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Note 4. Art

The question of art is the question of generating and supporting becomings. This is the  secret of art, as  it is the secret of philosophical writing. ‘Singing or composing, painting, writing, have no other aim: to unleash these becomings’ (TP p.272). The terrible passivity of the ‘observer’ in discussions of art is left behind with this way of thinking. Instead of the notion of the‘appreciation of beauty’ or a nebulous idea of ‘rejuvenation’ or ‘catharsis’, what is at stake is the idea of a world of extraordinary movements of perception and engagement, issuing sometimes in sustained deepening lines of connection, and,  at one level,  in new practises,  new skills, new forms of play and experiment. At the same time, the idea of the artist becomes that of someone whose becomings involve the production of intensificatory  materials, instead of it being the grim, subjectificatory idea of the ‘master’ or ‘genius’  who imposes their will on matter. In other words, the artist and the person who encounters art emerge together on the same plane: on a plane which is neither that of passivity or activity, but is that of becomings.

With painting the becomings are primarily at the level of colours and contours, and  at the level of forces which have colours and contours as aspects. For instance, a painter can paint horses, and can pass from this into a world of colours and lines which are in engagement with horses while passing elsewhere, and without a ‘representational’ horse being involved. With music, the becomings are preeminently with sounds and zones of motion. Music therefore has an intense connection with human emotions and emotional transitions. It can be seen why it is that Deleuze and Guattari say that music can become capable ‘of harnessing nonsonorous forces’ (TP p.343). The field of motion of a tree in the wind, or of someone experiencing the exhilaration of a new freedom - these are not sonorous forces, but they are capable of emerging into expression in music.

The becomings in the case of writing are overtly at many different levels, but they have to break past the most horrific and complex conditions of stratification, which include an acutely rigid graphical and lexical coding (unlike music and painting there are therefore very limited opportunities for movement at the first micrological level). What is notable with writing is that a mapping of becomings has shown itself to be capable of emerging at a high level, setting out connections, pathways and  fields of stratificatory or de-intensicatory becomings. Free becomings are initiated, re-initiated and intensified by setting them out, by setting out guide-lines (details of starting points: for example the idea of cutting the flow of internal verbalising, in order to start thinking, or the idea of ‘lodging yourself’ on the edge of an assemblage (TP p.161)), and by showing where the hidden dangers are, so that these can be escaped or circumvented (this last is the ‘warning’ functioning of writing that was mentioned in the introduction). It  it is also possible in writing to disturb stratificatory connections by fusing elements together in ways that ‘move’ and ‘frighten’ the reader  (horror fiction is a crucial example) so that a deep-level cartography of freedom and horror can get the chance to break into effect from below the anomalous connection-field which the reader understands as ‘fictional’. There are no vampires, but then, on another level, there are vampires...

Art has a profound connection with the field of ‘meditational’ and ‘martial art’ modes of intensification (the two are properly two aspects of one field, held apart by conjoined levels of stratification). Beyond the levels of their own intricate over-codings, these  modes collectively consist of fields of guide-lines concerning the intensification of perception and activity, and the cutting of stratificatory verbal and ‘imagistic’ functionings in order to initiate becomings. To make this connection is to experience a powerful shift.  Art as an  immensely varied zone in a meshed field of ‘nomad’ processes of intensification.

At this point it also becomes clear why it is that the idea of art is inseparable from the idea of micropolitics (and from the idea of the  un-trapped nomad war machine).The bad or compromised categories have all been left behind – representation, subjectivity, beauty, aesthetics, the sublime. Instead there are group and individual bodies and their becomings with  the sky, the ocean, distributions, present and past landscapes, minerals, tools, animals, buildings, social formations... A language of freedom, micropolitics and intensities replaces the dark workshop of subjectificatory artistic/aesthetic discourse.

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