do my reading home work

,; ,I ..J, ~

, ,t(

,. ( .... Also by Gilles Deleuze ,t

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (with Felix Guattari) ~.} ,

\,!.

A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (with Felix Guattari)

Kant's Critical Philosophy

Foucault

Cinema 1: The Movement-Image

Cinema 2: The Time-Image

" ";,,

, Kafka: Toward a lv1inor Literatll1'e (with Felix Guattari)

.'.;'. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque

';.~r ,',

L. Essays Critical and Clinical

Proust and Signs: The Complete Text

,.:','

:, ~"

Francis Bacon The Logic of Sensation

Gilles Deleuze

Translated and with an Introduction by Daniel W. Smith

Afterword by Tom Conley

I University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis

30 - Bacon's Periods and Aspects

extends itself in order to better close in on itself; and there is a sys­ tole in the second movement, when the body is contracted in order to escape from itself; and even when the body is dissipated, it still remains contracted by the forces that seize hold of it in order to re­ turn it to its surroundings. The coexistence of all these movements in the painting ... is rhythm.

CHAPTER 6

Painting and Sensation

Cezanne and sensation The levels ofsensation ­ Figuration and vioknce - The movement oftranslation,

the stroll The phenomenological unity ofthe senses: sensation and rhythm

There are two ways of going beyond fIguration (that is, beyond the illustrative and the figurative): either toward abstract form or to­ ward the Figure. Cezanne gave a simple name to this way of the Figure: sensation. The Figure is the sensible form related to a sen­ sation; it acts immediately upon the nervous system, which is of the flesh, whereas abstract form is addressed to the head and acts through the intermediary of the brain, which is closer to the bone. Certainly Cezanne did not invent this way of sensation in painting, but he gave it an unprecedented status. Sensation is the opposite of the facile and the ready-made, the cliche, but also of the "sensational," the spontaneous, etc. Sensation has one face turned toward the subject (the nervous system, vital movement, "instinct," "temperament"-a whole vocabulary common to both Naturalism and Cezanne), and one face turned toward the object (the "fact," the place, the event). Or rather, it has no faces at all, it is both things indissolubly, it is Being-in-the-World, as the phenomenologists say: at one and the same time I become in the sensation and something happens through the sensation, one through the other, one in the other.! And at the

it is the same body that, being both subject and object, gives and receives the sensation. As a spectator, I experience the sensation only by entering the painting, by reaching the unity of the sensing

the sensed. This was Cezanne's lesson against the impression­ ists: sensation is not in the "free" or disembodied play of light

31

, 32 ­ and Sensation

,i

color , on tne contrary, it is in the

of an Color is in the body, sensation is in and not in

the air. Sensation is what is painted. What is painted on the canvas is

the body, not insofar as it is represented as an object, hut insofar as

it is experienced as sustaining this sensation (what Lawrence, speak­

ing of Cezanne, called "the appleyness of the apple")."

This is the very general thread that links Bacon to Cezanne: paint the sensation, or, as Bacon will say in words very close to Cezanne's, record the fact. J "It is a very, very close and difficult thing to know

some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and

other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain.""

There would seem to be only obvious differences between these two

Cezanne's world as and still life (even before the

versus Bacon's inverted

the world as Na­

are not these obvious differences in the service of "sensation" and

"temperament"? In other words, are they not inscribed in

Bacon to Cezanne, in what they have in common? When Bacon

speaks of sensation, he says two things, which are very similar to

Cezanne. Negatively, he says that the form related to the sensation

(the Figure) is the opposite of the form related to an object that it is

supposed to represent (figuration). As Valery put it, sensation is that which is transmitted directly, and avoids the detour and boredom of

6 And positively, Bacon constantly says that sensa­

one "order" to another, from one "level" to

one "area" to another. This is why sensation is the

the agent of bodily deformations. In this re-

the same criticism can

ing and abstract they pass through the

act directly upon the nervous system, they do not attain the sensa­

tion, they do not liberate the Figure-all because they remain at

one and the same level. 7 They can implement transformations of fonn,

but they cannot attain deformations of bodies. In what sense Bacon

, Painting and Sensation 33 ~

is even more so than if he were a disciple of Cezanne,

we will have occasion to consider later.

corresponds to a

the interviews, he

" "areas of sensa­

think that each

sensation: sensa­

tion would thus he a term in a sequence or a series. For the

series of Rembrandt's self-portraits involves us in different areas of

feeling. 9 And it is true that painting, and especially Bacon's painting,

proceeds through series: series of crucifixions, series of Popes, series

of self-portraits, series of the mouth, of the mouth that screams, the

mouth that smiles ... Moreover, there can be series of simultaneity,

as in the triptychs, which make at least three levels or orders coexist.

