Transmissibility: Writing Aesthetic History 9780367859015, 9780367859022, 9781003015666

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“Transmissibility: Writing Aesthetic History is an exuberant inquiry into the moment— better still, the movement—of transmissibility that pushes aesthetic form over the edge of political praxis, and vice versa. How does art-work survive transitional life-worlds? How are we to think and write about ontological and historical immanence within aesthetic history? Jae Emerling accompanies his reader every step of the way in this exciting and erudite text: he works side-by-side with you to face the challenge of making sense of what it means to encounter art.” Homi Bhabha, Harvard University, USA “Jae Emerling has done the remarkable. He argues convincingly that transmissibility is both of and for aesthetics (where aesthetics is critical and transformative thinking), but that it is also of and for history too; which is to say, that it is attentive to both the ontological and the experimental-creative historiographic properties of art. In all this, transmissibility is feral—as is Emerling in the shape of his thinking, his use of language’s materiality, and the rhythm of his writing, and thus what it does—as it (and he) cuts across fields and practices, problematising them, and our affective experiences of them too. How is it possible for Emerling to do all this? Read the book, it’ll blow your bloody doors off!” Marquard Smith, University College London, UK “Very occasionally a writer will come along who changes what it might mean to write about art and culture, giving us the permission to take new liberties. In this dazzling, innovative and courageous book, Jae Emerling enacts a radical approach to thinking the intersections of the history and ontology of art. Here, experimental historiography meets experimental writing. In luminous prose, the book plays, tests, and even betrays its multiple sources, performing the anachronisms and transdisciplinary provocations it describes, deftly moving between modes and genres of writing—the aphoristic, the meditation, the dialogic, the confessional, the fictional. Transmissibility is a paean to how truly vital scholarship begins with the raw and unmediated experience of an author’s real encounters; a love letter to reading without boundaries. Provocative, impassioned, searingly creative, this is a book to help us envision the future of writing and thinking about art, its histories and theories, and its multifarious effects.” Kamini Vellodi, University of Edinburgh, UK

TRANSMISSIBILITY

This book examines transmissibility to remind us why the vitality and epistemic significance of an artwork is anachronistic and futural. Transmissibility: Writing Aesthetic History performs a transdisciplinary philosophy of aesthetic history via the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Cy Twombly, Marina Abramović, Paul Celan, Cecil Taylor, Italo Calvino, Candida Höfer, and others by focusing on the artistic and historiographic labor that differentiates artworks from other modes of creation. Jae Emerling is Professor of Art History in the College of Arts + Architecture at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. He is the author of Theory for Art History and Photography: History and Theory, published by Routledge.

TRANSMISSIBILITY Writing Aesthetic History

Jae Emerling

Designed cover image: © Ezra Klee Studio, Past Futures Lie Ahead, 2022 First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Jae Emerling The right of Jae Emerling to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-367-85901-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-85902-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-01566-6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003015666 Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Credit Lines I II

Introduction: “Visions and Auditions”: To Survive Our “Plague Year” Twenty-first Series of Aesthetic History

viii x

1 18

III Twenty-first Series of Aesthetic History: Hypomnemata

66

I V Sibyl of Cumae, or Indiscernibility

91

V

From Oceanic Chaos…A Luminous Wave: Transmissibility in the Aesthetic Thought of Deleuze and Guattari

94

VI Imperceptibility, or The Ear of the Future

111

VII To Transmit and Receive Vibrations and Waves: Italo Calvino as Aesthetic History

