It took me about two years to get through most of Gilles Deleuze’s works. In that time, my understanding of Deleuze fluctuated greatly. The apex of my academic education came about when I wrote the following paper when finishing my second BA as a grad student (I had mostly completely my graduate degree. I had another a year I needed to wait because of the way my classes fell, so I decided to finish a second BA in that year.)
The following paper was written for an Art and Religion Class back in 2005. Any paper we produced as the class paper needed to involve religion (or spirituality) and art. I chose Kandinsky, because in looking at texts, I thought it would be an easier transition to write about an art’s thoughts on art than on art directly. Also, to make the paper manageable, I decided to limit the works from Deleuze to just The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Eventually under the same instructor (Linda Lam-Easton, who was a very unusual but extremely well crafted instructor) I audited a Taoism class which I never completed. I was going to write a paper on Taoism and Immanual Kant but never got around to it.
Anyway, I post this paper on Kandinsky here as a point of reference.
Unfolding Kandinsky: Spirituality and Expression
In Kandinsky’s first book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, he introduces painting as a mode of spiritual expression. His focus is on how art is spiritual and how material works to influence spirit. Although he speaks at length about art in general, his main focus is on painting. When he reaches the section on painting, he claims that painting has two “weapons” (24) color and form. Perhaps because of his heavy reliance on musical examples of form, he feels it unnecessary to explore form. Instead, he examines color. Yet, the examination of color is even less useful than the aesthetic statement about spirituality in art. Even before diving into an examination of color, Kandinsky disclaims, “such definitions [of color] are not universally possible” (24). But for the remaining pages in his work, he feels it necessary to try and provide these impossible definitions. In the midst of all this, where he theorizes about the psychological develop of man and the reasons why we must paint in new ways – only “a first encounter with any new phenomenon exercises immediately an impression on the soul” (23). This first encounter is an encounter with spirit, with art. Yet in shaping his explanation, he remains limited by the classical perspective, a comment both on art and theory. While he recognizes that a certain human being sees art while other human beings see things, he still ignores the role a specifically formed subject has on painting and vis versa. In other words, he does not go far enough in his examination. Kandinsky himself realizes this, which is why he wrote a second book, Point and Line to Plane in an attempt to cover any gaps in his subject matter, not by examining color, but by examining form. This second work relies heavily on a methodology imitating science – to be objective and to master the Real by covering it up with a discourse generated by methodology. For this reason, he resists speaking of the subject and of spirituality, even as he tries to cover gaps in his first work. What is decided at the end of Kandinsky’s second book is that art relies on a projection of tension, between lines and points in order to achieve a spiritual visual space. This also assumes that such tension is innate in viewing human beings. In his first work, Kandinsky would speak of such tension as “vibrations in the soul” (24). In his second, he claims that “Art mirrors itself upon the surface of our consciousness” and that “entering art’s message [is] to experience its pulsating-life with all one’s senses” (17). How this happens is beyond Kandinsky’s explanation but extremely relevant to his work. To help further critique Kandinsky’s project I will rely on the work of Gilles Deleuze, in particular his book The Fold: Liebniz and the Baroque.
Before we get to introducing the intricacies of Deleuze’s work, let us ground Kandinsky’s system a little further in order to better understand how Deleuze can address Kandinsky. Kandinsky begins his second book Point and Line to Plane by noting a dual nature of the world: the external and the internal. He uses the traditional metaphor of painting as a window, except that he cites the window as a limitation. Only when “we open the door, step out of the seclusion and plunge into the outside reality [do] we become an active part of this reality and experience its pulsation with all our senses” (17). Although (or because) he is an abstract artist, Kandinsky claims that art is to “mirror itself upon the surface of our consciousness” which is not that of the material world but the spiritual. How this is achieved is unclear, although Kandinsky does claim that it takes a more developed man to experience these “psychic effects” (CSA 24). Perhaps because we are all so disenchanted with a world full of objects we see over and over, Kandinsky insists that it is only through new impressions that we can get at that psychic effect, hence the abstract nature of his art. Yet doesn’t Kandinsky in PLP insist that the formal elements of art remains the same throughout all art forms?
