Deleuze on J.M.W. Turner: Catastrophism in Philosophy?1 [Draft]
... Turner's last watercolours do not only conquer already all the forces of impressionism, but also the power of an explosive line without contours. Making painting itself a catastrophe without equal (instead of romantically illustrating catastrophe).i
But does not difference as catastrophe precisely bear witness to an irreducible ground which continues to act under the apparent equilibrium of organic representation?ii
I. Introduction
It is argued here that Gilles Deleuze puts forward a world-view where catastrophe plays a positive role. This advocacy for catastrophe is most explicit in Deleuze's studies of art, in particular, in his work on J.M.W. Turner. There, the greatness of Turner's late paintings is seen to lie in their expression of catastrophe, that is, they allow catastrophe to become actual in so far as the works of art are catastrophes in themselves. In this case, artistic expression is in direct opposition to the representation of catastrophes. However, Deleuze goes beyond catastrophe and, more importantly, he avoids the accusation of destructive nihilism. For him, catastrophe is only a stage that allows us to express the differential changes that underlie identity in a world committed to identity and representation. Once these changes are expressed and understood our commitment to identity disappears and with it the need to relate to change purely in terms of the extreme violence of catastrophe. In its place, Deleuze puts forward the doctrine of counteractualisation, that is, the practice of expressing the catastrophic changes that come to constitute and destroy any actuality.
II. Catastrophism in Philosophy
For Gilles Deleuze, disaster and destruction must be present in all things and must be put into motion in all great creations. Not only, are all things overshadowed by catastrophe, but also, it is the task of great art to participate in this disaster. In his remarks on Turner, his `oracle', Deleuze singles out the painter's absolute dedication to catastrophe. The English painter is not put forward as great simply for his early representations of Alpine avalanches and other aweinspiring disastrous eventsiii. He is great because, in the later works, the paintings become catastrophes in themselves and for those who view them.
This is no mistaken usage, the Littré and OED definitions are unequivocal. A catastrophe is a great reversal, a disaster and a deplorable end. Deleuze risks outdoing Voltaire's PanglossLeibniz by inviting rather than merely accepting the Lisbon earthquake: `trente mille habitants de tout age et de tout sexe sont écrasés sous les ruines ... -- Quelle peut être la raison suffisante 1
Dr. James Williams, University of Dundee.
de ce phénomène? disait Pangloss.'iv Indeed, for Deleuze, catastrophe is to be affirmed and sought out in art and in life. His reasons are not simply millenarian or tragic in the sense of the final disaster or undoing, rather, in accord with the more abstract definition of the OED, his catastrophe is any event `subverting a system of things'. The subversion of systematicity and identity is the attraction of catastrophe rather than the harsh lessons of its violence.
Deleuze's catastrophism, then, appears to be radical and thoroughgoing. Where, in geology, the term indicates a theory that explains changes on the earth's surface in terms of sudden catastrophic events, in his philosophy, catastrophe is ubiquitous and without fixed scale. From the smallest to the greatest state different catastrophic processes are at workv. In Deleuze and Guattari's books, from Thousand Plateaus to What is Philosophy?, this geological catastrophism is expressed through the ever-present processes of de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation; no well-defined territory is safe or static, it is constantly undone and remade. The disappearance of familiar landscapes and the creation of an unfamiliar terrain in a volcanic eruption, tidal wave or earthquake is repeated in all things great or small.
Art -- somewhat like time-lapse photography -- can make these movements on different scales felt on others. For example, Le Corbusier uses vibration between colours or light and shade to animate a solid building; once coloured, static walls take on a dynamic quality that furthers the architect's project of making buildings into an active aesthetic experience. Motion and change take over from stasisvi. Similarly, Peter Eisenman followed Gilles Deleuze in expressing movements in geology, urban planning and settlement, and communication in the folds of the structural designs for the Rebstockpark site in Frankfurt: `The idea of the Rebstock Fold is to become this surface on which urban events would be inscribed with an intensive actuality'vii Thus, according to Deleuze, every actual thing is subject to an infinite set of ongoing and openended transformations and re-creations that can be expressed in art. There is no rule for the organisation of these processes. There also is no possible overview, or hierarchy; instead, the series is a multiplicity that cannot be totalised. Furthermore, this multiplicity is radically destructive insofar as the identity of things is not preserved in the transformation.