And the series can be closed, when it has a contrasting composition,

but it can be open, when it is continued or continuable beyond the

three.lO All this is true. But it would not be true were there not some­

that is already at work in each painting,

sensation. It is each paintimr. each Fi!!llre. that is

itself a shifting sequence or series (and not

it is each sensation that exists at diverse levelS, III dltterent orders, or

in different domains. This means that there are not sensations

different orders, but different orders of one and the same sensation.

It is the nature of sensation to envelop a constitutive difference

level, a plurality of constituting domains. Every sensation, and every

Figure, is already an "accumulated" or "coagulated" sensation, as in

a limestone figure.!! Hence the irreducibly synthetic character of

sensation. What then, we must ask, is the source of this synthetic

character, through which each material sensation has several levels,

several orders or UVllldlll:>. what makes up

their sensin!!" or

"Vhat makes up

34 and Sensation and Sensation - 35

Bacon does, that something is nonetheless figured (for instance, a screaming Pope), this secondary figuration depends on the neutral­ ization of all primary figuration. Bacon himself formulates this prob­ lem, which concerns the inevitable preservation of a practical figu­ ration at the very moment when the Figure asserts its intention to break away from the figurative. We will see how he resolves the prob­ lem. In any case, Bacon has always tried to eliminate the "sensa­ tional," that is, the primary figuration of that which provokes a vio­ lent sensation. This is the meaning of the formula, "I wanted to paint the scream more than the horror."12 When he paints the screaming Pope, there is nothing that might cause horror, and the curtain in front of the Pope is not only a way of isolating him, of shielding him

view; it is rather the way in which the Pope himself sees noth­ ing, and screams before the invisible. Thus neutralized, the horror is multiplied because it is inferred from the scream, and not the re­ verse. And certainly it is not easy to renounce the horror, or the mary figuration. Sometimes he has to turn against his own instincts, renounce his own experience. Bacon harbors within himself all the violence ofIreland, and the violence of Nazism, the violence of war. He passes through the horror of the crucifixions, and especially the fragment of the crucifixion, or the head of meat, or the bloody suit­ case. But when he passes judgment on his own paintings, he rejects all those that are still too "sensational," because the figuration that subsists in them reconstitutes a scene of horror, even if only second­ arily, thereby reintroducing a story to be told: even the bullfights are too dramatic. As soon as there is horror, a story is reintroduced, and the scream is botched. In the end, the maximum violence will be

in the seated or crouching Figures, which are subjected to neither torture nor brutality, to which nothing visible happens, and yet which manifest the power of the paint all the more. This is be­ cause violence has two very different meanings: "When talking about the violence of paint, it's nothing to do with the violence of war." 13 The violence of sensation is opposed to the violence of the repre­ sented (the sensational, the cliche). The former is inseparable from its direct action on the nervous system, the levels through which it

passes, the domains it traverses: being itself a Figure, it must have nothing of the nature of a represented object. It is the same Anaud: cruelty is not what one believes it to be, and depends less and less on what is represented.

A second interpretation must also be rejected, which would confuse the levels of sensation, that is, the valencies of the sensation, with an ambivalence of feeling. At one point, Sylvester suggests, "Since you talk about recording different levels of feeling in one image ... you may be at one and the same time a love of the person and a hostility towards them ... both a caress and an assault?" To which Bacon responds, "That is too logicaL I don't think that's the way things work. I think it goes to a deeper thing: how do I feel I can make this image more immediately real to myself? That's aU."14 In fact, the psychoanalytic hypothesis of ambivalence not only has the disadvantage of localizing the ambivalence on the side of the spectator who look., at the painting; for even if we presuppose an ambivalence in the Figure itself, it would refer to feelings that the Figure would experience in relation to represented things, in rela­ tion to a narrated story. But there are no feelings in Bacon: there are nothing but affects, that is, "sensations" and "instincts," according to the formula of Naturalism. Sensation is what determines instinct at a particular moment, just as instinct is the passage from one sen­ sation to another, the search for the "best" sensation (not the most agreeable sensation, but the one that fills the flesh at a particular moment of its descent, contraction, or dilation).