In Point and Line to Plane, Kandinsky meticulously examines three elements as an extension of one another across different artistic mediums: dance, architecture, music to name a few. Perhaps because Kandinsky is a painter, he explains each of these elements in terms of a visual geometry, a geometry that permeates his work. The two paintings I have selected are examples of how Kandinsky explores space. Different than Klee or Ernst, Kandinsky insists on the primacy of geometric shapes and full colors. He does not do the painterly thing and fizzle out his forms, rather his lines are sharp and his colors are well defined. This does not mean that these compositional elements are primary. Throughout his book, he uses notions like “absolute sound” (70), relative temperatures like “cold” and “warm” (59) and relative movement like “sliding” (63) to explain his compositional elements. Although these are not necessarily visual terms, they only supplement Kandinsky’s explanations. The visual components always form the basis for how we understand what is expressed in art. The dancer’s expression is inherent in the lines his body makes (42). A Chinese pagoda expresses itself “with means of equal clarity as curves leading to the point – in short precise beats audible as a transition of dissolution in which the space form fades away into the atmosphere surrounding the building” (40). Even music has lines and points that structure its expression as Kandinsky notes from a score of the motif in Beethoven’s Symphony No 5. Yet these are only cursory examples because Kandinsky is concerned with how points and lines create planes which are another way of expressing tension.
Tension is the key to Kandinsky’s theory. How we get to form tension relies on the basic building blocks of point and line. Through those formal elements, as well as the use of color, certain psychic effects build and release a certain quality. For example, in “White Line” Kandinsky characterizes a white line as tension or tension as a white line. It removes itself from the background of colors and shapes which comment on it. Furthermore, its shape seems to rise from the lower right into the upper right, to become looser. Using Kandinsky’s own examination of a similar line as an analogy, Kandinsky writes
A free curved line, [. . .] has an obstinate “look” because of its broad upper part [. . .]. This line expands as it moves upward, the expression of curvature becomes more and more forceful until the “obstinacy” attains its maximum (PSP 134).
This line has a looser feel to it’s left side and a tighter resistance on the right. This tension is inherent not only in the line as a comment to itself (from topside to bottom) but also through the various colors that it overcodes. These separate lines and colors remark on the white line through their different rhythms and repetitions. It are these rhythms and repetitions of lines that Kandinsky calls composition, the creation of qualities and quantities that interplay in tension. Tension however, is only one kind of term, the other is universal harmony. Kandinsky writes
The universal harmony of a composition can, therefore, consist of a number of complexes rising to the highest point of contrast. These contrasts can even be of an inharmonious character, and still their proper use will not have a negative effect on the total harmony but, rather, a position one, and will raise the work of art to a thing of the greatest harmony (original bold 97).
Although Deleuze and Kandinsky diverge in their understandings of art, it is in harmony and composition where they mostly agree. The differences in lines that run throughout a painting are harmonious; that is the aim of painting. Although Kandinsky here most obviously portrays it in pieces like “White Line”, where “The simplest case is the exact repetition of a straight line at equal intervals – the primitive rhythm” (original bold 95), Deleuze would disagree. There is nothing simple about even parallel straight lines. Rather such repetition is only a repetition found inherent to a series. This is the additive nature of harmonies which do “not relate multiplicity to some kind of unity, but to ‘a certain unity’ that has to offer distinctive or pertinent traits” (128). In other words, each series of lines has its own inner characteristics. This is the same kind of realization that realizes a harmony out of even divergent lines, or even lines that do not relate in the kind of “primitive rhythm” of Kandinsky. Deleuze notes that this kind of harmony passes through different kinds of strata,
preparing and resolving dissonance. [. . .] The preparation of dissonance means integrating the half-pains that have been accompanying pleasure, in such ways, that the next pain still not occur “contrary to expectations”. Thus the dog was musical when it knew how to integrate the almost imperceptible approach of the enemy, the faint hostile odor and the silent raising of the stick just prior to receiving the blow (131).
This pleasure however, is not the same as tension, it is only a unitive affect, the play of the focal point of the eye from one position to another along two convergent series which have an additive harmony on one another. In this case, the tip-toeing of the attacker, the raising of the cane and the bash is one series. The other is the series of the dog going to eat its food, eating its food and then being hit. This is like the two series of the three black triangles of “White Line” pointing through (behind) the white line. Another kind of series would be the kind of dissonance of the lower and upper left corners and the lower and upper right corners that converge without any direct touch. Rather these corners affect each other. Further understood would be to extend Liebniz’s theory of evil in which damned souls
produce a dissonance on a unique note, a breath of vengeance or resentment, a hate of God that goes to infinity; but it is still a form of music, a chord – though diabolical – since the damned draw pleasure from their pain, and especially make possible the infinite progression of perfect accords in other souls (132).
Harmony is always harmony of the inside where different essences relate in relation extending beyond each of the parts. This is how harmony is not to be found in one piece or the other but in the whole that is its own part. We can understand this as two choir members who sing in harmony together but who do not hear each other and do not know what the other is doing. Deleuze talks about these kind of series as additive effects, parts to a whole that is different from its parts, like the music of the Baroque in which many horizontal melodies converge and diverge:
It is at once the horizontal melody that endlessly develops all of its lines in extension, and the vertical harmony that establishes the inner spiritual unity or the summit, but it is impossible to know where one ends and the other begins. But, precisely, Baroque music is what can extract harmony from melody, and can always restore the higher unity toward which the arts are moving as many melodic lines: this very same elevation of harmony makes up the most general definition of what can be called Baroque music (128).