Here, the very concept of identity as ground is challenged: underlying any identity we find a set of destructive and creative processes. These processes are the transcendental condition for any actual identity. Deleuze owes this move from the empirical to the transcendental to Kant: `[...] Kant is the one who discovers the prodigious dominance of the transcendental. He is the analogue of the great explorer -- not of another world, but of the upper or lower reaches of this one.'viii There can be no limited and clearly defined actual thing whose existence does not presuppose a set of past and future catastrophic changes. Though individuals and species become settled and attached to a particular form, they are the result of a series of dramatic changes and they are destined to be engulfed by further ones: identity must be understood in terms of a potentiality that can come to destroy it. Deleuze's favoured source in this respect is the work of the biologist Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire: `[the set of genes] constitutes a virtuality, a potentiality; and this structure is incarnated in actual organisms, as much from the point of view of the determination of their species as from the differentiation of their parts, according to rhythms that are precisely called `differential', according to comparative speeds or slowness which measure the movement of actualization.'ix In this sense, life presupposes catastrophe and destruction as potentialities and the role of the philosopher, artist and scientist is to lift the illusion of settled identities and pure essences by expressing the processes that come to produce
and undermine them.
This extreme nature of Deleuze's advocacy of catastrophe is unsettling, even distressing. In less radical versions, catastrophe in philosophy still leaves a place for redemption and reconciliation. It can be a sign of order and justice, where great disasters are in fact only lessons, purifications, or selective events designed, in the end, to bring about the Goodx. These possibilities are actively opposed in Deleuze's work, since they break with the belief in the omnipresence of destruction and re-creation. There can be no transcendent realm from whence to explain and rationalise catastrophe. With this refusal of transcendence there is also the refusal of a transcendent ethical order: disaster cannot be redeemed by reference to a will outside this world. Deleuze's commitment to immanence and to an univocal philosophy is a strong as Spinoza'sxi. Neither philosopher will exchange this commitment for the re-assurance of a final cause and for the explanation of catastrophe through divine will. They despise those who do fall into this illusion: `[...] among so many conveniences in Nature they had to find many inconveniences: storms, earthquakes and diseases, and the like. These they maintain happen because the gods are angry on account of wrongs done to them by men [...]'xii
III. Deleuze and Turner
Deleuze's most important remarks on Turner appear in two passages of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. Though the sections are relatively short they are dense and a careful reading allows a complex position to emerge. This density is a key factor of the style of the book: it is written to reflect the view, firstly, that all the possibilities that can occur and have occurred to an actual thing subsist in it as potentialities and, secondly, that the potentialities of any given actuality is the cosmos as a whole. In its most straightforward version this means that any Deleuzian actuality is the meeting point of all potentialities, or, any existent presupposes the subsistent world as a whole. It is important to note how this view departs from a statement such as `God is fully present even in the smallest thing and all things are in God'. In the Deleuzian version, the identification of part and whole never takes place, rather, they are differentiated by the relation of actual to potential. It is for this reason that expression is an important function within his philosophy; it relates the potential to the actual. Passages from Anti-Oedipus therefore condense the book as a whole and wide series of arguments and theories are found in concentrated form in extremely short passages.
