Month: December 2019

Accidents

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Musical events often seem to come about as a result of accidents, whether while composing or performing, or even while researching and writing about music. both composers and performers may come across new techniques or interpretations through mistakes. This is especially applicable in jazz and popular music, but is equally so for Western classical musicians.

Maybe a hand stutters and loses its mark on the keyboard in the case of the composer or singer, fingers slip unexpectedly. From nowhere a note is made. Not what was meant, not what was planned, an accident. When such accidents happen, we always reduce them to anomaly status instantly. Maybe we’re carrying on, overlooking the failure, and reaffirming the context in which our success started: that’s how it should have gone. Or, we may replicate the slippage test, with aim this time alone.

Because it is not the same event, the sound is familiar. We repeat it again, and think of it as the “same” accident; it is interesting, it works, and it begins to sound good. We continue to play over the section, transforming the music. What was an accident ceases to be as such. It moves from a singularity to a particular instance of a general type. The accident is subsumed within a framework, and its singularity becomes repeatable, acceptable within the original framework, its surprising affect becoming part of a representational system. It is no longer a singular, idiosyncratic event.

Artifice

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Artifice seeks to impart information, be it a message, an opinion, a judgment, or a physiological stimulus. It is therefore naturally implicated in the creation of Consensus, a term I am using to describe the cloud of received opinions and ideas in which we all live. Consensus is the statistical world of useful knowledge, generalization, habit, custom, and ideology.

There is no room for genuine conception in Consensus but only preconception, pre-thought, all things having been packaged prior to delivery. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wrote, “When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself” The last thing artificers want, however, is to divide their audience,” he wrote. “Anomalies must be ironed out of the work, which for its part must exhibit seamless continuity and smoothness” “Perfect artifice would evoke exactly the same emotional state in everyone regardless of who they were,” he said. Artifice appeals to our physiological urges by replacing individuality with an abstraction. The more a pornographic work objectifies people, the more the viewer is objectified in turn, he writes. Artifice can lead us to acts of self-betrayal. The marketer’s goal is to have us act in certain ways whether or not we personally approve of the prescribed behavior. Marketing exemplifies the basic principle of consumer culture, that William S. Burroughs dissects in Naked Lunch. You’re selling customers to the product. The product itself is secondary, all products are junk from the salesman’s cynical viewpoint that goes straight to the “reptilian brain,” the most primitive part of the nervous system. “The reptilian brain always wins” .

ART AND JOYCE

Proper art stills us, evoking an emotional state in which “the mind is arrested and raised above desiring and desiring” Improper art does the opposite, aiming to make the percipient act, think, or feel in a prescribed manner. Art is constantly being put to uses that are at odds with its essence. Cultural institutions, social pressures, laws, customs, fashions, and trends pull it in every direction: In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce outlines his theory of art. For the young James Joyce, true art is “static,” while false art, which he will here call artifice, is “kinetic”

PORNOGRAPHIC AND DIDACTIC ART

Joyce describes two types of artifice: pornographic art and didactic art. In pornographic art, things are presented in a way that makes us want to possess or consume them. Didactic art is essentially pornography in the minor key, he writes. Both types are “kinetic” because they appeal to physiological urges rather than individual urges. “All forms of didacticism place art in the service of moral judgment,” he argues, “where all works are designed solely to convey a message or moral judgment” . 

Our intention is not to claim that artifice is invariably “wrong,” he writes, only that it falls short of the effect that art alone can achieve. Popular fiction genres often rest on a didactic foundation. Their purpose is to teach us how to act, and show us. How to feel by giving us something to judge,” he adds. “It fails because it subordinates the aesthetic to interests that are foreign to it,” he says, “and shows us what to think, and how to Act”

Art With a Capital F (Affects and Percepts)

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Affects and percepts are two different concepts in psychology.

Affects refer to the emotional experiences or feelings that people have in response to various stimuli or events. Affects can be positive or negative, and they can range in intensity from mild to intense. Examples of affects include happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust.

Percepts, on the other hand, refer to the mental representations of the sensory information that people perceive from the environment. Percepts are the internal representations of the external stimuli that we perceive through our senses. Examples of percepts include the mental image of a red apple, the sound of a bird chirping, and the taste of a sweet dessert.

In summary, affects are related to emotions, while percepts are related to sensory perceptions.

In the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, affects and percepts have a slightly different meaning than in traditional psychology.