This is where the notion of composition occurs, the knowing interplay between harmonies, or tensions. This is also the apex of Deleuze’s book. In The Fold, Deleuze ends his discussion about folds on a chapter titled “The New Harmony”, exactly where Kandinsky is in the middle of his book on PLP.
Here, at the level of the composition, Kandinsky might as well end his work, but instead he goes on to further develop the idea of tension in what he calls the base plane. This last section of PLP is not a true development of the previous ideas, but more of an application in painting, although I am sure Kandinsky does not see it that way. True, Kandinsky has not explained all he knows yet but he has defined what composition is: the play of harmonies and “complexs rising to the highest point of contrast” (97). Yet what is contrasted and how harmonies rise is only explicated in Deleuze, not by Kandinsky, despite Kandinsky’s claim that his work is analytical. Further, only in the beginning of his last chapter on BP, “basic plane”, does he show how tension can develops without explaining how. We will speak at length in the near future about why different tensions happen but for now, Kandinsky’s point is more pressing as it reveals the limitations of his theory. In his viewing of two kinds of rising lines, one that goes left and one that goes right (“White Line” is one that goes right) he reveals his understanding of tension and spirituality. The harmony that
Tie[s] in with these two [contrasting] sides is another special feeling which can be explained by the characteristics already described. This feeling has a “literary” aftertaste, which again discloses the very deep-going relationships between the different expressions of art – and which, furthermore, gives us an inkling of the very deep-lying universal roots of all art forms – and, finally, of all spiritual fields. This feeling is the result of the two sole possibilities of movement of the human being, which, in spite of various combinations, actually remain only two (121).
These two feelings are of “movement into the distance” for lines moving left and for the right, “movement toward home” (121). The differentials of these two lines play against the BP of the canvas. This is to say that Kandinsky always bases the larger tensions of composition as an effect harmonizing the canvas as the BP, the square that presents the entire harmony, that even forces harmony between series that might otherwise have their own harmonies. Although Kandinsky is satisfied in his theory with this maneuver, in his painting he is not. Witness the twisting of the BP in “White Line” as the four corners are realigned with dynamic triangles that re-angle the focal point of the central space. This is an added layer of complexity for what was a simple white arc no longer arcs through the familiar square space of the BP. Although Kandinsky stops with the BP in his theory – as he wants to remain general – we see the limits of the BP. For what if there are other planes? How can spirituality be a consequence of the ever-present materiality of painting? We see then, that Kandinsky would have done well to go on, because if the BP is the final grounding of tension in painting, what if the canvas was no longer rectangular? With this simple change in material, already Kandinsky looses a full third of his theorization.
In order to re-cover what Kandinsky was interested in, we must understand the way in which he addresses the tradition he addresses. Kandinsky was very much aware of the traditional bounds of painting inherited from the Renaissance, i.e., that painting should be a window to the external world. His contemporaries too reacted to this level of materiality in all kinds of different ways. Magritte for instance, made paintings of easels completing landscapes, as well as windows which were broken (on the broken shards of glass would be a same image of the outside as the window). Kandinsky however, sought not to comment on tradition but to escape materiality through abstraction. As noted in the quote above, Kandinsky was fully aware of the window metaphor. He sought to circumvent it by “stepping outside”, but not to the material world, but the spiritual one. His play of shapes, lines and colors were meant to be a direct link to this spiritual outside, to express. As noted in his first work which is a combination of artistic statement and an analysis of color, Kandinsky defines what he means by the spiritual in art.
In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky presents us with a dichotomy that means to speak beyond painting and art. He posits two polar modes which are incompatible but coexisting: the material and the spiritual. These are different levels, areas where art can achieve goals. For Kandinsky most art deals with material: the drawing of objects, exposition of technique and reproduction of material. For most artists, says Kandinsky, what remains largely untapped is the spiritual in art. Only in this spiritual space, created by the artist, can an inner soul be expressed. This spirit is “‘what’ the inner truth which only art can divine, which only art can express by those means of expression which are hers alone” (9). This early aesthetic statement reflects Kandinsky’s own ambitions in his paintings. He wants to achieve a spiritual dimension of expression in his art. For this, he chooses to leave material expression completely behind. Kandinsky cites the familiarity of the world, of colors and objects to be disenchanting. Without the nominal content of traditional painting, he is freer to develop. A loose assumption Kandinsky exercises here: a man must develop with the art otherwise he will not be sensitive to its psychological effects. How these effects are mined are found for Kandinsky in his division of painting into two different elements: form and color. Although form and color are the two modes of composition through which painting expresses these two modes interact but occupy different axises. They comment on each other, and add to a sum greater than the parts but do not directly interact. Only in his second book, which we have already explored at some length, does he attempt to describe how it is form too, leads to the spiritual.
