by Daniel Smith
In Chapter 15, however, Deleuze will define Bacon's novelty in a twofold manner that breaks with these earlier conceptions of color and space. On the one hand, in his use of color, Bacon follows Cézanne and Van Gogh in replacing relations of value with relations of tonality: that is, with pure relations between the colors of the spectrum. Following Gilbert Simondon, Deleuze calls this a technique of modulation that relies on the relations between colors or the juxtaposition of tints. “The formula of the colorists is: if you push color to its pure internal relations (hot–cold, expansion–contraction), then you have everything” (FB 112). For the colorist, everything in painting—form and ground, light and shadow, bright and dark—is derived from pure relations of color. In this regard, Deleuze sees Bacon as one of the great colorists in the history of painting. Chapter 16 analyzes how the three formal elements of Bacon's paintings—the Figure, the contour, the structure—are all constructed by means of color: the internal variations of intensity in the structure, the “broken tones” of the Figures, the colored line of the contour. Thus, each element of Bacon's paintings converges in color, and it is modulation (the relation between colors) that explains the unity of the whole, the distribution of each element, and the way each of them acts upon the others. This is why Deleuze says that it is the “coloring sensation” that stands at the summit of Bacon's logic of sensation.
On the other hand, this use of color claims to bring out a peculiar kind of sense from sight: a haptic vision of color, as opposed to the optical vision of light. What Deleuze calls haptic vision is precisely this “sense” of colors. The tactile-optical space of representation presents a complex eye–hand relation: an ideal optical space that none the less maintains virtual referents to tactility (depth, contour, relief). From this, two types of subordination can occur: a subordination of the hand to the eye in optical space (Byzantine art), and a strict subordination of the eye to the hand in a manual space (Gothic art). But what Deleuze; following Riegl, terms haptic space (from the Greek verb aptō, to touch) is a space in which there is no longer a hand–eye subordination in either direction. It implies a type of seeing distinct from the optical, a close-up viewing in which “the sense of sight behaves just like the sense of touch.”36 Riegl argued that haptic space was the invention of Egyptian art and bas-relief, in which form and ground are experienced as being on the same plane, requiring a close vision. Deleuze in turn suggests that a new Egypt rises up in Bacon's work, this time composed uniquely of color and by color: the juxtaposition of pure tones arranged gradually on the flat surface produces a properly haptic space, and implies a properly haptic function of the eye (the planar character of the surface creates volumes only through the different colors that are arranged on it). In this regard, Deleuze will place Bacon in the great tradition of Turner, Monet, Cézanne, and Van Gogh—the great modern colorists who replaced relations of value with relations of tonality.
We have attempted to distinguish three conceptual trajectories in The Logic of Sensation, which respectively concern formal aspects of Bacon's paintings (isolation, deformation, coupling …), the non-rational logic of sensation (rhythm, chaos, force …), and the act of painting itself (clichés, the diagram, modulation …). Obviously, the three trajectories are interlinked; painting has its own manner of experimenting with the logic of sensation, and Bacon's path has a validity of its own that does not negate other paths such as abstraction or expressionism. In turn, each of these trajectories points beyond itself toward linkages with other arts such as music, cinema, and literature, such that The Logic of Sensation can itself be seen as an entry point into the conceptual proliferation of Deleuze's philosophy as a whole, and his other writings on the arts.