Deleuze defines affects as pre-individual intensities that exist in the world prior to individual experiences and emotions. Affects are not subjective experiences or feelings, but rather objective and impersonal forces that shape our experiences and perceptions. They are not limited to human beings, but exist in all things and can be experienced by anyone or anything that encounters them.

Percepts, on the other hand, are the way in which the human mind organizes and interprets sensory information to create meaningful experiences. They are not objective representations of the external world, but rather subjective constructions that are shaped by the individual’s experiences and perspectives. Percepts are not limited to sensory experiences, but can also include thoughts, concepts, and other mental constructs.

In Deleuze’s philosophy, affects and percepts are intimately connected. Affects provide the raw material for the creation of percepts, and percepts shape the way that affects are experienced and interpreted. By exploring the relationship between affects and percepts, Deleuze seeks to understand how individuals experience and interact with the world around them.

Art’s power is its ability to distinguish affect from affection. Where we might sometimes suggest that the power of an art work lies in what it’ means’-what it reflects. Deleuze will insist that its power lies in its development of affect singularities. Instead of asking what a piece of music means, Deleuze would insist that we should ask:

what does it do? What new effects does it create, what new connections does it make possible?

(…)

As such, by virtue of this principle, the work resembles nothing, mimics nothing. It must ‘subsist by itself’, on its own, without pointing or referring back to a world outside it, which it would reflect, or to a subject which it would express. The literary work is worth on its own, it is by essence that which stands right, that which stands: it is a ‘monument’ ”

Deleuze and Guattari also indicate this self-preservation of the sensation in art as an autonomous block of sensations. The work of art is a being of sensation.

From its beginning, the created thing is independent from its model, as well as from the spectator and the artist who created it. The sensations, percepts and affects do not need man as a subject that would grant them a consistency or a justification. They exist besides and before man.

“it is the painter that becomes blue”

The goal of art is to reach pure sensation. The main question of a theory of the aesthetic experience becomes then that of the nature of this “wresting” an affect or a percept, this “extracting” a block of sensations.

“Art undoes the triple organization of perceptions, affections, and opinions in order to substitute a monument composed of percepts, affects and blocs of sensations that take the place of language. The writer uses words, but by creating a syntax that makes them pass into sensation that makes the standard language stammer, tremble, cry, or even sing: this is the style, the `tone’, the language of sensations”

Art is the elimination from the entire subjective domain of the mere effect and interpretation. It’s a sensation distillation process. There are specific procedures for each creator to succeed in this process. But they all focus on the same point: the extension of the definition of human, of self the becoming-colour, the becoming-cry, or man’s pure sound.

“Affects are precisely these nonhuman becomings of man, just as percepts — including the town — are nonhuman landscapes of nature”

The centripetal effect of the art-monument, which wrests the affects from the perceptions, wrests the artist from himself. The artist is the one that mixes himself with nature, and enters a zone of indiscernibility with the universe. Van Gogh becomes sunflower, Kafka becomes animal, Messiaen becomes rhythm and melody.

“It should be said of all art that, in relation to the percepts or visions they give us, artists are presenters of affects, the inventors and creators of affects. They not only create them in their work, they give them to us and make us become with them, they draw us into the compound (…). The flower sees (…). Whether through words, colors, sounds or stone, art is the 11

The artist is the one who lives the affect, the one who works with the affect and lives in the affect, the point of indifference between man and the animal or the entire world, the area of indiscernibility between words and things. The artist is the one who becomes, for example, ocean (Moby Dick) or mineral (Bartleby), as in Melville.

TERRITORY

It is in this sense that Deleuze and Guattari insist that the primordial gesture of art is to cut out, to carve, either chaos or a territory, always to make sensations occur there.

“Perhaps art begins with the animal, at least with the animal that carves out a territory and constructs a house”.

To carve a territory or to cut our chaos: these are the very first moments of artistic creation.

“All that is needed to produce art is here: a house, some postures, colors and songs — on condition that it all opens onto and launches itself on a mad vector as on a witch’s broom, a line of the universe or of deterritorialisation”.

By this line, one returns to the field of indiscernibility between man and animal, words and objects, in short, art and nature. So art becomes the link between what Deleuze and Guattari call the

“determined melodic compounds” and “infinite plan of symphonic composition”.

