direction, embracing diversity, defying the direct route from A to B. This text therefore offers ‘multiple points of entry’ within and through the chapters, and the ‘Articulations’ that link them, such that there is no necessary dictate that the book should be read in lineal sequence, only that it should be read as a multiplicity. Just as the botanical rhizome spreads laterally through the soil, the traveller through the book is encouraged to follow the vicissitudes of experience where point ‘A’ is always behind, and point ‘B’ resides somewhere on a perpetually changing horizon. Both rhizome and traveller, in defying the concept of a defined and organising root/route, are thus open to tangential diversions, which may provide valuable alternative insights, but on the other hand, they may sometimes lead to strange, dark places where significance haunts blind alleys and obstructs the ongoing pursuit of understanding. In the darkness, and following paths that yet remain unmade, the unwary may find themselves endlessly circling a hermeneutic paradigm where there is no obvious entrance or exit.

But to explore unknown territory is necessarily to take risks, sometimes calculated, sometimes not. Moreover, the question as to whether the risks are worth taking at all can only be answered in hindsight, and as the pale light of reason waxes and wanes over a constantly changing landscape of interpretation, nothing is ever as sure or safe as the fact that there is no surety or safety in a truly subjective creative process. Under the tyranny of objectivity, subjectivity fights a guerrilla war. No prisoners are taken and there are no clear battle lines. Thus, at a crossroads in the journey, choosing not to choose becomes a self-defeating paradox and there is no choice but to continue. So, I invite you now to journey on, but with all due respect to you as a fellow traveller, you must be prepared to find your own way.

Chapter 1

Act and Form

Introduction: first words – The journey begins –A meaningful psychosis – What is philosophy? – What is art? – The nature of the concept – The concept visualised – What is science? The pre-eminence of the rhizome over the metaphor – Root, stem and rhizome – 1st Articulation – ‘Black 47’ – The rhizome as a conceptual construct: map and tracing.

Introduction: first words

In writing Narrating the Catastrophe my aim is to explore the relation between fine art practice and philosophy, in order to develop an alternative perspective on how, through interpretation, we come to understand our existential reality. As an artist, my point of departure is a fundamental premise that the art object can itself be conceived as a text, and as such, can therefore be contextualised and explored from within the dialogical relation between Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenological hermeneutics, my own experience as expressed in imagery and self-reflexive, autoethnographic account and the conceptual framework constructed by Gilles Deleuze, both alone and with Felix Guattari. Within the pages of the written text you will therefore find its visual counterpart, in reproductions of drawings that are themselves textual entities, and although at first they may seem like mere illustrations, these drawings are, in fact, much more. As separate singularities that make up a Deleuzean assemblage, they contribute to the ‘bilingual’ and multilayered, or stratified whole that is Narrating the Catastrophe.

Unlike Ricoeur, Deleuze never focused specifically on interpretation and hermeneutics, but his work is nevertheless intimately related to interpretation primarily through his emphasis on connectivity. Indeed, it is his fundamental notion of ubiquitous connectivity that is based on the conceptual construct of the rhizome and through which the world and the text become at once both separate and inseparable, that provides the basis for all that follows here.

Narrating the Catastrophe is the exploration of the evolution and chronological momentum of a discernible shift in figurative emphasis in my own creative practice. As the book develops, the drawings provide both subject and context for the interpretation of elements and dimensions of structure and form, content and expression, figuration, representation and resemblance, through the interrelation of philosophical discourse and autoethnographic account, which is embodied in a narrative and analytical text. The dialogue that is built up, chapter by chapter, is further layered and interrelated with sub-themes or ‘Articulations’, which punctuate the chapters. Like spinal vertebrae, these provide a narrative structure that balances and supports the body of this book as a whole.

Ricoeur’s phenomenological hermeneutics, established through his reworking of Gadamer’s theory, provides me with a foundational cornerstone for the conceptual and philosophical framework upon which Narrating the Catastrophe is constructed, and within which figuration in art practice becomes the primary focus. It is most specifically his introduction of structural analysis as a necessary requirement in the process of interpretation that provides a basis for the relation between philosophy and my own creative practice. In accordance with Ricoeur’s emphasis on structure as an interpretative vehicle towards a meaningful understanding of Being, I propose that a focus on the role of visual structure, that which moves abstraction towards figuration in a work of art, is a crucial and indeed foundational element in the interpretative process wherein understanding is ultimately achieved in the active, rather than passive engagement with the work, or the ‘visual text’ being interpreted. Such engagement embodies an interpretation which, in a disavowal of the limitations that figurative representation and the expectations of immediate recognition impose, reaches self-consciously towards an understanding of the ‘true’ resemblance that is encountered only in relation to the figure beyond figuration. The level of understanding that such interpretation achieves therefore is derived from a relation with the ‘Other’ that the figure beyond figuration becomes, and it allows, in turn, a deeper understanding of self.

Such a proposition is indebted of course to Ricoeur’s notion of ‘re-figuration’, but also further extends this conceptual process that is elicited by the text and within which interpretation consists of a restructuring of our stance in ‘front of the text’ according to the invitation that it offers. Such re-figuration ultimately allows us to become profoundly aware of our own Being through a meaningful relation with both the individual text being interpreted, and with the wider context within which that relation is realised.