ESSAY 14
The New
The Conditions of the New
THE QUESTION OF THE NEW: CHANGE, CAUSALITY, EMERGENCE
W
hat is the status of the new as a philosophical problem?1 Deleuze frequently said that the question of the conditions for the production of novelty (Bergson) or creativity (Whitehead) was one of the fundamental questions of contemporary thought, entailing a profound shift in philosophy away from the eternal to the new, from the universal to the singular.2 Most generally, Deleuze's response to this question was that the conditions of the new can be found only in a principle of difference, or more strongly, in a metaphysics of difference. The reason: if identity were the primary principle—that is, if identities are pre-given or presupposed, then there would in principle be no production of the new (no new differences).3 Yet the status of the new is a highly complex problem. On the one hand, the “new” seems to be one of the most obvious phenomena in the world; every dawn brings forth a new day, and every day brings with it a wealth of the new—new experiences, new events, new encounters, new “news.” If the new means “what did not exist before,” then everything is new. On the other hand, one can say, with almost equal assurance, with the writer of Ecclesiastes (1:9–10), that there is nothing new under the sun; the dawn of today was just like the dawn of yesterday, and simply brings with it more of the same. The new seems to come in well-worn and predictable patterns and regularities. Talk of the new, in other words, immediately threatens to be pulled back into talk of the old. As the French saying puts it, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose (“the more things change, the more they stay the same”).
These complexities are due, in part, to the fact that the problem of the new is easily confused with a host of related but none the less distinguishable problems, including questions of transformation and change, causality and determinism, and the possibility of emergence (emergent qualities). One could, for instance, pose the question of the new in terms of the question of change or transformation; when artists create a painting or a piece of sculpture, they are simply rearranging matter that already exists in the world in a new way. Such a view of novelty would be merely combinatorial: melodies are made out of notes, paintings are made out of pigments, sculptures are hewn out of stone. This would be a simplified caricature of the hylomorphic schema: creation is the imposition of a new form (morphe) on a given material or matter (hyle), even if matter contains a certain potentiality for the form. Here, novelty is found on the side of the form, and matter is the passive receiver or receptacle of this newness. In this case, novelty would be little more than the rearrangement of matter in the universe into ever-new forms. The question of whether such novelty would eventually be exhausted would rest on a metaphysical question about the finitude or infinity of matter (and time) in the universe.
The question of novelty has also been linked to the question of causality: if everything has a cause, and if effects pre-exist in their causes, then only old things can come out of change. If there is nothing in the effect that was not already in the cause (or, to put it in logical terms, if there is nothing in the consequent that was not in the antecedent), then causal processes can give rise to objects that are new in number, but not new in kind—there can be quantitative or numerical novelty, as in mass-produced objects, but not qualitative novelty. Yet, as Mario Bunge has argued in his classic book Causality and Modern Science, this view, though consistent (and popular), is extreme, since it rests on a simplified and linear view of causality: effects can be (and usually are) determined by multiple causes (heat can be produced by friction, combustion, nuclear chain reactions, microwaves, and so on), and causes can have multiple effects (penicillin may cure my infection but kill someone allergic to it).4 Causality, in other words, must be distinguished from the more general question of determination, since determination can be not only causal, but also statistical or probabilistic (determination of a result by the joint action of independent entities), structural or wholistic (determination of parts by the whole), teleological (determination by ends or goals), dialectical (determination by internal strife or synthesis of opposites), as well as dynamic or causal. Deleuze's proposal will be to see all such forms of determination as derivable from a metaphysical principle of difference: “Differenc
e is the state in which one can speak of determination as such” (DR 28).
The question of the new, finally, must also be distinguished from the question of emergence, even though the two issues are closely related. Emergence is a phenomenon of widespread interest in contemporary science and philosophy. It is an issue that initially arose in a “physicalist” ontology, which holds that all existents are physical entities, and hence that all sciences, in principle, should be reducible to physics. The problem is that physicalism, at least in its radically reductionist versions, cannot take into account phenomena that have supra-physical (or emergent) properties that their physical components lack, such as the emergence of consciousness, or the emergence of new individuals, species, artifacts, institutions, and so on.5 If radical novelty can be distinguished from emergence, however, it is because emergence implies the production of new quality at “higher levels” of complexity in a system, whereas the concept of the new in Deleuze—as well as Whitehead and Bergson—implies conditions in which novelty or creativity (difference) becomes a fundamental concept at the most basic ontological level.