There is a third, more hypothesis. This would be the motor hypothesis. The levels of sensation would be like arrests or snapshots of motion, which would recompose the movement syn­ thetically in all its continuity, speed, and violence, as in synthetic cubism, futurism, or Duchamp's Nude [102]. It is true that Bacon is fascinated by the decomposition of movement in Muybridge, which

has used as a subject matter. It is also true that he obtains very in­ tense and violent movements of his own [39], such as George Dyer's ISO-degree turn of the head toward Lucian Freud [42]. More gener­ ally, Bacon's Figures are often in the middle of a strange stroll

., 36 - Painting and Sensation ,'I [68], as in Man Carrying a Child [22] or the Van Gogh [23]. The ":~:

round area or the parallelepiped that isolates the Figure itself be­

comes a motor, and Bacon has not abandoned the project that a mo­

bile sculpture could achieve more easily: in this case, the contour or

pedestal would slide along the length of the armature so that the

Figure could make its "daily round."15 But it is precisely the nature

of this daily round that can inform us of the status of movement in

Bacon. Beckett and Bacon have never been so close, and this daily

round is the kind of stroll typical of Beckett's characters: they too

trundle about fitfully without ever leaving their circle or paral­

lelepiped. It is the stroll of the paralytic child and its mother cling­ ing to the edge of the balustrade in a curious handicapped race [36].

It is the about-face in Figure Furning [30]. It is George Dyer's bi­ cycle ride [40], which closely resembles that of Moritz's hero: "his

vision was limited to the small piece of land he could see about

him.... To him, the end of all things seemed to lead, at the end of his

journey, to just such a point. "16 Therefore, even when the contour is

displaced, the movement consists less of this displacement than the

amoeba-like exploration that the Figure is engaged in inside the

contour. Movement does not explain sensation; on the contrary, it is

explained by the elasticity of the sensation, its vis elastica. According

to Beckett's or Kafka's law, there is immobility beyond movement:

beyond standing up, there is sitting down, and beyond sitting down,

lying down, beyond which one finally dissipates. The true acrobat is

one who is consigned to immobility inside the circle. The large feet

of the Figures often do not lend themselves to walking: they are al­

most clubfeet (and the large armchairs often seem to resemble shoes

for clubfeet). In short, it is not movement that explains the levels of

sensation, it is the levels of sensation that explain what remains of

movement. And in fact, what interests Bacon is not exactly move­

ment, although his painting makes movement very intense and vio­

lent. But in the end, it is a movement "in-place," a spasm, which

reveals a completely different problem characteristic of Bacon: the

action of invisible forces on the body (hence the bodily deformations,

which are due to this more profound cause). In the 1973 triptych

,I"l

Painting and Sensation - 37

[73], the movement of translation occurs between two spasms, be­

tween the two movements of a contraction in one place. tThen there would be yet another hypothesis, more "phenome­ 1,lilinological." The levels of sensation would really be domains of sen­

sation that refer to the different sense organs; but precisely each

level, each domain, would have a way of referring to the others, in­

dependently of the represented object they have in common. Between

a color, a taste, a touch, a smell, a noise, a weight, there would be an

existential communication that would constitute the "pathic" (non­

representative) moment of the sensation. In Bacon's bullfights, for

example, we hear the noise of the beast's hooves [56, 57]; in the 1976

triptych, we touch the quivering of the bird plunging into the place

where the head should be [79], and each time meat is represented,

we touch it, smell it, eat it, weigh it, as in Soutine's work; and the

portrait ofIsabel Rawsthorne [41] causes a head to appear to which

ovals and traits have been added in order to widen the eyes, flair the III

nostrils, lengthen the mouth, and mobilize the skin in a common ex­ 'II ercise of all the organs at once. The painter would thus make visible a

I

kind of original unity of the senses, and would make a multisensible

Figure appear visually.