In his desire to break free of the traditional mores of painting, Kandinsky does miss a crucial point. He does not radically break with the classical viewing apparatus but modifies it by keeping the subject that is implicated by the view. After all if Kandinsky abandons every-day objects to gain an immediacy of spirituality in his painting, then why should it take a more sensitive, developed subject to view the painting, in order to understand it properly? What happened to immediacy? Should not the spiritual be apparent to the viewer, to the viewing eye without support from an apparatus? What Kandinsky wants is ambitious; an immersal of the subject into the spiritual of painting, but what he needs before this can happen is the subject to bring a certain viewing-apparatus to the painting. The viewing subject must be schooled first, in a certain kind of viewing! This too is the case with classical painting which has always been both representational and perspectivist. In a sense, Kandinsky rebukes the content of painting but preserves the form. He still is very traditional in that he is still a representationalist. Although he reacts against material representation, he replaces the object of representation with another object, the material with an abstract geometry of lines and shades, shapes and colors. In his book about Francis Bacon titled The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze comments on representation as being grounded by a kind of view:
Greek art [. . .] distinguished planes, invented a perspective and put into play light and shadow, hollows and reliefs. If we can speak of a classical representation, it is because it implies the conquest of an optical space, a distant viewing that is never frontal: the form and the ground are no longer on the same plane, the planes are distinguished from each other, and a perspective traverses them in depth, uniting the background-plane to the foreground-plane; objects overlap each other, light and shadow fill up space and make it rhythmic, the contour ceases to be the common limit on a single plane and becomes the self-limitation of the form or the primacy of the foreground. Classical representation thus takes the accident as its object, but it incorporates the accident into an optical organization that makes it something well founded (a phenomenon or a “manifestation” of essence (original italics 101).
This view, seen by the subject, grounds both the organizational lines of perspective, the event horizon of infinitude and the presence of objects whose relationship is only dynamic along a dimension of perceived depth. In paintings such as this, a whole world view (and view of the world) is accorded by which things come to be represented. What’s philosophical about such paintings can be articulated with first Descartes and then Kant. Both philosophers relegate the external world beyond immediacy, positing substance untouchable. What could only be apprehended were attributes as attributes were posited as the most direct experience we could have of a world as external. For Descartes, a “substance is a ‘thing in which what we conceive exists formally or eminently’” (Fold original italics 54). Kant takes this further when he grounds space and time as a priori, a an experiential structure inherent within all subjects. This is the bind common to traditional painting and early modern philosophy where subject and view are as one. We could not be a subject without viewing the painting through this perspective and this painting could not be as a representation without a viewing subject. Thus, paintings ground their representations and in doing so ground their viewing subjects as the subject qua focal point implicated just afore the painting at the level of the viewer’s eye. For representationalism there is no other experience of paintings. Implicit in this is traditional painting’s experiential objects. Within the objectified space of the painting objects can arise only through the specificity of attribute. Because of this, technique and cliché became the marks of good painters. Although Kandinsky reacts to this proliferation of technique and cliché vehemently, he too follows this tradition by grounding his representations on a plane. This is a different plane however, as this BP is a dimension of space not grounded on a dynamic illusion of a third dimension but on borders of the actual canvas. We can see this in the chapter on the BP. Consistently, Kandinsky formulates shapes and lines on the BP, noting that these shapes and lines have added weight depending on which quadrant of the BP is painted. Kandinsky is aware of the BP’s affects but considers this to be the mode of painting. For instance, in the examination of two reflected lines, he writes
Turning this example upside-down is especially fitted to the investigation of the effects of “above” and “below” and this is something the reader can do for himself. The “content” of the line changes so radically that the line is no longer recognizable: the obstinacy disappears completely and is replaced by a laborious tension (PLP 135).