115

VIII Impersonality, or Bob Dylan as a Column of Air

147

Index

149

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In an October 1985 issue of the appropriately titled journal L’Autre, Gilles Deleuze shared the following in a conversation with Antoine Dulaure and Claire Parnet: “mediators are fundamental. Creation is all about mediators. Without them nothing happens…Whether they are real or imaginary…you have to form your mediators. It’s a series…I need my mediators to express myself.” So I will start here in medias res to express my sincere gratitude to my mediators, both real and imaginary, without whom I could never express myself—Giorgio Agamben, Éric Alliez, Homi Bhabha, Mieke Bal, Craig Lundy, Ali Behdad, Black Thought, Christoph Menke, William Wylie, Sean Anderson, Cecil Percival Taylor, Georges Didi-Huberman, Lauren Berlant, Ian Verstegen, Lucia D’Errico, Paulo de Assis, Eugenie Brinkema, Jane Rendell, Lina Malfona, Donald Preziosi, Claire Farago, the Editorial Collective of the Journal of Visual Culture, David Cunningham, Ernst van Alphen, Tacita Dean, Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, John Ó Maoilearca, Simone Weil, Richard Woodfield, Erik Waterkotte, Ezra Klee Studio, and Dann Disciglio. Even more, I would like to acknowledge the debt I owe to infinite past-future conversations with Marq Smith and Kamini Vellodi. To these “milieu theoreticians” as well as to those comprising other series that shape my life, I offer this passage, which is the event of this book, from Deleuze’s last published text “Immanence: A Life”: A life is everywhere, in every moment which a living subject traverses and which is measured by the objects that have been experienced, an immanent life carrying along the events or singularities that are merely actualized in subjects

Acknowledgments  ix

and objects. This indefinite life does not itself have moments, however close they may be, but only between-times, between-moments. It does not arrive, it does not come after, but allows one to see the event to come and already past, in the absolute of an immediate consciousness. In memoriam Italo Calvino (1923–1985)

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CREDIT LINES

The lines from “Eastern War Time,” from An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–1991, by Adrienne Rich. Copyright ©1991 by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. The lines from “A Long Conversation,” from Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995– 1998, by Adrienne Rich. Copyright ©1999 by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. The lines from “A Primitive Like an Orb,” “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” “Description without Place,” “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” and “The Idea of Order at Key West” from The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play by Wallace Stevens. Copyright ©1967, 1969, 1971 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. The lines from “Portrait of a Lady,” “Preludes,” “Four Quartets,” from Collected Poems, 1909–1962, by T. S. Eliot. Copyright ©1963 by T. S. Eliot. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. The lines from “Return of the Native,” “AM/TRAK,” and “In the Tradition,” from The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, by Amiri Baraka. Copyright © Estate of Amiri Baraka. Used by permission of Chris Calhoun Agency. The line from “Coal,” from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde, by Audre Lorde. Copyright ©1997 by The Audre Lorde Estate. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. The line from “War Memoir,” from Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness, by Bob Kaufman. Copyright ©1965 by Bob Kaufman. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

I INTRODUCTION: “VISIONS AND AUDITIONS” To survive our “plague year”

A “plague year,” as we have lived, in the twenty-first century, or whatever its date, is never only viral, but also political, ethical, ecological, menacing-liberative in its technoscience, and its foolish–knavish (left–right) desire for fascism redux. We have now become attentive to transmissibility as a virology term regarding maximal and minimal viral loads (to bear and to be exposed to); how easily a virus spreads (R-naught rates), and the modes of transmission (encounters with molecular bodies, hosts, variants). An entire semiotic of COVID-19 presented. This specific usage of “transmissibility” takes on consistency within our “plague year,” a certain type of bio-political event. But, like all intriguing concepts, “transmissibility” is “wild” and “pluripotent” as it traverses many different epistemological fields, not only epidemiology.1 For many of us throughout the world, pandemic pressures forced us to acquiesce to live in common. Some offered their own journals of the plague year as Daniel Defoe did before them in 1665 to record “observations or memorials, of the most remarkable occurrences, as well public and private.” Many others, unsurprisingly, returned to Dr. Rieux. I certainly did. Not only because he and I could be mistaken for Sicilian peasants, perhaps we are, but also for that scene revisited and retold in the dimming natural light of our present. A scene of “strange happiness” wherein Rieux and Jean Tarrou swim in the ocean along an Algerian coastline. Wherein Rieux floats “on his back and stayed motionless, gazing up at the dome of sky lit by the stars and moon.” “With same zest, the same rhythm” they swim not to escape the plague, but to prove that a “happiness that forgot nothing” exists.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003015666-1