But this operation is possible only if the sensation of a particular

domain (here, the visual sensation) is in direct contact with a vital

power that exceeds every domain and traverses them all. This power

is Rhythm, which is more profound than vision, hearing, etc. Rhythm

appears as music when it invests the auditory level, and as painting

when it invests the visual level. This is a "logic of the senses," as

Cezanne said, which is neither rational nor cerebral. What is ultimate

is thus the relation between sensation and rhythm, which places in

each sensation the levels and domains through which it passes. This

rhythm runs through a painting just as it runs through a piece of

music. It is diastole-systole: the world that seizes me by closing in

around me, the self that opens to the world and opens the world it­

self. 17 Cezanne, it is said, is the painter who put a vital rhythm into the

visual sensation. Must we say the same thing of Bacon, with his co­

existent movements, when the flat field closes in around the Figure

38 - Painting and Sensation

and when the Figure contracts or, on the contrary, expands in order to rejoin the field, to the point where the figure merges with the field? Could it be that Bacon's closed and artificial world reveals the same vital movement as Cezanne's Nature? Bacon is not using empty words when he declares that he is cerebrally pessimistic but nerv­ ously optimistic, with an optimism that believes only in life. IS The same "temperament" as Cezanne? Bacon's formula would be: figura­ tively pessimistic, but figurally optimistic.

CHAPTER 7

Hysteria

The body without organs: Artaud UIOrringer's Gothic line "What the "difference oflevel" in sensation means - Vibration

Hysteria and presence Bacon's doubt ­ H.ysteria, painting, and the eye

This ground, this rhythmic unity of the senses, can be discovered only by going beyond organism. The phenomenological hypothesis is perhaps insufficient because it merely invokes the lived body. But the lived body is still a paltry thing in comparison with a more pro­ found and almost unlivable Power [puissance}. We can seek the unity of rhythm only at the point where rhythm itself plunges into chaos, into the night, at the point where the differences of level are perpet­ ually and violently mixed.

Beyond the organism, but also at the limit of the lived body, there lies what Artaud discovered and named: the body without organs. "The body is the body I it stands alone I it has no need of organs I the body is never an organism I organisms are the enemies ofbodies."1 The body without organs is opposed less to organs than to that orga­ nization of organs we call an organism. It is an intense and intensive body. It is traversed by a wave that traces levels or thresholds in the body according to the variations of its amplitude. Thus the body does not have organs, but thresholds or levels. Sensation is not qual­ itative and qualified, but has only an intensive reality, which no longer determines within itself representative elements, but allotropic vari­ ations. Sensation is vibration. We know that the egg reveals just this state of the body "before" organic representation: axes and vectors, gradients, zones, kinematic movements, and dynamic tendencies, in relation to which forms are contingent or accessory. "No mouth.

39

before80 - The r these traits, figuration recovers and re-creates, but does not

the figuration from which it came. Hence Bacon's constant

formula: create resemblance, but through accidental and nonreseIIl­

bling means.

So the act of oscillat­

ing between a of paint­

ing ... Everything is already on the canvas, and in the him­

self, before the act of painting begins. lIenee the work of the

is shifted back and only comes later, afterward: manual labor, out of

which the Figure will emerge into view ...

CHAPTER 12

The Diagram

Tbe diagram in Bacon (t1'aits and color-patcbe.lj1 ­ Its rmmual cbaracter Painting and tbe experience

ofcatastropbe Abstmct painting, code, and Action Painting, diagmm, and rlUmual space

vVbat Bacon dislikes about both tbese 1l'tlys

We do not listen closely enough to what painters have to say.

say that the is alrea~y in the canvas, he or she encoun­

ters all the figurative and probabilistic givens that occupy and pre­ occupy the canvas. An cntirc battle takes place on the canvas between

the painter and these There is thus a preparatory work that

belongs to painting fully, and yet precedes the act of painting.

can be done in sketches, though it need not be,

in any case sketches do not replace it (like many contemporary

painters, Bacon does not make sketches). This preparatory work is

invisible and silent, yet intense, and the act of painting it­

self appears as an afterward, an apres-coup ("hysteresis") in relation to this work.