Further, he examines the affects of the base plane, various times, diving the BP into “four primary parts, each of which has its specific appearance” (126). Never mind that these corners of the BP are differentiated only in position to the viewer. Of course, this is the case when paintings can be hung in all kinds of ways different from how the artist painted it. Nonetheless, even before any markings are made, Kandinsky is describing an apparatus that pre-organizes the work. For instance, these corners touch at what Kandinsky calls “the ‘indifferent’ center, out which tensions flow diagonally” (126). This is very much like the lines of perspective that flow out from the viewing subject of more traditional material representation. How has Kandinsky modified the classical view of perspective? It is as if the subject were released from his position on the ground and thrown into the air to see the world as a bird’s eye system of Cartesian coordinates. This view is still consistent with classical perspectives, because it assumes an objective gaze that is all the more objective because even further, the subjective field of view is presented without a mediating subject. Now, the viewing subject sees as a God, all the field for there would be nothing left from his sight. All that remains is the null point of a zero center. You can see then, how this new viewing apparatus of the subject is modified but simultaneously retains the basic system of representation. One suggests that this field of representation is all the more deceptive because its viewing apparatus is entrenched, made invisible. This is not to say that spiritual immediacy should be founded on a materiality that is not canvas or rectangular or planar. Rather, if there is a spirituality of the art work, let it be of the art work itself, and not the added effect of the viewing eye. In a sense, we must approach the works as naïve and let the work tells us of what it will without pre-focusing the work in any particular way. As Kandinsky writes
Our materialistic age has produced a type of spectator or “connoisseur,” who is not content to put himself opposite a picture and let it say its own message. Instead of allowing the inner value of the picture to work, he worries himself in looking for “closeness to nature,” or “temperament,” or “handling,” or outer expression to arrive at the inner meaning (49).
It is exactly this inner value that is locked away when art must always be formulated off a theoritical, pre-fabricated BP. In the context of the BP’s tensions, this inner value remains a kind of surplus, the originary excess that all works of art retain, even though this value can be obscured by inner tensions. As mentioned previously, we can see Kandinsky’s own attempt at shaving away the BP in “White Line” which when combined with the pluralistic, multifaceted background, obscures the effect of the BP on the “White Line”. In effect, he paints with more sophistication than he is aware.
If abstract art is not enough, what else is needed to get at this spirituality? Is not harmony enough? Indeed, with Deleuze we see that harmony is enough, although there are two consequences of a radical harmony: 1) The viewing subject as apparatus, not as actual person, must be gotten rid of and 2) we must understand what it is that is harmonized. If harmony is a sum that is greater than its parts, then what are the parts? Are these parts sums in themselves or are they only parts, partial and incomplete without the harmony? We shall see in a moment that these two questions are related and that the answer to the second naturally follows from the answer to the first.
Too often are we used to treating all matters that we culturally hold equivalent in the same manner, oblivious to the individual differences which determine preferential treatment. To see all paintings in the same way would be to confuse an actual, real painting with our shared cultural assumptions of what paintings are and how they function. In effect, we would confuse the objects we place for the cultural place where we shelve objects. To this end, the removal of the subject’s viewing lense leaves a void that needs to be addressed. Certainly many paintings ask to be treated in the same way. They request that we read this one like the last one, and thus are painted as such. This not need be the case however, with abstract art, or with art that is painted with the avant garde in mind. With this, we almost have to forget who painted what, to see what the painting itself expresses as its own essence. This is the understanding of philosophies of difference, of which Deleuze is par excellence. This means that every difference is itself an identity, and that identity is not to be found on the negative transcendental qualities of X is not-Y, not-Z, not-A and not-B but that X is its own difference as an affirmation of X. Taken in this way, it is as if Deleuze would take the viewing lense of the transcendental subject (who sees the field from above as if a God) and smash this lense against the viewing field. Space then becomes deterritorialized as topographical differences arise on their own originary tension. Kandinsky is here at this point of originary difference in the beginning of PLP in his chapter on points.
On his examination of points Kandinsky attempts to describe an isolated phenomenon before building up to the next step. In this isolation, Kandinsky is at his most purest but what he misses when he goes to the next step is to extend this prior understanding to the next level. He discards what he has learned in order to embrace what he knows. Kandinsky begins by writing that these points are both “an incorporeal thing” (25) and a “Disturbance originating from within” (26), both of which he explains by saying that points are “‘human’ in nature” (25). These meanings are conceptual but they betray Kandinsky’s first grasp of difference. But this is different from the alienated substance of Descartes, rather as Kandinsky explains early on one must have a direct apprehension.
In a conversation with an interesting person, we endeavor to get at his fundamental ideas and feelings. We do not bother about the words he uses, nor the spelling of those words, nor the breath necessary for speaking them, nor the movements of his tongue and lips, nor the psychological workings on our brain, nor the physical sound in our ear, nor the physiological effect on our nerves. We realize that these things, though interesting and important, are not the main things of the moment, but that the meaning and idea is what concerns us. We should have the same feeling [read attitude] when confronted with a work of art. When this becomes general the artist will be able to dispense with natural form and colour and speak in a purely artistic language (CSA 49).
Interesting to note is that Kandinsky follows this exegesis of what not to do after complaining about the cultivated spectator who brings his cultural baggage to the scene of art. Kandinsky does not see cultural baggage as innately different from a mechanistic analysis because the two are the same for him. Of course, we might be interested with how paintings are deployed in various cultural settings and views, but that is an examination of culture. On the contrary, a direct apprehension to the level of the interesting person’s ideas require that we pay intimate attention to what he says and how he uses those aforementioned lips, tongues and sounds without being preoccupied with the mechanics of them. We must rather, pass through these various enunciations and grasp at the wholeness of his speech and his gestures in order to reach a level by which parts are of a whole and that ideas and meaning are immanent a present expression.