In line with this property of Deleuze and Guattari's writing, the first passage on Turner from Anti-Oedipus will be unpacked into a series of points that cover wider Deleuzian arguments and ideas. The question `Why does Deleuze come to develop a catastrophism in art and philosophy?' is the leading thread connecting these points. The key passage is: The visit to London is our Pythia. Turner is there. Looking at his paintings, one understands what it is to scale the wall, and yet to remain behind; to cause flows to pass through, without knowing any longer whether they are carrying us elsewhere or flowing back over us already. The paintings range over three periods. If the psychiatrist were allowed to speak here, he could talk about the first two, although they are in fact the most reasonable. The first are of end-of-the-world catastrophes, avalanches and storms. That's where Turner begins. The paintings of the second period are somewhat like the
delirious reconstruction, where the delirium hides, are rather when it is on a par with the lofty technique inherited from Poussin, Lorrain, or the dutch tradition: the world is reconstructed through archaisms having a modern function. But something incomparable happens at the level of the paintings of the third period, in the series Turner does not exhibit, but keeps secret. It cannot even be said that he is far ahead of his time: there is something ageless, that comes from an eternal future, or flees towards it. The canvas turns in on itself, it is pierced by a hole, a lake, a tornado, an explosion. The themes of the preceding paintings are to be found again here, their meaning has changed. The canvas is truly broken, sundered by what penetrates it. All that remains is a background of gold and fog, intense, intensive, traversed in depth by what has just sundered its breath: the schiz. Everything becomes mixed and confused, and it is here that the breakthrough -- not the breakdown -- occurs.xiii
The first point to draw is that the passage is a response to a key problem in Deleuze and Guattari's work. The problem has a political and moral side, it also has a logical aspect. Firstly, the break with identity and with the repression of desire as change (Deleuze defines desire as a movement rather than as a longing for a specific goal or object) risks descending into a chaotic, structure-less state. Secondly, in terms of logic and the philosophy of language, the question arises of whether there can be a radical break with rules without a collapse into nonsense. From the point of view of this revolutionary book written in the aftermath of May 68, the political risk of anarchy and the moral risk of nihilistic destructiveness must be addressed. This is why we find the passage opening on the opposition between passing over the wall and remaining behind or allowing flows to pass through, but also to return. It is also why the passage closes on the opposition between a breakthrough or a breakdown. The analogies capture the tension between the escape from repression, escaping over the wall of the prison, the home or the state, and the need for an order, limitation and sense without which chaos would reign. They also capture the psychological, and more importantly, the mechanical tension between a breakthrough and a breakdown: the breakout from repression or from technical limits is energising and lifeaffirming but it is also the point of greatest danger in terms of complete breakdown or failure, whether psychological or machinic. Thus, the passage on Turner is situated exactly where Deleuze and Guattari consider the possibility of a terminally chaotic catastrophe in politics, psychology and, more generally, in any machinic set-up. Turner's paintings are a creative response to this problem.
Deleuze and Guattari deal with the response in terms of standard divisions in the critical understanding of Turner's work and a non-standard interpretation of those divisions. His work evolves from early picturesque paintings, through an historical and mythical period, inspired among others by Poussin and Claude, to his late, more abstract and now more famous paintings (for instance, The Fighting `Téméraire', 1838), where recognisable forms are disturbed or torn asunder in explosions of light and colour. This division into periods is not especially controversial, since it follows clear formal and substantive differences. However, given the integrity of Turner's work these distinctions are most often conflated according to overall interpretations. For example, Turner's work has been united under the theme of the romantic sublime according to which each of the periods of his work is related to the sublime relation of nature to man. For example, in conclusion to the notes on his major exhibition on the Turnerian sublime, John Wilton writes: `As human beings we cannot avoid being responsive to the sublime in nature and in the works of man. We must still be responsive to it in works of art. This instinctive human response is what prompts much of our admiration of Turner.'xiv
According to this view, Turner's art represents the power and beauty of nature as it exceeds mere human scales and values. More significantly, John Gage has developed a subtle interpretation that claims, after Ruskin, that Turner's art brings together a painterly concern with the role of colour and a concern with the romantic relation of man and nature. This union is achieved through a complex poetic symbolism where colour and forms represent themes in the relation of colour to sublime romantic themes: `Turner in his art was less and less concerned to express chromatic harmony, but rather the conflict of light and dark; for him the primaries were emblematic not of harmony but of disharmony.'xv
Deleuze rejoins Gage on the theme of light and colour but breaks with his symbolism and romanticism. For him, Turner's art breaks with representation through colour and only the late paintings achieve this break: `The canvas is truly broken, sundered by what penetrates it. All that remains is a background of gold and fog, intense, intensive, traversed in depth by what has just sundered its breath: the schiz.' In these different interpretations the theme of catastrophe is never far away, whether it be in the immeasurable power of a sublime nature, represented by Turner's obsession with storms and turbulent sea-scapexvi, or in the catastrophic explosionxvii, backgroundxviii or veilxix of light and colour in the late paintings as viewed by Deleuze. However, for Gage, catastrophe can be averted through the intellectual function of symbolic representation. For him, Turner brings together an understanding of the forces of nature, of the science of colour and of the romantic relation of man to nature: In the study of Turner's career as a colourist, Ulysses deriding Polyphemes is a central picture because it is as much about light and colour as it is about the Homeric story; and because it invites us both to look for a conception of natural forces underlying some of the earlier subject pictures which have often been considered as merely conventional, and to look forward to a mythology of colour infusing some of the later landscapes.xx Thus, for Gage and for Ruskin, the deeper truth that underlies Turner's sublime pictures lies in the possibility of making sense of the apparent immeasurable force of nature through mythical interpretations blended into the landscape with the aid of his supreme command of colour: `[...] the aim of the great inventive landscape painter must be to give the far higher and deeper truth of mental vision, rather than that of the physical facts.'xxi