What does this act of painting consist of? Bacon defines it in

this way: make random marks (lines-traits); scrub, sweep, or the

canvas in order to clear out locales or zones (color-patches); throw

the paint, from various and at various

or these acts, presupposes that there were already tlguranve gIVens

on the canvas (and in the painter's head), more or less virtual, more

or actual. It is precisely these givens that will be removed the act of painting, either by wiped, brushed, or ruhbed, or

covered over. For example, a mouth: it will be elongated, stretched

one side of the head to the other. For example, the head: part

HI

S2 - The - S3The

" of it will be cleared away with a brush, broom, sponge, or rag. This is what Bacon calls a "graph" or a DifJgram: it is as if a Sahara, a zone

of the Sahara, were suddenly inserted into the head; it is as if a piece

of rhinoceros skin, viewed a microscope, were stretched over

it; it is as if the two halves of the were split open by an ocean; it

is as if the unit of measure were changed, and micrometric, or even

'A'''HHL, units were substituted for the figurative unit.' A Sahara, a rhinoceros skin: such is the suddenly outstretched diagram. It is as if, in the midst of the figurative and probabilistic givens, a rntnct,,.n!1h,,

overcame the canvas.

It is like the emergence of another world. For marks, these are irrational, involuntary, accidental, random. They are

nonrepresentative, nonillustrative, nonnarrative. They are no longer

either significant or signifiers: they are a-signifying traits. They arc

traits of sensation, but of confused sensations (the confused sensa­

tions, as Cezanne said, that we bring with us at birth). And above

they are manual traits. It is here that the painter works with a rag,

stick, bntsh, or sponge; it is here that he throws the paint with

hands. 4 It is as if the hand assumed an independence, and began to guided by other forces, making marks that no longer depend on

either our will or our sie-ht. These almost blind manual attest

to intrusion of another world into the visual world of

Ti-l a certain extent, they remove the painting from the optical orga­ nization that was already reigning over it and rendering it

in adv;"mce. The painter's hand intervenes in order to shake its own

dependence and break up the sovereign optical organization: one

can no longer see anything, as if in a catastrophe, a

is the act of painting, or the turning point of the painting.

There are two ways in which the painting can fail, once visuallv and

once manually. One can remain entangled in the figurative

and the optical organization of representation; but one can also

the diagram, botch it, so overload it that it is rendered inoperative

(which is another way of remaining in the figurative: one will have

mutilated or mauled the cliche ...).5 The diagram is thus the

set of asignifying and nonrepresentative lines and zones,

line-strokes and color-patches. And operation diagram, its

1U1lCUUll, says Bacon, is to be "suggestive." Or, more rigoronsly, to

similar to Wittgenstein's, it is to introduce "possibili­

"6 Because they are destined to give us the it is all

the more important for the traits and color-patches to break with

figuration. This is why they are not sufficient in themselves, but

must be "utilized." They mark out possibilities of fact, but do not

constitute a fact (the pictorial fact). In order to be converted

into a fact, in order to evolve into a

into the visual whole; but it is precisely through the action of these

marks that the visual whole will cease to be an optical organization;

it will give the eye another power, as well as an object that will no

longer be The diagram is the operative set of traits and color-patches, of

lines and zones. Van Gogh's diagram, for example, is the set of straight

and hatch marks that raise and lower the ground, twist the

trees, make the sky palpitate, and which assume a particular inten­ sity from 1888 onward. \Ve can not only differentiate diagrams, we can also date the diagram of a painter, because there is always a mo­

ment when the painter confronts it most directly. The diagram is in­

deed a chaos, a catastrophe, but it is also a germ of or rhythm.

It is a violent chaos in rclation to the figurative but it is a

germ of rhythm in rclation to the new order of the painting. A'i Bacon

says, it "unlocks areas of sensation."7 The ends the prepara­

tory work and begins the act of painting. There is no painter who

has not had this experience of the chaos-germ, where he or she no

longer sees anything and risks foundering: the collapse of visual

coordinates. This is not a psychological experience, but a properly

experience, although it can have an immense influence on

the psychic life of the painter. Painters confront the of

dangers both for their work and for themselves. It is a kind of expe­

rience that is constantly renewed by the most diverse painters:

Cezanne's "abyss" or "catastrophe," and the chance that this abyss

will way to rhythm; Paul Klee's "chaos," the vanishing "gray

" and the chance that this gray point will "leaD over itself"

84 - The Diagram

and unlock dimensions of sensation ...~ Of all the arts, painting is undoubtedly the only one that necessarily, "hysterically," integrates its own catastrophe and consequently is constituted as a flight in advance. In the other arts, the catastrophe is only associated. But painters pass through the catastrophe themselves, embrace the chaos, and attempt to emerge from it. Where painters differ is in their man­ ner of embracing this nonfigurative chaos, and in their evaluation of the pictorial order to come, and the relation of this order with this chaos. In this respect, we might perhaps distinguish three great paths, each of which groups together very different painters, but each of which designates a "modem" function of painting, or expresses what painting claims to bring to "modem man" (why still paint today?).