Language is perhaps a bad example because of its loaded nature. Deleuze presents us with an understanding of the point which he borrows from Liebniz that extends Kandinsky’s point about points. Liebniz is famous for his contribution to mathematics (he founded calculus at the same time Newton did) as well as his philosophical monadology. Curiously enough, this philosophy addressed Descartes’ dualism and it is this dualism in painting which we shall remove. Aforementioned, Descartes separated the subject from the world by claiming that originary substance is different from attribute, that substance was a conceptual matter of necessity but only through the accidental encounters on the level of attribute. As Deleuze writes, “for Descartes, the essential attribute is confused with substance, to the point that individuals now tend only to be modes of the attribute as it generally is” (54). Only through an understanding of attribute qua substance qua expression can we return individuality and distinctness to its rightful place. The traditional grammatical example demands distinction between subject and attribute. The scheme of attribution works by first expressing a quality and designating an essence that is to say, the subject is the basis by which the predicate acts. However, with Liebniz we have
the event [which] is deemed worthy of being raised to the state of a concept: the Stoics accomplished this by making the event neither an attribute nor a quality, but the incorporeal predicate of a subject of the proposition (not “the tree is green,” but “the tree greens . . .”). They conclude that the proposition stated a “manner of being” of the thing [. . .] and they put manner in the place of essence (53).
It is this manner that replaces the conceptual substance in the monad. We return to Kandinsky’s characterization of the point as a “disturbance originating from within” (26). This is to say that a conceptual point is the abstraction of manner as difference. When the actual point becomes, so becomes the monad in its characteristic “as an independent being and its subordination transforms itself into an inner purposeful one” (28). Kandinsky is only right when he is at his most theoretical for he at once contemplates the point as its own being but looses this when he subordinates all points as the same point. Rather we should being to understand that each point, or monad, has its own life that does not require substance. In isolation, monads are clearly what they are, but what about in tandem?
When Kandinsky extends the point by “another force which develops not within the point, but outside of it” (54), he begins to conceive a line. But this force is not from the outside of the point but from within it. He mistakes the line as an extended force that erases the point because he thinks that points have an innate substance, but this is not so. Rather, the line is an extension of a point’s force from where arises an expression and harmony that creates the whole. This can be understood from calculus where Liebniz conceived of a rate of change different at each point of the arc of a line. Line is a series of monads each of which extend their differential force along the arc, passing the expression as line. Monads in series is the variation of a curve along a curve as the measurement of movement takes movement as measurement. A single monad then, objectively speaking, is a differential, a rate of change that expresses itself as its own variation. Deleuze writes
Moving from a branching of inflection, we distinguish a point that is no longer what runs along inflection, nor is it the point of inflection itself; it is the one in which the lines perpendicular to tangents meet in a state of variation. It is not exactly a point but a place, a position, a site, a “linear focus,” a line emanating from lines. To the degree it represents variation or inflection, it can be called point of view. Such is the basis of perspectivism, which does not mean a dependence in respect to a pregiven or defined subject; to the contrary, a subject will be what comes to the point of view, or rather what remains in the point of view. That is why the transformation of the object refers to a correlative transformation of the subject [. . .]. The point of view is not what varies with the subject [. . .] it is [. . .] the condition in which an eventual subject apprehends a variation. (original italics, 19-20).
This is how space becomes topographical, as monads express themselves in tandem. Further this is how paintings can become expressive not in space but by compressing and releasing space, by moving through the relative temperatures of “hot and cold.” The language Kandinsky uses to try and explicate colors expresses not temperature or depth, but relative variation of one degree or another. It is these many different points, intensities and lines of force that build the harmony by commenting as a whole, on it holographically. For this, each monad has with it, the whole engendered, a microcosm that is relative to its degree of variation of the macrocosm. But one should not fall back to a comfortable transcendent objectivity to find grounding for monads, rather it is the monads that comment on each other to topographize a fuzzy objective ground. A given topography does exist in two, three or four dimensions, but more correctly, expresses each dimension in tandem. Each point is a difference but together, any three points have a rhythm that convergences as the seeds for a plane, not it is not that planes have seeds for points. To further explicate, Deleuze recapitulates Liebniz’s statement about the monads and the city.