2  Introduction: “Visions and Auditions”

Undulating waves become rhythmic written lines. On 10 December 1957, a decade after writing La Peste, Albert Camus alludes to this form of “happiness” in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He implies that aesthetic labor must embody the infinitive verb to transmit. He does so by articulating a threshold between formalism and socio-political commitment wherein “the writer” faces the “silence” of “a world threatened by disintegration” and is drawn “out of his exile, at least whenever, in the midst of the privileges of freedom, he manages not to forget that silence, and to transmit it in order to make it resound by means of his art [et à le relayer pour le faire retentir par les moyens de l’art].”2 This “silence,” he continues, “consists in preventing the world from destroying itself. Heir to a corrupt history, in which are mingled fallen revolutions, technology gone mad, dead gods, and worn-out ideologies, where mediocre powers can destroy all yet no longer know how to convince, where intelligence has debased itself to become the servant of hatred and oppression.” To transmit, Camus intimates, commits to “reconcile anew labor and culture.” For us, transmissibility is an aesthetic concept, but one perhaps never entirely within aesthetics. If, by aesthetics we suppose either a pleasing set of effects, stylistics, or a set of analytic propositions and corollaries. Here, on the contrary, aesthetics is critical, transformative thinking with and alongside the production of art, regardless of specific mode or field. It signifies an attentiveness to the ontological and historiographic properties and capabilities of art-work, that is, the creative labor (poiesis as composition) that produces a constellation of actualvirtual effects that we encounter (aisthesis, an encounter through our senses). Such effects force us to think about memory, temporality, representation, and an ethics of becoming. For us, aesthetics is “a materially intensive expression” that affects us and forces us to think, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have shown.3 In fact, transmissibility has been a longstanding part of cultural and historiographic discourse since antiquity. References to the idea of the past being “transmitted by memory” resound throughout Jewish, Greco-Roman, and early modern European cultural history. In the twelfth century, Abbot Suger justified the aesthetic design and curation of objects for the Gothic basilica St. Denis as a “need to transmit the description of the ornaments of the church” to the future in order to fend off “Oblivion, jealous rival of the truth.” In an even earlier text, we read Pliny discussing painting as a mode that “deigned to transmit to posterity [posteris tradere].” Complex, nearly contradictory, relations between “transmissibility” and memory have always been present because of the contingencies and ethics of material-discursive survival, historiography, and aesthetic labor itself. Within diasporic memory itself there is always an inherent tension with transmissibility, as Toni Morrison writes in Beloved: “this is not a story to pass on.”4 Or, as Primo Levi warned in his preface to If This Is a Man: “Ponder that this happened: I consign these words to you. Carve them into your hearts…Or may your house fall down, illness make you helpless, and your children turn their eyes from you.”5