Abstraction would be one of these paths, but it is a path that re­ duces the abyss or chaos (as well as the manual) to a minimum: it fers us an asceticism, a spiritual salvation. Through an intense spiri­ tual effort, it raises itself above the figurative givens, but it also turns chaos into a simple stream we must cross in order to discover the abstract and signifying Forms. Mondrian's square leaves the figura­ tive (landscape) and leaps over chaos. It retains a kind of oscillation from this leap. Such an abstraction is essentially seen. One is tempted to say of abstract painting what Peguy said of Kantian morality: it has pure hands, but it has no hands. This is because the abstract forms are part of a new and purely optical space that no longer even needs to be subordinate to manual or tactile elements. In fact, they are distinguished from simple geometrical forms by "tension": ten­ sion is what internalizes in the visual the manual movement that de­ scribes the form and the invisible forces that determine it. It is what makes the form a properly visual transformation. Abstract optical space has no need of the tactile connections that classical represen­ tation was still organizing. But it follows that what abstract painting elaborates is less a diagram than a symbolic code, on the basis of great formal oppositions. It replaced the diagram with a code. This code is "digital," not in the sense of the manual, but in the sense of a finger that counts. "Digits" are the units that group together visu­ ally the terms in opposition. Thus, according to Kandinsky, vertical-

The Diagram - 85

white-activity, horizontal-black-inertia, and so on. From this is rived a conception of binary choice that is opposed to random choice. Abstract painting took the elaboration of such a properly pictorial code very far (as in Auguste Herbin's "plastic alphabet," in which the distribution of forms and colors can be done according to the letters of a word). It is the code that is responsible for answering the ques­ tion of painting today: what can save man from "the abyss," from external tumult and manual chaos? Open up a spiritual state for the man of the future, a man without hands. Restore to man a pure and internal optical space, which will perhaps be made up exclusively of the horizontal and the vertical. "Modem man seeks rest because he is deafened by the externaL"lO The hand is reduced to a finger that presses on an internal optical keyboard.

A second path, often named abstract expressioni~m or art in­ formel, offers an entirely different response, at the opp~)site extreme of abstraction. This time the abyss or chaos is deployed to the max­ imum. Somewhat like a map that is as large as the country, the dia­ gram merges with the totality of the painting, the entire painting is diagrammatic. Optical geometry disappears in favor of a manual line, exclusively manuaL The eye has difficulty following it. incompa­ rable discovery of this kind of painting is that of a line (and a patch of color) that does not form a contour, that delimits nothing, neither inside nor outside, neither concave nor convex: Pollock's line, Morris Louis's stain. It is the northern stain, the "Gothic line": the line does not go from one point to another, but passes between points, contin­ ually changing direction, and attains a power greater than 1, becom­ ing adequate to the entire surface. From this point of view, we can see how abstract painting remained figurative, since its line still de­ limited an outline. If we seek the precursors of this new path, of this radical manner of escaping the figurative, we will find them every time a great painter of the past stopped painting things in order "to paint between things."11 Turner's late watercolors conquer not only

the forces of impressionism, but also the power of an explosive line without outline or contour, which makes the painting itself an unparalleled catastrophe (rather than illustrating the catastrophe

86 - The Diagram

romantically). Moreover, is this not one of the most prodigious con­

stants of painting that is here being selected and isolated? In Kandin­ sky, there were nomadic lines without contour next to abstract geo­ metric lines; and in Mondrian, the unequal thickness of the two sides

the square opened up a virtual diagonal without contours. But with Pollock, this line-trait and this color-patch will be pushed to their functional limit: no longer the transfonnation of the form bnt

a decomposition of matter, which abandons us to its lineaments and granulations. The painting thus becomes a catastrophe-painting and a diagram-painting at one and the same time. This time, it is at the point dosest to catastrophe, in absolute proximity, that modern man

discovers rhythm: we can easily see how this response to the ques­ tion of a "modern" function of painting is different from that given

by abstraction. Here it is no longer an inner vision that gives us the infinite, but a manual power that is spread out "all over,''1l from one

edge of the painting to the other.