For if [. . .] Liebniz makes the monad a sort of point of view on the city, must we understand that a certain form corresponds to each point of view? In conic sections, there is no separate point of view to which the ellipse would return, and another for the parabola, and another for the circle. The point of view, the summit of the cone, is the condition under which we apprehend the group of varied forms or the series of curves to the second degree. It does not suffice to state that the point of view apprehends a perspective, a profile that would each time offer the entirety of a city in its own fashion. For it also brings forth the connection of all related profiles, the series of all curvatures or inflections. What can be apprehended from one point of view is therefore neither a determined street nor a relation that might be determined with other streets, which are constants, but the variety of all possible connections between the course of a given street and that of another. The city seems to be a labyrinth that can be ordered. The world is an infinite series of curvatures or inflections, and the entire world is enclosed in the soul from one point of view (24).
Rather then, monads here are fragments of the smashed lense where that objective viewing apparatus has fragmented into subjective, continually variable instances of its viewed objects. You might ask at this point, what determines how monads express? If a monad is a variation on a point in concert with others, might not a differential of a monad encompass other monads in tandem? And further, is this not what a line, or a plane or a tangent is? The answer is yes, this is how monads, are. According to Deleuze, monads
includes the whole series [and] conveys the entire world, but does not express it without expressing more clearly a small region of the world, a “subdivision” [. . .]. Two souls do not have the same order, but neither do they have the same sequence or the same clear or enlightened region. It might even be stated that insofar as it is filled with folds that stretch to infinity, the soul can always unfold a limited number of them inside itself, those that make up its subdivision or borough. A definition of individuation remains to be clarified: if only individuals exist, it is not because they include the series in a certain order and according to a given region; it is even the inverse that holds (original italics, 25).
Thus we have both the world within the subject but the subject too within the world. Either one could not be without the other. This is radically different from Kandinsky’s comprehension of the BP as an empty basic plane that already has differentials of tension and place. This is how the BP itself is a work of art before Kandinsky paints, but also how the BP insisted by Kandinsky can obliterate the art of an artwork by denying that artwork its own relations. In a half step, this too is how monads can be in a series or line, but how that line is also a continuous variation of monads like notes in melody. What gives a line its inner tension, as Kandinsky might say, is what makes a melodic line harmonize not to another line but to itself. This is where Deleuze comes up with the notion of the fold.
Further more, although these monad/points maybe one sided, how Deleuze comprehends these monads are as folds. Each one interlocks with their neighbor and expression dominos to infinity. A line on a painting may retain its force through all the swirling mass of colors and lines it crosses, but this line too can extend outward beyond the BP, as its own tension to comment on its surroundings. The Mona Lisa can smile at Guernica all the while both paintings retain their own intensity as if in solitude. We can see this play of commentary and folding in and out in “Several Circles No. 323”. Circles themselves for Kandinsky retained a special meaning, as an extended point, a fortissimo vibration that is its own inside. Literally, these circles are what Deleuze might call incompossible, as each wraps itself within its own world, its own highlights, its own note. They nonetheless play with one another (in what is compossible) like two songs from two different radios at the same time, neither fully aware of the other but in harmony, of the same world. Thus, only on the level of the fold that extends (despite) variation that we begin to converge on what Deleuze calls the second story of the Baroque, what Kandinsky might call the level of the spiritual.
Again, recalling Kandinsky’s polar modes of materiality and spirituality, Kandinsky notes that these two points are mutually exclusive aims of art. One can desire to capture the material or one can desire to capture the spiritual. Kandinsky professes to the spiritual, as we see in his art, but theorizes on the level of the material, basing his theory of composition on the tension inherent in the BP. Indeed, Kandinsky should aim a little higher, but such heights are difficult to metaphysically describe as each painting is in itself a monad incompossible because of its specificity, wrapped up in its own world. Again, only on a level beyond differentiation, where variation reach beyond material bounds to enfold other variations, do we find yet another higher story that achieves a purity, a reflective unity of its own. This is how life rises up from its plastic forces where
The organism is defined by its ability to fold its own parts and to unfold them, not to infinity, but to a degree of development assigned to its own species. Thus an organism is enveloped by other organisms, one within another (interlocking of germinal matter), like Russian dolls. The first fly contains the seeds of all flies to come, each being called in its turn to unfold its own parts at the right time. And when an organism dies, it does not really vanish, but folds in upon itself (8).
Further, this is how a body arises, the folding of one monad over others, consistently and each differential monad expressing its own difference through the body of many variations. This body is thus defined by a dominate monad as “a clear and distinguished zone of expression” (original italics, 98). Thus while on a lower level, we have monads of continuous variation, blind to each other like the several circles whose pink is pink and the other whose yellow is yellow, separated and happy in their separate spaces. Simultaneously on the upper level, we have the painting an entire differential, as harmonious, where melodies enfold and interplay folding and unfolding on each other like so many children passing the hot potato, some quickly, some hanging onto it, others giggling and some hiding back, but each in their proper turn. In terms of curvature, Deleuze writes of the two floors:
On the upper level we have a line of variable curvature, without coordinates, a curve with infinite inflection, where inner vectors of concavity mark for each ramification the position of individual monads in suspension. But only on the lower level have we coordinates that determine extreme, extrema that define the stability of figures [. . .]. This is the organization of the Baroque house with its division in two floors, one individual weightlessness, the other in a gravity of mass (102).