Introduction: “Visions and Auditions”  3

Thus transmissibility here is defined not as a general or traditional, even museological, action of cultural survival, but as the aesthetic and epistemic labor that differentiates artworks from other modes of production and creation. It is conceived as an ontological-historiographic mode of production distinct—even if by intensity of degree rather than kind—from other commodities, products, techniques, and rituals. Transmissibility is the work undertaken and in-process within ontology and historiography itself. This aesthetic modality of an artwork as an ontological and historical temporal relation eludes positivist, historicist, and presentist conceits in favor of iterability (repetition and difference): traces and threads of sense-events. This modality resonates in claims as varied as Baudelaire’s assertion that art-work is “mnemotechny” to Paul Celan’s idea of poetry giving us a “narrowest strait” that remains a “leer/lehr” text (empty-open and yet forceful teaching) within chronological history itself to Mieke Bal’s “preposterous” quotational histories. Thus art-work is not timeless, but rather durational, contingent, feral even: it enacts a sense-event that renders other lines of time, other past-futures possible. It offers us another “promise of happiness,” one sensible and intelligible at once, time and again. Transmissibility certainly complicates chronology and any discrete successive notion of past-present-future. What does it offer us instead? Not simply that chronology is futile or useless. Neither are decolonial challenges to center– periphery relations nor any critical historiographic original–belated inversions. Transmissibility shifts the emphasis from positivist representational knowledge to an ontological-historiographic experimentation with events that is affirmative rather than a simple dialectical negation. It allows things to take on other consistencies and meanings by decreating and composing anew both the original and the belated, the center and the periphery. This is, of course, part of how network theory functions.6 But transmissibility is a concept that focuses our attention on artistic creation as it labors to deframe and compose the real as such. Furthermore, it attempts to take ontology-aesthetics-history as a multiplicity of effects that decreate and thus complicate how we conceive and write aesthetic histories. Transmissibility is always already an aesthetic-ontological encounter as much as a historical one; it experiments with how these synchronic-diachronic, actual-virtual networks and becomings cohere historically and aesthetically within a work of art whose vitality and epistemic significance is anachronistic and futural. We are wagering that art-work offers us something other than artifactual, evidentiary causal relations that presuppose coherent entities (peoples, cultures, nationalities, time periods, intentionality, mindsets, etc.) because “works of art are immersed in a virtuality” that is not “opposed to the real but to the actual.” 7 This is not an aesthetic generalization as much as learning how and why within each specific work of art virtuality (becoming) is implicated. There is a logic by which art is formed with virtual elements—“varieties of relations and singular points”— that coexist within actual qualities, forms, and socio-historical statements. This

4  Introduction: “Visions and Auditions”

coexistence allows us to experiment with how and why these virtual genetic elements refuse to allow “a point of view privileged over others, a centre which would unify the other centres.”8 Instead, every artwork is “double without it being the case that the two halves [actual and virtual] resemble one another, one being a virtual image and the other an actual image.”9 This is our problematic: how to retrace the movement of the virtual within specific historical actualizations and crossings (artworks as actual historical bodies) without generalizing the aesthetic and without foreclosing on experimentalcreative historiography? We must learn how to encounter an internal ontological and historiographic difference more profound and transformative than the ostensible contradictions between past and present, self and other, center and periphery.10 This is art-work as immanence, which can never be solely and completely in the present. Such “untimely” labor transforms both perception and memory, present and past, history and becoming. Consequently, it has nothing to do with either the timeless or the utopian; instead, it “acts counter to the past, and therefore on the present, for the benefit, let us hope, of a future—but the future is not a historical future, not even an utopian future,” it is becoming.11 We aim to experiment with how these relations between virtual and actual, becoming and history, within art-work remain co-present, co-determinant, and immanent as past-future events. With Antonio Negri, we desire “to reach the level of immanence—which is not a horizon, a substitution for a divine scheme, or a pantheism” but rather “a calculus of forces enabling one to understand and forecast what is taking place on the historical terrain” because “there is always such a calculus that allows us to launch names, schemata, and projects forth—which are much like nets one casts to catch both the present and future.”12 This book offers aesthetic history as a field that takes shape around the concept of transmissibility. As a “possibility of a commencement,” it opens new futures not simply by repeating the past, but by creating transmissibility as force-form, as “echo and extension,” resonance and reinscription.13 In these terms, aesthetic history is constructed and expressed within a spectral geophilosophical archive: ars-technē, an anachronistic noun and verb. This substantive noun—itself a multiplicity of properties and capacities—is one event of transmissibility. A Roman receptioncreation of an already overdetermined preexisting Greek concept, which is inseparable from a violent history of colonial spoil. Ars-technē: a set of historical objects, phenomena, and individuals that are nevertheless individuated and explicated via intensive movement, immanent techniques, unbecoming betrayals, and unimaginable recommencements. Anachronistic, yes always, because there is no return to an origin here (Greek technē). On the contrary, we create with and against Roman-Greek heterogenous series, channels, and passages resonating within obscene, unimagined futures. Acknowledging that such creative practice affords art-work an ontological movement within our historiological frameworks. Frameworks that too often domesticate aesthetic labor and thought via continuity, causality, resemblance—academic disciplinary watchwords of