In the unity of the catastrophe and the diagram, man discovers rhythm as matter and materiaL The painter's instruments are no longer the paintbrush and the easel, which still conveyed the subor­ dination of the hand to the requirements of an optical organization.

The hand is liberated, and makes use of sticks, sponges, rags, ~yringes: Action Painting, the "frenetic dance" of the painter around the paint­ ing, or rather in the painting, which is no longer stretched on an easel but nailed, unstretched, to the ground. There has been a con­ version from the horizon to the ground: the optical horizon reverts

completely to the tactile ground. The diagram expresses the entire painting at once, that is, the optical catastrophe and the manual rhythm. The current evolution of abstract expressionism is complet­

this process by realizing what was still little more than a meta­

phor in Pollock: (1) the extension of the diagram to the spatial and temporal whole of the painting (displacement of the "beforehand" and the "afterward"); (2) the abandonment of any visual sovereignty, and even any visual control, over the painting in the process of be­ ing executed (the blindness of the painter); (3) the elaboration oflines that are "more" than lines, surfaces that are "more" than surfaces,

The Diagram - 87

or, conversely, volumes that are "less" than volumes (Carl Andre's planar sculptures, Robert Ryman's fibers, Martin BarnS's laminated

works, Christian Bonncf"oi's strata).ll It is all the more curious that the American critics, who took the

analysis of abstract expressionism very far, could have defined it as the creation of a purely optical space, exclusively optical, peculiar to "modern man." This seems to us to be a quarrel over words, an am­

biguity of words. In effect, what they meant was that the pictorial space lost all the imaginary tactile referents that, in classical three­ dimensional representation, made it possible to see depths and con­ tours, forms and grounds. But these tactile referents of classical rep­ resentation expressed a relative subordination of the hand to the eye, of the manual to the visual. By liberating a space that is (wrongly)

claimed to be purely optical, the abstract expressionists in fact did nothing other than to make visible an exclusively manual space, de­ fined by the "planarity" of the canvas, the "impenetrability" of the painting, and the "gesturality" of the color-a space that is imposed

upon the eye as an absolutely foreign power in which the eye can find no rest.14 These are no longer the tactile referents of vision, precisely because it is the manual space of what is seen, a violence done to the eye. In the end, it was abstract painting that produced a

purely optical space and suppressed tactile referents in favor of an eye of the mind: it suppressed the task of controlling the hand that the eye still had in classical representation. But Action Painting does something completely different: it reverses the classical subordina­

tion, it subordinates the eye to the hand, it imposes the hand on the

eye, and it replaces the horizon with a ground. One of the most profound tendencies of modern painting is the

tendency to abandon the easel. For the easel was a decisive element not only in the maintenance of a figurative appearance, and not only in the relationship between the painter and Nature (the search for a

motif), but also in the delimitation (frame and borders) and internal organization of the painting (depth, perspective ...). \Vhat matters today is less the fact-does the painter still have an easel?-than the tendency, and the diverse ways this tendency is realized. In an

88 - The Diagram

abstraction of Mondrian's type, the painting ceases to be an organ­ ism or an isolated organization in order to become a division of its own surface, which must create its own relations with the divisions of the "room" in which it will be hung. In this sense, Mondrian's

is not decorative but architectonic, and abandons the easel in order to become mural painting. Pollock and others explicitly re­ ject the easel in a completely different manner, namely, by making "all-over" paintings, by rediscovering the secret of the "Gothic line" (in Worringer's sense), by restoring an entire world of equal proba­ bilities, by tracing lines that cross the entire painting and that start and continue the frame, and by opposing to the organic notions of symmetry and center the power of a mechanical repetition ele­ vated to intuition. This is no longer an easel painting but a ground painting (true easels have no other horizon than the ground).l) in truth there are many ways of breaking with the easeL Bacon's triptych form is one of ways, very different from the two pre­ ceding ways. In Bacon, what is true of the triptychs is also true of each independent painting, which is always, in one way or another, composed like a triptych. In the triptych, as we have seen, the bor­ ders of each of the three panels cease to isolate, though they con­ tinue to separate and divide. This uniting-separating is Bacon's technical solution, which brings his entire set of techniques into play, and distinguishes them from the techniques of abstract and in­ formal painting. Are these three ways of once again becoming "Gothic"?

