from sentences and their equivalent, philosophy extracts concepts (which must not be confused with general or abstract ideas), whereas science extracts prospects (propositions that must not be confused with judgments, and arts extracts percepts and affects (which must not be confused with perceptions and feelings). In each case language is tested and used in incomparable ways—but in ways that do not define the difference between disciplines without constituting their perpetual interbreeding. (24)Percepts and affects are powers associated with aesthetic figures (Deleuze and Guattari 65).
Figures have nothing to do with resemblance or rhetoric but are the condition under which the arts produce affects of stone and metal, of strings and wind, of line and color, on a plane of composition of a universe. Art and philosophy crosscut the chaos and confront it, but it is not the same sectional plane; it is not populated in the same way. In the one there is the constellation of a universe or affects and precepts; and in the other, constitutions of immanence or concepts. Art thinks no less than philosophy, but it thinks through affects and percepts. (66)We need to replicate the noumenal landscape of electracy through out public policy issue—in other words, the mental landscape of electracy. I don’t think that we will need to draw or paint anything. I think that the opinions we collect will "speak" their own image of thought, with the help of formal techniques we will borrow from Marchand and modern art. Through this collective image, and the texture or taste that it takes on to show itself, our goal is to “see” how to think what has, as of yet, not been thought. My conceptual persona is part of the texture in this new vision of thought. Deleuze and Guattari allow this figure of thought (conceptual persona) and its vital anecdote the sensation of chaos that keeps the plane of the concept and the experience itself immanent: “conceptual personae are philosophical sensibilia, the perceptions and affections of fragmentary concepts themselves: through them concepts are not only thought but perceived and felt” (131). Perceptions and feelings presuppose opinions; which cannot be controlled by a system even though they are comprised of elements in the self same system. The states of exception from rule (perceptions, feelings, philosophical sensibilia) may be what Deleuze and Guattari call “illusions of transcendence” that create the vital anecdotes which mediate between chaos, meaning, and the illusion of transcendence: “illusions of transcendence are useful to us and provide vital anecdotes—for when we take pride in encountering the transcendent within immanence, all we do is recharge the plane of immanence with immanence itself” (73). This is important because Marchand found that “‘the public preferred ‘the frivolous against the serious, ‘escape’ as against reality . . . the diverting as against the significant.’ . . . People seemed to want escapist fantasy, a feeling of personal identification with fictitious characters and celebrities, even more than they wanted products” (115). Our image of thought will need to take these ideas into account.
Our philosophical concept, then, will present the experience of the landscape of thought in electracy like modern art represents an experience of the social mindset around a painting's conception. Modern art, especially impressionist art, is endlessly (interpretively) fascinating. When I learned that we would be basing the expression of our concept using the formal devices of modern artists, such as brushstrokes, color, perspective, and other compositional features, I was intrigued. How can we do that philosophically? (I will find out in the second part of this course).
I took the following photograph of Édouard Manet's Skating (1877) before I figured out how to turn off the flash on my camera (the angle is wonky too).
The woman in Manet’s painting is staring at the viewer with a removed and disinterested look on her face. Her expression is ambiguous, but her direct acknowledgment of the viewer’s presence hints at interest and even a vague sense of appeal. Manet conveys this through a softness that the downward slant of her eyes add to her features. And the sketchiness of his paint strokes in and around her eyes add a slight, but noticeable, disarray to her face that elicits an ambivalent response of either compassion or interest, or a mixture of both. Her lips, also, are set between a gesture of a smile and indifference. The woman’s identity in the painting is not clear, but her presence as Manet’s focal subject is, despite the fact that she appears to be a bystander rather than a skater—the theme of Manet’s painting. Only the upper portion of the woman’s body is visible and her clothing distinguishes her as a non skater, but makes no claim to her social status. The descriptive plaque at the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge states: “[j]udged by her dress and make-up, she could be a courtesan . . . , but she holds a child by the hand, suggesting that she could also be a prosperous, if overdressed, mother taking her child to watch the skaters” (Skating, 1877. 1951.50).
Manet obstructs any ability to draw decisive meaning from the painting--he hides just as much as he reveals and offers no solutions. The woman’s ambiguous acknowledgement of the viewer and her dubious class status also make her presence at the skating event questionable. If she is a courtesan, she may be looking for business, but why is she holding a child’s hand? And, if she is a prosperous mother, then why is she receiving attention from the lady at her right, who is not as well dressed as her and is also, potentially, of any social class but not as ambiguous because she is involved in the skating activity? Also, is the woman appealing to the viewer suggestively or simply looking at him or her with the same type of acknowledgement she is generating? These questions are at the heart of Manet’s painting and are impossible to answer conclusively, However, Manet provides hints in his composition, layout, and brushwork; which serve as metaphors for the social setting of the painting and provide clues to its meaning. Manet’s brushwork in Skating ranges from smooth to imperceptible, and serves as a metaphor for the ambiguity of the woman’s class status and her social role in the skating activity. He obscures the crowds in the background and the horizon to emphasize focus on the woman’s presence and make all her surroundings elements incidental to her appearance.
In Great Bathers, Paul Cézanne portrays a group of nude bathers on the sand near an area of water and between strangely angled of trees. The trees and the bathers create a triangle, which the particular groupings of people at the base of each set of trees on either side of the painting mirror. Cezanne, in this later work, interestingly goes against his usual style of shunning traditional formal methods, such as the use of the triangular symmetry to ground and support structural elements in the painting. The Renaissance pyramid is the most striking feature in the painting. It draws the viewer’s attention down to its subject material, in an inverse apex, the bathers. Cezanne paints disproportional figures. The females on the left of the painting have abnormally small torsos and huge hips. The woman at the center of the painting, in a crouched position, is strangely depicted from both a side profile and facing forward, which creates the illusion that her right side is collapsing into or creating another human shape. The figure to the far right and front of the painting combines the overall disparity in the rest of the figures by having no sense of realizable form. Cezanne seems to paint a hybrid figure of a pair legs with a head on the top or a figure with shoulders severely hunched forward. The figures in Cezanne’s painting and his use of bright colors, along with the seemingly utopian setting, combine with his use of classical formal techniques to suggest that the marriage of old formal techniques and his own vision of the aesthetic in his artwork result in a collapse of representation. The disparity in and between Cezanne’s bathers creates a relationship of representation that carries into their immediate environment disjoining everything and combining it all into something whole--weird, strange, and wonderful. Cezanne makes a charged statement about juxtaposition of forms, perspective, and space that cannot really be put into words—it can only be experienced as a sense of something irresolvable.
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