Introduction: “Visions and Auditions”  5

legitimacy and authority. Aesthetic history recommences the historiographic and ontological desire to increase the unconscious (non-historical, non-actualized, non-psychological) effects (flows and connections, betrayals, seductions, missteps, epiphanies) of a-signifying signals within social-historical, signifying composites because “intensities lie beneath qualities.”14 More precisely, as Virginia Woolf intimates in Orlando, aesthetic history posits art-work as “a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice.”15 Such an aesthetic history forecloses neither on the past nor the future. Neither on the individual nor the collective. As Marc Auge writes: “the past is never wholly occluded either on the individual or the collective level” and “the future, even when it concerns the individual, always has a social dimension: it depends on others.”16 To reaffirm this past-future passage we must resist ambiguity—“the armature of a dialectical conception of reality and history which lays heavy emphasis on contradiction”—and thereby refuse “the use of the past as the explanation for everything, to make it the sole actor.”17 This is certainly not to deny the critical role of the past in every domain, especially the life of groups or of individuals. But, as Auge argues, if we use the past as the “explanation for everything” and treat it as inured, absolute tradition, then there are two reactions: (1) experimentalism, which has little to say beyond declaring its own innovation and modernity; and (2) presentism, which rejects the past through a solipsism that verges on nihilism. In both reactions we “risk ignoring in our relation to time all that falls outside of history, or more exactly evades historical determination: intuition, creation, commencement, volition, encounters.”18 For us, “art offers to one and all the opportunity to live through a commencement” because “to read a book, listen to music, or look at a painting” is to participate in an aesthetic encounter that is never “one-way only,” meaning it is dictated neither by the author nor by the reception. Within this encounter there is a passage, a becoming. “Contrary to heredity, heritage and destiny,” an aesthetic encounter possesses an “inaugural force” that is “the ordeal of otherness (the reason why the word signifies empathy as well as confrontation) and an opening-up of time.”19 For this reason, aesthetic history cannot preclude the social, political, and ethical problematic of the individual and the collective (of a people to come), but it also must insist on a certain limited, ideal-empirical autonomy for artistic practice. “A relation to the other,” Auge concludes, “even in the form of memory, promise or project, forms part [of us]; [we] reanimate it incessantly in [our] everyday behavior and seek its traces or proofs in the surrounding world and its events” and, therefore, we “have to be able to think of time as a plot outline but at the same time, in a complementary fashion, as an inauguration” of alterity, becoming-other.20 As Jacques Derrida reminds us in Specters of Marx, we must learn how “to affirm justly, so as to have the power…to affirm the coming of the event, its future-to-come itself.”21 Since the future… because one “never inherits without coming to terms with some specter, and therefore with more than one specter.”22 Never merely a question of delay, deferral, difference, postponement, as