The importance of this intellectual capture of the forces of nature in the mythology of colour cannot be under-estimated. Ruskin was working against severe popular attack on the inventive and surreal use of colour in Turner's late paintings. His use of an apparently unreal, though in fact scientificxxii, three colour basis for painting and his reliance on yellow, over and above red and blue, caused revulsion and ridicule among some critics. Turner was seen as ruining the real beauty of nature through personal obsession. Indeed, the sensual catastrophe picked up upon by Deleuze was felt very early on, but only in negative terms as a sensual scandal. The Morning Herald, for example, launched an attack on the very painting that Ruskin and Gage view as central: This is a picture in which truth, nature and feeling are sacrificed to melodramatic effect ... he has reached the perfection of unnatural tawdriness. In fact it may be taken as a specimen of colouring run mad -- positive vermilion -- positive indigo; and all the most glaring tints of green, yellow and purple contend for mastery on the canvas, with all the vehement contrast of a kaleidoscope or a Persian carpet.xxiii
The British Press went further in attacking Turner for the catastrophe he unleashed on the canvas and in the senses of the viewer: [...] all is yellow, nothing but yellow, violently contrasted with blue ... Mr. Turner has degenerated into such a detestable manner, that we cannot view his works without pain ... [we] would wish Mr. turner turn back to Nature and worship her as the goddess of his idolatry, instead of his `yellow bonze' which haunts him ... in Mr. turner's pictures we are in a region that exists in no quarter of the universe.xxiv
Yet, it is this sacrifice of represented nature that Deleuze and Guattari pick out as the most important aspect of the late paintings: `Everything becomes mixed and confused, and it is here that the breakthrough -- not the breakdown -- occurs.' This is because, unlike Gage, they value the power of catastrophe in painting exactly because it disturbs the mental function of ascribing sense to nature even where nature his hidden or strange. So, for them, colour and light in Turner are primordial, they cannot be re-inscribed into a mythology of colour. Rather, the explosiveness of Turner's use of light and colour expresses the potential violent changes that bring about and destroy any actual natural state. This is why Deleuze is attracted to Turner's use of colour against figure. The explosive, undermining and sundering effects of colour in the paintings disrupt figure. Shapes lose their determinacy, not in terms of an imagined event -- a storm or an avalanche -- but as sensual facts. This catastrophe is to be Turner's greatest and most truthful achievement: But at least something arose whose force fractured the codes, undid the signifiers, passed under the structures, set the flows in motion, and effected breaks at the limits of desire: a breakthrough... We have seen this in the case of the painter Turner, and his most accomplished paintings that are sometimes termed "incomplete": from the moment there is genius, there is something that belongs to no school, no period, something that achieves a breakthrough -- art as a process without goal, but that attains completion as such.xxv Where Gage and Ruskin attempt to tame catastrophe through an appeal to Turner's conceptualisations, his `wonderful range of mind', Deleuze and Guattari seek to inflate the role of catastrophe to the point where intellectual functions are stilled by pure sensual intensity.
However, Deleuze is not only drawn to the late paintings but also to some of the characteristics of their creator. One of the effects of the opposition to identity in Deleuze's philosophy is the critique of the role of the self as a reference point for the understanding of art. The artist's character and psychology are often seen as mirrors for the works and vice versa. In this sense, they represent one-another in different ways and in different areas and thereby offer an alternative to Deleuze's view of art as the expression of intensities that escape identification. He is therefore drawn to the secrecy and duplicity of Turner's later life ,`the series Turner does not exhibit, but keeps secret.' Not only did Turner keep these paintings to himself (in poor conditions in his studio), he also took on a second identity in order to preserve himself from his artistic fame. This is, to use Deleuze's term, Turner's becoming imperceptible: the artist disappears just as his art reaches its greatest intensity. In order to disappear, Turner took the name of his companion Mrs Booth and withdrew with her to a small house in Chelsea hidden from his fame and reputation as an artist (`... there where he could gratify his desire to be
completely incognito.'xxvi) The importance of this imperceptible quality of the artist is to render psychological analysis redundant: `If the psychiatrist were allowed to speak here, he could talk about the first two, although they are in fact the most reasonable.' This then allows the pure intensity of the works to take effect and escape capture within a psychological interpretation. Paradoxically, Turner's earliest picturesque work was sponsored by Dr. Munro, consultant to George III during his attacks of madness. Munro believed that drawing picturesque landscapes offered an escape from melancholy madness. However, where the early works fit into a theory whereby the harmony of the landscape must return a disturbed mind to calm, the later works express the violent potential of light and colour at work behind any scape: `art, as soon as it attains its own grandeur, its own genius, creates chains of decoding and deterritorialisation that serve as the foundation for desiring-machines, and make them function.'