The problem of the new must thus be distinguished from the problems of change, causality, or emergence, since in each of these cases the new (difference) appears, mutatis mutandis, as a secondary effect. If Deleuze, following Bergson and Whitehead, formulates an original conception of the new, it is because he repositions the new as a fundamental ontological concept: Being = Difference = the New. “The new, with its power of beginning and beginning again, remains forever new” (DR 136). As Bergson put it, “the more we study the nature of time, the more we shall comprehend that duration means invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the new.”6 None the less, the new remains primarily an operative concept in Deleuze's philosophy, which he tends to thematize explicitly under the rubric of difference (Difference and Repetition) or the event (Logic of Sense) or time (The Time-Image). When the theme of the new explicitly appears in Deleuze's writings, it is almost always tied to the question of the conditions of the new.
THREE TYPES OF CONDITIONS: THE LOGICALLY POSSIBLE, POSSIBLE EXPERIENCE, REAL EXPERIENCE
The properly Deleuzian question would therefore be: What are the ontological conditions under which something new can be produced? But this question, in turn, seems to entail a new conception of what constitutes a “condition,” since, if the new were conditioned, this would seem to imply that it was not new, but already given in its conditions. To approach this problem, we can distinguish between three types of conditions with which philosophers have tended to concern themselves: the conditions that demarcate what is logically possible; the conditions that determine the limits of possible experience (Kant); and the conditions of real experience. For Deleuze, the problem of the new is coextensive with the attempt to determine the conditions of real experience (since the real is the new). What, then, does it mean to think the conditions of the real?
First, one could say that thought, on its own, is only capable of thinking the possible, and that it does so in the name of certain principles which one can call logical principles. Logical principles are principles that determine what is possible and what is not possible. Classical logic identified three such principles: the principle of identity (A is A, a thing is what it is), the principle of non-contradiction (A is not non-A, a thing is not what it is not), and the principle of the excluded middle (between A or not-A, there is no middle term). Taken together, these three principles determine what is impossible—that is to say, what is unthinkable without contradiction: something that would not be what it is, something that would be what it is not, and something that would be both what it is and what it is not. By means of these three principles, thought is able to think the world of what is possible (or what traditional philosophy called the world of “essences”). But this is why classical logic only goes so far: it leaves us within the domain of the possible.
Kant went a step further than this when he tried to demarcate, not simply the domain of the logically possible, but the domain of possible experience. This domain of possible experience is no longer the object of formal logic, but of what Kant called transcendental logic, and the transcendental conditions for demarcating possible experience are found in the categories. If logical principles demarcate the domain of the possible, transcendental categories demarcate the domain of possible experience. Causality is a category for Kant, for instance, since we cannot conceive of an object of our possible experience that has not been caused by something else. This transcendental logic allowed Kant to distinguish between what was immanent within and transcendent to this domain of experience. The object of empirical concepts is immanent to experience, and hence testable by hypothesis and experiment, whereas the object of transcendent concepts—or what Kant called, following Plato, Ideas—goes beyond any possible experience. The three great transcendent Ideas that Kant identified in the Transcendental Dialectic—the Soul, the World, and God—are thinkable (they are not logically inconsistent, given the principles of formal logic), but they are not knowable, since there could never be an object in experience that would correspond to them—they lie outside the domain of possible experience.
But the post-Kantian philosophers, starting with Salomon Maimon, attempted to push the Kantian transcendental project one step further: from the conditions of possible experience to the conditions of real experience. Kant had assumed that there are a priori “facts” of reason (knowledge, morality), and then sought the condition of possibility of these facts in the transcendental, thereby “tracing” the transcendental off the empirical and thinking the condition in the image of the conditioned. Maimon argued that it was illegitimate for Kant simply to assume these supposed facts; rather, in order truly to fulfill the ambitions of his critical project, Kant would have to show how they were engendered immanently from reason as the necessary modes of its manifestation. A method of genesis, in short, had to replace the simple method of conditioning. Moreover, to accomplish this task, the genetic method would require the positing of a principle of difference; identity may be the condition of possibility of thought in general, Maimon claimed, but it is difference that constitutes the genetic condition of the real. These two demands laid down by Maimon—the search for the genetic elements of real experience and the positing of a principle of difference as the fulfillment of this condition—could be said to be the two primary components of what Deleuze came to call his transcendental empiricism. “Without this [Maimonian] reversal,” he once wrote, “the Copernican Revolution amounts to nothing” (DR 162).