ART

There’s a second definition of art by Deleuze and Guattari: art as thought. Art is thought, art thinks just as much as science or philosophy. The purpose of art is to sensitize the chaos, because according to Deleuze and Guattari,

“art is not chaos but a composition of chaos that yields the vision or sensation, so that it constitutes, as Joyce says, a chaosmos, a composed chaos — neither foreseen nor preconceived. Art transforms chaotic variability into chaoid variety”

Not a relation of exclusion, but on the contrary, of inclusion. The thought is the result of an operation done to chaos, it is the very composition of chaos. To think is to give consistency to chaos. Making chaos consistent is cutting it out, giving it a reality of its own. Chaos becomes Thought, it acquires a reality as Thought or mental chaosmos. Art is one of the three forms of cutting out chaos. Art, science and philosophy are the three Chaoïdes, the three forms of thought and the three forms of creating chaos.

CONCEPTS

Thus, according to Deleuze and Guattari, within immanence occurs philosophy, within consistency occurs science and within composition occurs art. The junction of these three plans is called “brain”. “A concept is a set of inseparable variations that is produced or constructed on a plane of immanence insofar as the latter crosscuts the chaotic variability and gives it consistency (reality).

“It is the brain that thinks and not man — the latter being only a cerebral crystallization.

We will speak of the brain as Cézanne of the landscape: man absent from, but completely within the brain. Philosophy, art, and science are not the mental objects of an objectified brain but the three aspects under which the brain becomes subject, Thought-brain”.

Brain becomes a Subject when it becomes Thought.

Deleuze draws attention to a resonance between making a territorial form of art — house, postures, colors, songs — and the

“ the Thought-brain can be known as one “I”. The brain is an I, a philosophical “I conceive”, a scientific “I refer”, or an artistic “I feel”

“Contemplating is creating, the mystery of passive creation, sensation. Sensation fills out the plane of composition and is filled with itself by filling itself with what contemplates: it is ‘enjoyment’ and ‘self-enjoyment’. It is a subject, or rather an inject»

Art is the capturing of life’s energy and also the development of a life that stands alone and absorbs the force of the immanence of life for itself. And Deleuze proposes a philosophy of the spirit by explaining this way of capturing life. The spirit, in what theory is defined? As “soul,” “energy,” “shape in itself,” it is what, in the mind, tends to fly over chaos, to make it alert, to slice it out so that it becomes a chaoid or a compound of affects and experiences.

Art is then a real transcendental practice, because at the same time it is both a brain-like activity (instead of faculties, Deleuze now suggests the brain, the micro-brain) and an artistic creation of a soul, a life as the absolute immanence of the sensation. So art is a transcendental empiric experience.

ARTIST

“So, my good Teutons, you are proud of your good poets and artists? You point to them and brag about them to foreign nations? And since it cost you no effort to have them here among you, you spin the delightful theory that there is no reason to take any trouble about them in the future, either? They come all by themselves, isn’t that right, my innocent children? They stork brings them! Let’s not even talk about midwives!”

 F Nietzsche 

Art is not a thing; it is a way. “Art does not reproduce what is visible; it makes things visible” “Entertainment gives you a predictable pleasure. Art… leads to transformation. It awakens you, rather than just satisfying a craving.

 Entertainment just requires passive receivers, whereas art demands purposeful action that awakens your soul. Certain genres of music have become almost formulaic because writers are forced to follow stock templates of what’s expected to happen where (i.e., the first chorus coming in 20 seconds in).

ART: MUSES

An artist creates Art on their own initiative. An artist “labors” in service of their Muse, their Muse. The Muse alone is the Artist’s employer. “Do this,” she says, “and you will Live. Turn away, and at best you will only survive.” You do have a choice: You can make the Art, or not. I accept the Muse’s terms. I perform the labor, and receive my “payment”: Life.

I’d much rather serve the Muse than an employer, but although the Muse doesn’t negotiate a moneyed wage. The Muse turns out to always have the artist’s best interests at heart.

Percepts: The Landscape Before Man

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In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze presents art as a compound of sensations that is preserved in itself, in so far as it exists, and sensations as true beings, real existences.

“Art preserves, and it is the only thing in the world that is preserved”

Art is a compound of beings that preserve themselves for themselves, in themselves, without having anything else to explain, help them or would justify them. In their expression, sensations find a self-sufficient mode of existence. Art creates entities that remain as much as their own expression.

PERCEPT

‘The percept is the landscape before man, in the absence of man.’