The key to Tuner's work does not lie in curing the disharmony of man and nature, it lies in liberating light and colour as elements of desire in themselves. According to Paul Signac, Turner reached a kind of creative madness (pre-figuring abstract expressionism): `From 1834, Turner frees himself from black and looks for the most beautiful colorations; colour for colour's sake. You would say he was mad [...] The works of Turner prove to me that we must be free of all ideas of imitation and copying, and that hues must be created.'xxvii For Deleuze and Guattari, Turner has unleashed the power of changes in the intensity of light and colour within the framework of nature and the human form. The intensity of Turner's colour as it flows through a painting such as Norham Castle, Sunrise achieves a breakout away from sense and the restriction of familiar identifiable forms. It also achieves a breakthrough in the expression of the role of an intense and uncontrolled light in sensation. The effects do not take place through the mediation of a reflection upon the paintings, rather, the cognitive command over the senses is overwhelmed in favour of pure sensual intensity. It is in this sense that there is a literal catastrophe in Turner's late paintings, as opposed to a represented catastrophe in his early picturesque or mythical work.
IV The Deleuzian Diagram
If Turner's greatest achievement is to have broken through figure and broken out of sense, does this mean that painting and other expressive creation must always tend to the most pure expression of intensity? Is the logical extension of Turner's actual catastrophes to turn away from any figure and sense and into Twentieth Century abstract expressionism? Finally, does this catastrophism in painting find a parallel in a nihilistic philosophy that rebels against meaning and structure in favour of the destruction of any representations and identities? Deleuze considers these questions directly in his important book on Francis Bacon, in particular where he applies his concept of the diagram to painting.
For Deleuze, the diagram is the pre-figural preparation of the canvas, that is, the series of shades, colours, scratches and layers of material set down prior to the delineation of figure. Although the artist may have made a series of mental and draught preparations for a painting -sketches and ideas about figures, for example -- after this preparatory work a non-figurative diagram must also prepare the way for figuration. In Bacon's case this consists of a series of haphazard lines, coloured spots and pitched paint. For Van Gogh, to give a familiar example, this preparatory work is the set of straight and bent strokes of paint that deform earth, trees and
skyxxviii. This physical rather than visual act of painting puts down a ground that is in contradiction with the pre-planned figure. After visual preparation in the mind's eye or in sketches, there is an automatic and random production of non-figurative shapes and colours that threatens to engulf the figuration it is meant to prepare for. The diagram, then, is the physical catastrophe that underlies figuration in painting: It is like the sudden appearance of another world, because these marks, these lines are irrational, involuntary, accidental, free, driven by chance. They are non-representational, non-illustrative, non-narrative. But they are also not significant or signifying: they are asignifying lines. They are lines of sensation, but of confused sensation [...] The hand becomes independent and passes into the service of other forces, tracing marks that do not depend on our will or on our vision [...] The artist's hand has stepped in to exercise its independence and to smash a sovereign optical organisation: nothing more is seen, as in a catastrophe or chaos.xxix The diagram allows Deleuze to define what he calls the `haptic' aspect of painting, that is, the sense of a manual space given through coloured planes and the warmth and coldness of colours, rather than through perspective and light and shadow. In the diagram, an optical space organised according to the rigid geometrical coordinates above-below-far-near is replaced by a manual space organised according to the more fluid grasp of warm-cold-hard-soft. This means that instead of placing objects within a geometric grid, the painter gives a world that is sensed in terms of greater and lesser tactile intensities.xxx
The concept of the diagram allows Deleuze to explain how Turner's paintings undermine conceptual and visual organisation through the intensity of colour and, indeed, Turner's method fits this account very well on at least two counts. First, Turner prepared his oil paintings with the rapid and instinctive ground that Deleuze describes. This preparation astounded his contemporaries. How could the sublime beauty of the finished work be the result of a random, chaotic act of painting: `[...] he began by pouring wet paint till it was saturated, he tore, he scratched, he scrubbed at it in a kind of frenzy and the whole thing was chaos -- but gradually and as if by magic the lovely ship, with all its exquisite minutiae, came into being [...]xxxi Turner's virtuoso performances on varnishing days at the Royal Academy confirm this description of his method. He would allow an hopelessly unfinished or dim painting to be hung with only days left before the opening of the exhibition. But this unsatisfactory state, this diagram, would be rapidly transformed by the addition of small details or colorations: `Indeed it was quite necessary for him to make best use of his time, as the picture when sent in was a mere dab of several colours, and `without form or void', like chaos before the creation.'xxxii