The important question is, Why did Bacon not become involved in either of the two preceding paths? The severity of his reactions, rather than claiming to pass judgment, simply indicates what was not right for him and explains why Bacon personally took neither of these paths. On the one hand, he is not attracted to paintings tend to substitute a visual and spiritual code for the involuntary dia­ gram (even if there is an exemplary attitude on the part of the artist).

code is inevitably cerebral and lacks sensation, the essential reality of the fall, that is, the direct action upon the nervous system. Kandinsky defined abstract painting by "tension," but according to

The Diagram - 89

Bacon, tension is what abstract painting lacks the most. By internal­ izing tension in the optical form, abstract painting neutralized it. Finally, because it is abstract, the code can easily become a simple symbolic coding of the figurative. 16 On the other hand, Bacon is not drawn to abstract expressionism, or to the power and mystery of the line without contour. This is because the diagram covers the entire painting, he says, and because its proliferation creates a veritable "mess." All the violent methods of Action Painting-stick, brush, broom, rag, and even pastry bag-are let loose in a catastrophe­ painting. This time sensation is indeed attained, but it remains in an irremediably confused state. Bacon will never stop speaking of the absolute necessity of preventing the diagram from proliferating, the necessity of confining it to certain areas of the painting and certain moments of the act of painting. He thinks that, in this domain of irrational trait and the line without contour, Michaux went further than Pollock, precisely because he remained a master of the diagram. I?

Save the contour-nothing is more important for Bacon than this. A line that delimits nothing still has a contour or outline Blake at least understood this.IS The diagram must not eat away at the entire painting; it must remain limited in space and time. It must remain operative and controlled. The violent methods must not be given free rein, and the necessary catastrophe must not submerge the whole. The diagram is a possibility of fact-it is not the Fact it­ self. Not all the figurative givens have to disappear; and above all, a new figuration, that of the Figure, should emerge from the diagram and make the sensation clear and precise. ii:> emerge from the catas­ trophe ... Even if, as an afterthought, one finishes a painting with a

of paint, it functions like a local "whiplash" that makes us emerge from the catastrophe rather than submerging us further. 19

Could we at least say that during the malerisch period the diagram covered the whole painting? Had not the entire surface of the paint­ ing been lined with traits of grass, or variations of a dark color-patch functioning as a curtain? But even then, the precision of the sensa­ tion, the clarity of the Figure, and the rigor of the contour continued to act beneath the color-patch or the traits-which did not efface

90 - The Diagram

the former, but im;tead gave them a power of vibration and nonlocal­ ization (the mouth that smiles or screams). And in his subsequent pe­ riod, Bacon returns to a localization of random traits and scrubbed zones. Bacon thus follows a third path, which is neither optical like abstract painting, nor manual like Action Painting.

CHAPTER 13

Analogy

Cezanne: the motifas diag;ram The analogical and the digital Painting and analogy - The ptzradoxical

status ofabstract ptlinting - The analogictll language 0fCizanne, ofBacon: plane, color, and mass­

Moduttltio?l - Resembltl?lce recovered

There would thus be a tempered use of the diagram, a kind of mid­ dle way in which the diagram is not reduced to the state of a code, and yet does not cover the entire painting, avoiding both the code

its scrambling ... Must we then speak of wisdom or classicism? It is hard to believe, however, that Cezanne followed a middle way. Rather, he invented a specific way, distinct from the two preceding ones. Few painters have produced the experience of chaos and catas­ trophe as intensely, while fighting to limit and control it at any price. Chaos and catastrophe imply the collapse of all the figurative givens, and thus they already entail a fight, the fight against the cliche, the preparatory work (all the more necessary in that we are no longer "innocent"). It is out of chaos that the "stubborn geometry" or "geologic lines" emerge; and this geometry or geology must in turn pass through the catastrophe in order for colors to arise, for the earth to rise toward the sun. I It is thus a temporal diagram, with two moments. But diagram connects these two moments indissol­ ubly: the geometry is its "frame" and color is the sensation, the oring sensation." The diagram is exactly what Cezanne called the motif. In effect, the motif is made up of two things, the sensation and the frame. It is their intertwining. A sensation, or a point view, is not enough to make a motif: the sensation, even a coloring sensation, is ephemeral and confused, lacking duration and clarity

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