6  Introduction: “Visions and Auditions”

Derrida defended himself against his interpreters, but an instance of the “herenow” taking place “without lateness, without delay, but without presence.” In part because it is “the precipitation of an absolute singularity, singular because differing, precisely [ justement], and always other, binding itself necessarily in the form of the instant, in imminence and in urgency.”23 Aesthetic history is an attempt to receive the futural promise of such spectral, singular, and urgent transmissions within an intensive present—“as of a now,” to use Cecil Taylor’s beautiful phrase. Such discreet, promising, and unaddressed messages sent ahead and back, since the future. The constructed-expressed, past-future opening that art-work creates is key. But if art-work is transmissibility, then we must also heed Derrida’s ethic: “No progress of knowledge could saturate an opening that must have nothing to do with knowledge. Nor therefore with ignorance. The opening must preserve this heterogeneity as the only chance of an affirmed or rather reaffirmed future. It is the future itself, it comes from there. The future is its memory.”24 Simply put, transmissibility is “a stammering answer” uttered within all creative and critical work, whether artistic, philosophical, or historiographic. Transmissibility makes all of us, as writers of aesthetic history, regardless of specific discipline, stammer. Our disciplinary language stutters, misfires, and touches an outside. We are after “an affective and intensive language, and no longer an affectation of the one who speaks.”25 As an ontological-historiographic mode, transmissibility gives us “stammering answers” because it is a “matter of digging under stories, cracking open the opinions, and reaching regions without memories” in order to affect an individual limit (life as such as opposed to death) and thus to touch an intimate exterior within language itself and not outside of it. Only here do we become strangers to ourselves, problematic, exhausted, joyful. And for precisely these reasons aesthetic history is neither stolid historicism nor aestheticism, but rather it is an unbecoming stammering “that is always contemporary.”26 Stammering experiments with the “three virtues” of impersonality, indiscernibility, and imperceptibility that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari present us.27 These virtues are limit-experiences. They delimit us from falling back into solipsistic, highly personal aesthetic writing as exemplified by John Ruskin’s reverie before St. Mark’s or Oscar Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist” (1891). It is not a verbal equivalent (cf. William Hazlitt) registering our personal emotions and subjective affectations that we desire.28 Instead, it is a written counterwork without equivalent wherein one effect produces another and this production itself demands that the virtues of impersonality, indiscernibility, and imperceptibility be actualized as we touch a subjective limit. At this limit, subjective speech and experience are intensified without falling into ecstasy or systematicity.29 (After all, has there ever been an effective aesthetics without a constraint or delimiting element, a problematic contraînte as the Oulipo writers proved?) We write not from our impressions of an artwork; nor overly confidently from within our lived experience. On the contrary. We write with and alongside the problematic event of an aesthetic encounter. This encounter includes our own being, history, and

Introduction: “Visions and Auditions”  7

ethics. A “stammering answer” is therefore not a failure as much as it exhausts the pregiven clichés of our aesthetic thinking and subjective speech. Along this stammered limit language as such becomes “dynamic combinations in perpetual disequilibrium…making it bifurcate and vary in each of its terms, following an incessant modulation.”30 This limit-experience evinces that our subjective, immediate affectations before an artwork, or another person, are only a starting point rather than an end. Transmissibility also affirms the history of aesthetics itself as one structuring discourse that makes these affectations possible and articulatable. For example, Ruskin’s reveries are pinioned by a specific metaphysics. We must address the histories of aesthetics, whatever the specific field, as we pass through our physiological and psychological aesthetic responses. We recall the historian A. J. P. Taylor’s wager that historians write “for the joy of creation” all the while acknowledging that the discipline of history polices “an increasingly severe distinction between the real thing—argumentative, particularised, distrustful of narrative, set behind trenches of footnotes—and other kinds of attempts to reconstruct the past, to visualise or dramatise it, which are often seen as vulgar or childish, lower order, even irresponsible.”31 For us, any creative historiography is always already aesthetic. As such it demands an attentiveness to a “practical past” that falls to the side of formalized, academic history; it admits that the “vast majority of lived experience is penetrable only to the guided imagination”; and that the imagination, as Spinoza tells us, does not create illusion but is a real material-force in the world.32 Here Deleuze’s famous statement takes on consistency. He posits that “to render Time sensible is the task common to the painter, the musician, and sometimes the writer. It is a task beyond all measure or cadence.”33 But how must we understand “sensible” in this statement? For Deleuze, time is being as such, ontological reality. So why and how must someone “render Time sensible…beyond all measure and cadence”? Sense must not be confused with signification or exegesis, just as an event must not be confused with, or simply opposed to, a subject of history or a spatio-temporal realization of a state of things (“measure and cadence”). An event is sense itself. A “sense-event” takes place between statements and things, between conditions of visibility and affect. It is the construction and expression of a material-temporal “passage” or “threshold” wherein historicist, unidirectional time is redoubled, rearranged, split into an event of memory-perception. In his great work Matter and Memory (1896) Henri Bergson argues for the ontological status of the past as an event, which necessitates a shift from memorytraces and associative representation towards something more dynamic and fluid: a philosophy with real movement and coexistence between past and present, virtual and actual, infinite and finite. For Bergson, present and past are different in kind rather than degree. This means that the present does not simply follow the past in a discrete linear order; rather, the entirety of the past coexists—differently—with each moment of the present. Hence the “past can never be recomposed with