The Deleuzian answer to this critical astonishment is that the beauty of the paintings depends exactly on the chaotic intensity of the preparatory diagram that seems so at odds with the final figural sublimity. This point comes out more clearly in the second, and most important `diagrammatic' aspect of Turner's work. Deleuze describes Turner's diagram in terms of a coloured `line without contours'. What he means by this is that Turner's paintings are grounded on washes of colour with no clear boundaries. Patches of intense colour and light traverse the well-defined figures of the paintingsxxxiii. These washes or lines without contours were indeed
one of the most important preparatory aspects of Turner's late paintings, they were also the most striking side to his watercolours. In Turner's late work, the sketching of figures is overtaken by astounding colour preparations or `Colour Beginnings'xxxiv where fluid patches of colour are put down in series in sketch books. Draughtsmanship takes second place to the search for the perfect background colour wash for a given scene. In fact, in the last watercolours and some of the oils the background effaces the figure completely, for example, in the last watercolours of Switzerland. This is why Signac can claim Turner as the `mad' painter of colour for colour's sake. It is also why he is seen as the greatest fore-runner of abstract expressionism: the colour beginnings and late watercolours resemble nothing more than Rothko's abstract shadings and contrasts.
However, it is exactly when Deleuze discusses these last watercolours that he comes to question the extreme catastrophe that Turner brings to painting: `[In the diagram] the painter confronts the greatest dangers for himself and for his work.' Having argued that the diagram is a crucial part of any painting, he then considers three modern ways of acting out this fact: pure abstraction or a minimal, ascetic diagram as in the work of Mondrian; a maximal diagram, that is the most chaotic, as in Turner's last work and American abstract expressionism, Pollock, for example; and, finally, a diagrammatic painting that saves line and figure by `controlling' catastrophe, as in the work of Francis Bacon. The importance of this division lies in the set of remarks that accompany it. Each of the three ways is a handling of catastrophe: the first minimalises the role of the diagram in favour of a pure spiritual vision; the second flirts with complete destruction in the chaos of catastrophe without sense or figure, this is a pure manual painting; the third, however, involves an explicit criticism of the first two, what it seeks to avoid is the loss of intensity, caused by a fear of chaos, in the pure vision of formal abstraction, but also the complete foundering of painting in manual confusion. For Deleuze, Francis Bacon's third way avoids the catastrophic dangers of the first two. It is necessary for there to be the risk of destruction by the diagram, but catastrophe has to be controlled. Against, Turner's `line without contours' Bacon aims to save the contour from catastrophe: To save the contour, nothing is more important for Bacon [...] The Diagram must not devour the whole painting, it must be limited in space and time. It must remain operational and controlled. The violent means must not be unleashed and catastrophe must not submerge everything. The diagram is the possibility of fact, it is not Fact itself. All figurative facts must not disappear; and, above all, a new figuration must ... emerge from the diagram and carry clarity and precision with it. To emerge from catastrophe...xxxv
V Conclusion
Thus, although catastrophe and Turner `bear witness to an irreducible ground' (to use the expression from Difference and Repetition), the point is never to merely merge with that chaotic condition for identity. Deleuze's attraction to catastrophe is not a nihilistic rush towards collapse and chaos, rather, `the diagram must remain operational and controlled'. The role of philosophy and art is to divulge the presence of the intensities that come to constitute actuality without plunging into pure intensity. This measured response to catastrophe is made most clear where Deleuze considers the Stoic response to catastrophic events in conjunction with closeness to
disaster encountered in Anglo-American literature (a topic that he covers immediately after Turner's painting in Anti-Oedipus). The controlling response to catastrophic events is counteractualisation, that is, a doubling of the event where an artistic expression doubles the expression of differential changes in actuality. In counter-actualisation, the potentialities that are expressed in any actuality as destruction and creation, are themselves expressed: The eternal truth of the event is grasped only if the event is also inscribed in the flesh. But each time we must double this painful actualisation by a counter-actualisation which limits, moves and transfigures it [...] to be the mime of what effectively occurs, to double the actualisation with a counter-actualisation, the identification with a distance, like the true actor and dancer, is to give the truth of the event the only chance of not being confused with its inevitable actualisation.xxxvi Where Turner expresses the intensity of light and colour at work behind actual figures he achieves the counter-actualisation of the role of colour in actuality and helps us to live up to and live with the power of light and colour. But, if this expression takes over altogether from figures, then that achievement will be lost.