This is not to say however that there are two paintings, but rather that there are two paintings because there is one. It is impossible to tell where one floor ends and the other begins because these two comment wholly on one another. Deleuze attests to the inner beauty of fabric, the folding textures of Baroque characters whose ruffles accentuate a form by hiding it all together. Under the dress is an elegance that is common with the dress. On the one hand we
are dealing with two cities, a celestial Jerusalem and an earthy one, but with the rooftops and foundations of a same city, and two floors of a same house (119).
Although in actuality, the two floors are the same floor and the house is as one whole. This is perhaps too simple, and would repeat the dualism of Descartes, for there is not one spirituality or one materiality but a mix which is impossible to differentiate. Perception, expression and hallucination are the same for each has no object but subsists over the artwork as a second floor, simultaneously folded in and enfolded. Otherwise said, the object of perception is the perception, and the expressed essence is the attribute expressed. By extension, there are not just two Jerusalems, as that would insist on the same dualism, but a plurality. The man on the corner selling hot dogs is a different Jerusalem than the man on the other corner selling popcorn. The small dirty children who run around pick-pocketing have different Jerusalems each, and each Jerusalem is wrapped up in the differentials of the children. Likewise, the woman in the limousine, the fountain that breaks sometimes, the courier in his own car are all Jerusalem in convergence and yet each separately is divergent and enfolding. Thus, we have in the body of the mass of people many Jerusalems, and we also have the entire city as a whole, floating animated as if a cartoon coding through the dirty streets, the churches, mosques and synagogues. In this way, spirituality is inherent in all forms, in all matter, in all art. As Kandinsky claims that there is no pure decorative art, and even art meant as decoration is not lifeless (47). Thus we have the two meta-levels, spiritual and materiality as extreme points themselves, polar modes which may resist one another, one being made of porous sponge-like matter and the other made of clear airy mist, but the two are the same, commenting on one another. Where art enters as art is not on the level of the purely material, although we might begin with BP, but it is neither incorporeal, as might be a consistent feeling or a tendency. What rises through is the expression of both, a compossible world, divergent from this one perhaps, but all the more in active although not in force but in presence qua force qua presence. We can end thus, with a quote from Deleuze, as he explains that it is not the sum of the monads that realize a body. Rather it takes both floors,
the bending of the two levels, the zone of inseparability that produces the crease or seam. To state that the bodies realize is not to say that they are real: they become real with respect to what is actual in the soul (inner action or perception). Something completes or realizes the body. A body is not realized, but what is realized in the body is currently perceived in the soul. The reality of the body is the realization of phenomena in the body (120).
Spirituality is achieved as a realized shock, of the whole puzzle or of pieces that slide into place all the while the thing remains the same and is transformed or reaches another level.
Thus, contrary to Kandinsky, it is not the content of objective perspective that derails the spiritual in painting. Such content is itself the expression of materiality, but that expression is itself only a symptom of a dominate monad, a larger differential, one that would extend and overcode other monads and signify only itself over and over, everywhere. This one view demands itself objective over all, that there is only this one world, one focal point, one view, only this one transcendental acumen. In much the same way, Kant binds self and subject as in every experience through the grounding of a priori transcendental machines. This consistent view is a regurgitation that denies the larger body as constant variations, intensities that point to a many inflected theme. As art is expression, so must each art have clear expression. This means, and Kandinsky is on the right track, to replace the representation with an immediacy of access, to grasp that expression and not mistake it through something else. What he forgoes in this access however was the subject, the missing mediator. This does not suggest that everyone viewing art would view art the same way. We are all comments on each other, the artwork and the world. Each color is a comment on another color because each color is a shade of itself. A soul is a differential, which has a particular view, yet this vantage point need not dominate the artwork nor need it insist on its mastery by folding the artwork into an apparatus alien to the artwork. Thus while a body and a world exists as freedom, a zone of unfettered expression, so too an artwork must be free, on the BP, in your head, on the wall, unfettered and unchained. Art qua spirituality cannot uplift the subject unless the subject too is willing to be uplifted, brought to that seam or crease, to be enveloped, enfolded. If we want art to express, we should not fold the artwork into ourselves but be folded, unfolded and enfolded.
Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Liebniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: Minnesota 1993.
Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Trans. M.T.H. Sadler. New York: Dover 1977.
—. Point and Line to Plane. Trans. Howard Dearstyne and Hilla Rebay. New York: Dover 1979.
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