Yet, as Martial Guéroult has shown, Maimon is a pivotal figure in post-Kantian thought precisely because he himself hesitated between two ways of solving the problem of genesis:
Maimon oscillates between two solutions: first, to turn difference into a pure principle like identity … In a certain fashion this is the path Schelling will choose in the philosophy of Nature … This conception everywhere has the same consequences … : the suppression of the immanence in the knowing subject of the constitutive elements of knowledge; the finite subject Ego [Moi] is posterior to the realities of which it has knowledge … But another solution presents itself: identity being absolutely pure, and diversity always being a given (a priori and a posteriori), identity can be posited as the property of the thinking subject, and difference as an absence of identity resulting from the limitation of the subject.7
The latter will be the path followed by Fichte in his positing of the “I = I” as a thetic principle of identity. The former position, which we have summarized here, will be the path retrieved and pursued by Deleuze, in which the conditions of the real are united with the question of the new (difference).
THE CONDITIONS OF REAL EXPERIENCE: FIVE REQUIREMENTS
In speaking about conditions, then, we can trace out a trajectory from what constitutes the logically possible (determined by logical principles), what constitutes possible experience (determined by the categories), and the problem that Deleuze
set for himself: what constitutes the genetic and differential conditions of real experience.8 In so far as Deleuze's project constitutes a search for conditions—or, in pre-Kantian terms, a search for sufficient reason—Deleuze's philosophy can be said to be a transcendental philosophy. But as Deleuze says, with understatement, “the question of knowing how to determine the transcendental field is very complex” (LS 105), and takes us into a domain that is very different from what is often characterized as “transcendental arguments.” Kant was the philosopher who discovered the prodigious domain of the transcendental. “He is the analogue of a great explorer,” Deleuze writes, “not of another world, but of the upper and lower reaches of this one” (DR 135). However, Deleuze conceives of the transcendental in a very different manner than Kant. Throughout his work, he has laid out various requirements that must be met in determining the conditions of real experience, several of which are particularly relevant to our concerns, though they by no means exhaust the ways of approaching the problem.
First, as we have seen, for a condition to be a condition of real experience, and not merely possible experience, it must form “an intrinsic genesis, not an extrinsic conditioning” (DR 154). The genetic method means that the conditions of real experience must be able to account for novelty or the new, which means that the future must become the fundamental dimension of time.
Second, the condition cannot be in the image of the conditioned: that is, the structures of the transcendental field cannot simply be traced off the empirical. This was one of the fundamental critiques that the post-Kantians addressed to Kant; Kant had simply conceived of the transcendental in the image of the empirical. This was particularly clear in the deduction of first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, where the transcendental structures (apprehension, reproduction, recognition) are traced from the empirical acts of a psychological consciousness. Although Kant suppressed this text in the second edition, the tracing method, with all its “psychologism,” still persists, even if it is better hidden (DR 135). Deleuze, following Sartre, will strip the transcendental field of the presupposition of a transcendental subject or the form of consciousness; transcendental idealism becomes a transcendental empiricism (LS 105–6). But more importantly, the relation between the transcendental and the empirical is stripped of any resemblance: “the task of a philosophy that does not wish to fall into the traps of consciousness and the cogito is to purge the transcendental field of all resemblance” (LS 123). For Deleuze, the transcendental must be conceived of as a field in which “the different is related to the different through difference itself” (DR 299). When this field is actualized, it therefore differs from itself, such that every process of actualization is, by its very nature, the production of the new: that is, the production of a new difference. This is the task Deleuze sets for himself in the latter chapters of Difference and Repetition; the fourth chapter (“Ideas and the Synthesis of Difference”) examines the completely differentiated nature of the transcendental field, while the fifth chapter (“Asymmetrical Synthesis of the Sensible”) examines the manner in which this field is necessarily differenciated in its actualizations.