Notes: i. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: logique de la (Paris: la Différence, 1981) p. 68 [my translation].
sensation
ii. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: Athlone, 1994) p. 35. iii. See J.M.W. Turner, The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons. 1810; Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps. R.A. 1812. iv. Voltaire, Candide, ou l'optimisme, in Romans (Paris: Garnier, 1960), p. 147.
et
contes
v. Difference and Repetition, p. 42. vi. Le Corbusier developed the use of colour architecture from his work on and in modern art:
planes
in
Walls are painted white, brown, grey and blue, and these activate the interiors still further. In 1923 there was an exhibition of de Stijl architecture at the Galerie Rosenberg in Paris, and it is possible that Le Corbusier was influenced by Neo-plasticist ideas for generating contrast and vibration between pure colour planes. William J. Curtis, Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms (London: Phaidon Press, 1992), p 72. vii. John Rajchman, `Perplications' in Peter Eisenman et al Re:working Eisenman (London: Academy, 1993) pp. 115-23, esp. 119. viii. Difference and Repetition, p. 135. ix. Difference and Repetition, p. 185. x. For a limit case of this view of catastrophe as an ethical burden see John Llewelyn, `Genealogy as History Catastrophized' in The Genealogy of Ethics (London: Routledge, 1995) pp. 20913. xi. Difference and Repetition, pp. 40-41. xii. Spinoza, Ethics, I, Appendix. Ed. E. Curley (Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 111. xiii. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Athlone, 1984) p. 132. xiv. Andrew Wilton, Turner and the Sublime (London: British Museum, 1981) p. 105. xv. John Gage, Colour in Turner: Poetry and Truth (London: Studio Vista, 1969) p. 117.
xvi. See The Wreak of a Transport Ship. c. 1807; A Fire at Sea. c. 1835; Snowstorm -- Steamboat off a Harbour's Mouth. R.A. 1842; xvii. See The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, October 16, 1834. R.A. 1835; Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying -- Typhon coming on (`The Slave Ship'). R.A. 1840; Rain, Steam and Speed -- The Great Western Railway. R.A. 1844. xviii. See Keelmen Hauling in Coals by Night. R.A. 1835; Norham Castle, Sunrise. c. 1840-45; Sun setting over a Lake. c. 1845. xix. See Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory). R.A. 1843; the oils and watercolours of Venice, 1840-5. xx. John Gage, Colour in Turner: Poetry and Truth (London: Studio Vista, 1969) p. 132. xxi. John Ruskin, from Modern Painters, part V, quoted in Andrew Wilton, Turner in his Time (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987) p. 222. xxii. Turner was enthusiastic about the three colour theory put forward by Brewster against Newton, see Colour in Turner: Poetry and Truth, p. 122. xxiii. Turner in his Time, p. 160. xxiv. Ibid. p. 146. xxv. Anti-Oedipus, p. 370. xxvi. Turner in his Time, p. 202. xxvii. J. Rewald, `Extraits du Journal de Paul Signac', Gazette des Beaux Arts, 39, 1952, p. 279. xxviii. Francis Bacon: logique de la sensation, p. 66. xxix. Ibid. p. 66 [my translation]. xxx. Ibid. p. 87. xxxi. Turner in his Time, p. 114. xxxii. Ibid, pp. 177-85. xxxiii. See, Sun setting over a Lake. c. 1845. xxxiv. See Gerard Wilkinson, Turner's Colour Sketches (Barrie and Jenkins, 1975). xxxv. Francis translation].
Bacon:
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xxxvi. Gilles deleuze, The Logic of Sense (London: Athlone, 1990) p. 161.