8  Introduction: “Visions and Auditions”

a series of presents since this would be to negate its specific mode of being.”34 Memory and perception are thus simultaneous rather than sequential. We adopt Deleuze’s famous summation when he states that for Bergson the past is rather than was. “We are touching on one of the most profound, but perhaps one of the least understood, aspects of Bergsonism” because “what Bergson calls ‘pure recollection’ has no psychological existence,” which is why it is called virtual, inactive, and unconscious.”35 Bergson’s theory of memory forces a ‘leap into ontology’ that motivates aesthetic history. As Deleuze writes: We only grasp the past at the place where it is in itself, and not in ourselves, in our present. There is therefore a “past in general” that is not the particular past of a particular present but that is like an ontological element, a past that is…the condition of the “passage” of every particular present…According to Bergson, we first put ourselves back into the past in general…We really leap into being, into being-in-itself, into the being in itself of the past. It is a case of leaving psychology altogether…In any case, the Bergsonian revolution is clear: We do not move from the present to the past, from perception to recollection, but from the past to the present, from recollection to perception.36 There is no call here for any idealism or mysticism about this pure past. There is no reason to desire to represent it “as it truly was.” For Bergson, the pure past is what allows for the actualization of each and every particular past (as a former particular present). The pure past is contracted, actualized into a present, and thereby reconfigured. Simultaneous with its actualization, this real movement of contraction-dilation reorganizes the coexistent pure past: time as an open whole, as virtual becoming. Thus there is no preceding place that the past was. One does not look or go back in time as if retracing one’s steps. Nor does any readymade (non-stammering) narration in the present assure your encounter with the past as such. On the contrary, the entirety of the past is always enfolded and refolded within each and every actualization, within every measurable, extensive, useful succession of time imagined as a one-directional movement from past to future. Time as virtual becoming is the real, immanent mode of what is. As such it has no other mode than its own actualization (its continued differing from itself ): We can posit it realizing itself and becoming what it is—pure otherness and pure difference—without any need to appeal to either a logic of contradiction and negation [Hegelian dialectics] or to an abstract universality or generality… Bergson’s challenge to thinking consists in the claim that this is not to move thought in the direction of an abstract metaphysics. Indeed, he insists that the contrary is the case. The virtual is not, then, a general idea, something abstract and empty, but the concept of difference (and of life since it is vital) rendered adequate. The concept of the virtual gives us the time of life.37