Deleuze is particularly struck by the way the great English and American novelists write in percepts, claiming that authors like Heinrich von Kleist and Franz Kafka write in affects by comparison. This could manifest itself in the ability of the characters of Virginia Woolf to merge with the world, in T. The destruction of his own ego by E. Lawrence, or even the relentless reluctance of Bartleby to be’ particular.’

Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent of a state of those who experience them.

As small children are unable to distinguish between themselves and the outside world, with the percept, literature becomes a way of exploring not how we exist in the world, but rather how we become with the world. It has the capacity to explore our existence as “thisness” on phase space to remind us that we ourselves are part of these sensation compounds.

The percept makes visible the invisible forces of the world, that overwhelm the writer. Consequently, it has the power of vision. The percept challenges conventional notions of forms and subjects. It also could have political significance, in that it enables us to explore an impersonal and pre-individual soup that might be the basis for a particular sort of community.

In DUNE through his perceptions of the worm, Paul passes into the landscape, which in turn becomes a plane of pure expression that escapes form. Paul enters into a relationship of becoming with the worm, and the desert emerges as a pure percept, a compound of sensations.

In Moby Dick, Captain Ahab and the ocean emerges as a pure percept, a compound of sensa-tion. Ahab enters into a relationship of becoming with the whale. Another important reference point is Virginia Woolf, who talks of ‘moments of the world’, in which a character such as Mrs Dalloway ‘passes into’ the town.

Deleuze referred to the way the moor is perceived by Thomas Hardy, like the steppe by Anton Chekhov and the desert by T.E. Lawrence. It can be seen, then, that the percept implies a particular relationship between character and landscape. The landscape is essentially no longer an environment that either mirrors, mocks, or shapes the character. Nor is it the case that by directing a gaze at it the character perceives the landscape. It’s more a case how the mind is a kind of membrane that is both in contact with the outside world and is actually part of it.

The self is not a distinct thing from the outside world, but something more like the outer world’s’ fold,’ a membrane that captures other things. The intimate contact between the outside and the inside means that literature can explore the resulting’ private desert’ (T. E. Lawrence) or’ private ocean’ (Melville).

As Deleuze puts it, every bomb that T. E. Lawrence explodes is a bomb that explodes in himself. He cannot stop himself from projecting intense images of himself and others into the desert, with the result that these images take on a life of their own.

Given this emphasis on impersonality and ego dissolution, it is not surprising that the’ man without qualities’ is the literary hero of perception. This kind of character-closely related to what Deleuze calls the’ seer’ (the voyeur) in his cinema books-ultimately tends to’ be’ everyone and everything, at once modest but also crazy.

He might be a literally’ on the road ‘ character, and an obvious example of popular literature would be the open-mindedness of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road narrator. Deleuze talks about how a specific, practical notion of democracy is reflected in the way the soul finds fulfillment in American literature, rather than redemption, through’ taking the road’ and being open to all interactions.

The percept is mainly an artistic literary form, but it has something to add to politics. Simply put, experience has the effect of pulling us out of ourselves and into the world and questioning the individualizing and infantilizing propensity of a great deal of contemporary culture.

It’s not enough to turn our own experiences and affections into a book,

Deleuze and Guattari suggest,

to embark on a journey in search of the father who eventually turns out to be ourselves

AFFECTS

Art is presented as a radical philosophy of Nature where the brain exists among vegetables and minerals. Affects are blocks of space time. Affect is the change, or variation, that occurs when bodies collide, or come into contact. As a body, affect is the transitional product of an encounter, specific in its ethical and lived dimensions and yet it is also as indefinite as the experience of a sunset, transformation, or a ghost.

Deleuze engages and extends Baruch Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical conceptions of affect in order to describe the processes of becoming, transformation through movement and over duration. Deleuze rejects the philosophical tradition of passive reflection, and the value-laden associations of ascribing emotions to subjective experience or perceptions.

‘On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature’, Deleuze describes affect as

verbs becoming events —

naming affects as perceivable forces, actions, and activities. Within a Deleuzian context, affect acts as a matrix of attraction within any assembly to exploit meaning and relationships, inform and produce attraction, and create intensity.

Percept is a non-passive, guided and influenced constant moulding. Affect is an experiential force or a source of power that becomes enveloped by emotion by experiencing and mixing with other bodies (organic or inorganic), becomes an idea, and as such, as Deleuze describes, can compel information, history, memory, and power circuits systems.