In terms of kinship, Ricoeur and I share a common ancestry in philosophical orientation, one shared also by Deleuze. Both Ricoeur and Deleuze however, writing eloquently and influentially but nevertheless indirectly about experience, must remain but cousins, at least once removed. The present text is realised at least in part in my own self-reflexive and autoethnographic content, and therefore it must necessarily embody my experiential relation to interpretation both indirectly, as a writer writing about the experience of interpretation in terms of the art and the art process itself, and directly, given that I am myself the artist whose work I am writing about. In this sense, the discourse that is the text as a whole becomes a form of Deleuzean ‘double articulation’, through which I ‘narrate the catastrophe’. In a musty conference hall further on in the text, Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger waits impatiently in his own Articulation, to explain double articulation in more detail, but for now I simply invite you, the reader, to engage with this morphosyntactic synthesis of visual and written language, and to interact with, reflect on and appropriate it on various levels of meaning while you travel in a general direction towards understanding. This is philosophy in practice. Relevant concepts are here put to use in a dynamic, creative dialogue that, through your interpretation, can extend beyond the inevitable limitations of the book that you hold in your hands.

The journey begins

Author’s note: On completing the first draft of this opening chapter it occurred to me that the direction of the text seemed, almost of its own volition, to split into two at a point where the discussion of the rhizome reached an interim climax before continuing. The two parts of the chapter are connected by a commonality in the shape and conceptual form of the humble potato. For this reason, while the rest of the book is developed through ‘external’ articulations between chapters, like the subcutaneous vertebrae of the spinal column, Chapter 1 is articulated internally, just as the Atlas and Axis are embedded in the neck and interact with the cranium.

In the preface to this book I described myself as standing on a high plateau, one very like the plateau that Gregory Bateson (1904–80) describes as a ‘continuous self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end point’ (Deleuze 1999: 22). For Deleuze and Guattari, Bateson’s description translates into a multiplicity, endlessly connected to other multiplicities and, being always in the middle, the plateau has no definite origin and no foreseeable end. It is a point at which circumstances combine to bring an activity to a crucial juncture, but where it is not dissipated in a climax. It is a ‘heightening of energies’ sustained long enough to leave an ‘after-image’ that can be redirected into further activity. Narrating the Catastrophe is a plateau.

A wanderer often moves aimlessly, around, over and through a landscape towards no particular horizon, but a traveller who travels purposefully often carries in his pocket a field guide. A logical and scientific text designed to help identify and distinguish between natural flora or fauna of a particular location, the field guide manifests what Deleuze would call a ‘root-book’, a noble, signifying imitation of the world, and nature in it (1999: 5). The present book also identifies and explores particular themes in terms of its own territory, that of philosophy and visual art practice, but by its inherent nature as a search for understanding that is inescapably based on a subjective world view, it is neither scientific nor conventionally logical, it does not imitate, nor can it be itself truly imitated. The governing conceptual framework of Narrating the Catastrophe is that of the rhizome, which, constituted by serial plateaus and defined by the interconnection of such multiplicities, is infinite and indefinite, the antithesis of the field guide.

Where a field guide is intended to offer authoritative and detailed information, and focuses on differences between singularities, it is illustrative and finite in nature. Animals and plant life however are perpetually negotiating and adapting to their changing environments, and in doing so they render the conventional field guide obsolete. Such obsolescence is never a concern within the shifting parameters of the continually extending rhizome. Incorporating potentiality and the promise of change through constant divergences and deviations, the rhizome is forever extensible while always maintaining a simultaneous continuity of focus, a purposeful direction towards perpetual renewal.

Deleuze assures me that ‘writing is always the measure of something else’ (1999: 4) and that it has nothing to do with signification, but rather has everything to do with surveying and mapping, even of realms that are as yet unexplored. As such, the surveying and the mapping that constitutes my writing this book constitutes in turn the sustained focus, characteristic of the rhizome, that produces the heightening of energies, characteristic of the plateau, that is necessary to produce the after-image from which further surveying and mapping is generated. Simultaneously embracing and denying the literary cliché of the ‘journey’, Narrating the Catastrophe therefore embodies a conceptual map by which the reader can travel through its fragmented whole, guided along both familiar and unfamiliar pathways towards an understanding of the nature of being that eventually becomes a part of the extensive totality contained in the parameters of the text, but never constrained by them. The after-image is never a finite illustration, but rather a working drawing, a crucial aspect of the Deleuzean ‘refrain’ (see Chapter 8) that is characterised in transcendent potentiality. Narrating the Catastrophe as a whole therefore becomes a measure of the creative relation between art practice and philosophy, and the interrelation between visual and conventional written text is no more or less logical, signifying or predetermined than any creative practice can be. This is not a root-book, more a route-book and in following, you, the reader, will travel through a fertile textual landscape that generates a chiasmic intersection between explanation and understanding that must be negotiated through interpretation and choice.

A meaningful psychosis

Choice is a necessary part of Being. Lack of choice can cause confusion, at the very least, and can even threaten sanity as Gregory Bateson demonstrates in the development of his theory that schizophrenia derives from the continuous experience of a ‘double bind’ (Bateson et al. 1956). Double-bind situations occur where the victim receives contradictory injunctions or emotional messages on different levels of communication,