Introduction: “Visions and Auditions”  9

This “time of life” is a complex disjoining of our memory-perception circuit. It helps account for Bergson’s interest in hallucinations, déjà vu, dreams, delirium. These anomalies intrigued him because they disclose the splitting of time: the operation of memory as more than a recollection-image, a re-presentation of a former present. The pure past is operative in every durational act of recollectionperception, in every body-image, every aesthetic history. Such past-future ontological durations run through history (condensing, translating, and rotating as it is actualized). Sense (sens, direction, tendency, orientation) is an ontological-aesthetic pretext, whereas only historical and discursive context confers meaning. But changing contexts (temporal, cultural, geographic, historical), that is, constitutive-open histories, create complex fault lines within the field of meaning itself. These recursive fissures are neither interruptions nor negations. Rather, they “form part of ” the field of meaning as “Visions and Auditions” that are no longer part of any language or material yet they take place and actualize along an exterior fissure itself, enabling us to sense an event that touches and traces the extimate (intimate exterior) contours of a movement that runs through history.38 Runs through (as a current) signifies the vital repetition—ontological duration—of a sense-event rather than atemporality. These “Visions and Auditions” are “not fantasies, but veritable Ideas” that we see and hear “in the interstices of language, in its intervals.” “They are not,” Deleuze continues, “interruptions of the process, but breaks that form part of it, like an eternity that can only be revealed in a becoming, or a landscape that only appears in movement. They are not outside language, but the outside of language.”39 Transmissibility is the extimate shaping of immanent forces as a sense-event. “What is going to happen? What has just happened?” are the only questions a sense-event poses to us. These curious future anterior questions and the cultural encounters that embody them are challenging, exhausting perhaps, but they are undeniably worthwhile because they offer real insight into the vital, resisting power of art-work. An insight that challenges us to study and to write aesthetic history. Writing aesthetic history in this manner forces us to comprehend art-work as the creation and presentation of untimely becomings, transhistoric tendencies, and recursive passages, that move us to the threshold of human thought and agency where we encounter the traces and threads of ontological-historiographic events. A “bit of becoming” takes on consistency specific to it. As Deleuze and Guattari challenge us in Anti-Oedipus, with “a little additional effort” we can create such an open field named aesthetic history. One wherein we become “capable of collecting and dealing with all the indices” of our own fields in order to “study their nature” (their density, knots, impasses, presuppositions, and recursivity). Such a study enables us to sense the contours of another immanent field within our own. We undo and decode our own indices in order to construct and to express the forces at work within a “subrepresentational field” (ontological becoming, the being of the sensible) that continues “to survive and work” immanently within our own artistic and historiographic forms.40

10  Introduction: “Visions and Auditions”

Thinking and writing transmissibility is one means to construct and to express this immanent field. In large part because it operates through a double movement of partial connections, misreadings, polyvocal flows, and transductive breaks wherein “something is conducted, something happens between chains of semiotic expression and material chains,” as Guattari explained.41 Something other than what we have traditionally come to represent “as history.” We create a “new land”—aesthetic history—only by experimenting with history and ontology, with forms and forces. We could say that transmissibility is an “intensive voyage” that “undoes all the lands for the benefit of the one that it is creating,” one in which our thinking and writing—our encounters with artworks as historiographic and ontological modes, as individuated waves on a single oceanic duration—become indices of a “new world” that is not at all a vain “hope, but a simple ‘finding’, a ‘finished design’.”42 Transmissibility is therefore a “form of motion,” to borrow a line from the poet A. R. Ammons, that re-finds art-work as a “diagram of forces” (vide D’Arcy Thompson), as temporal-historiographic morphogenetic resonance. Franco Moretti has written that “deducing from the form of an object the forces that have been at work” is key to any “new conception” of what we are promising here as aesthetic history. We side with Moretti as he questions himself, his desires for an unnamed methodology, and an open future: Were I to name a common denominator for all these attempts, I would probably choose: a materialist conception of form. An echo of the Marxist problematic of the 1960s and 70s? Yes and no. Yes, because the great idea of that critical season— form as the most profoundly social aspect of literature: form as force…remains for me as valid as ever. And no, because I no longer believe in that a single explanatory framework may account for the many levels of literary production and their multiple links with the larger social system: whence a certain conceptual eclecticism of these pages, and the tentative nature of many of the examples. Much remains to be done…But right now, opening new conceptual possibilities is more important than justifying them in every detail.43 Transmissibility is presented here as such a “conceptual possibility.” One that constructs and traverses aesthetic history at varying speeds and intensities. This double movement between history and ontology requires a certain “Sisyphean labor,” to resituate Roland Barthes’ term, in that we must acknowledge our own subject position and agency even as art-work is allowed an existence outside of us. This “Sisyphean labor” is an ethic of aesthetic-historiographic encounter, “not so much in creating meaning as suspending it.”44 If artworks are “gifts to the attentive,” as Celan reminds us, then we must become attentive and affective. Affective means capable of locating the singularities that comprise the multiplicity of the work (ars-technē) and the real as such, including ourselves, as sense-events. I would like to add transmissibility is not a method. Or, perhaps, it is a method “for anyone aiming to establish a method subtle and flexible enough to

Introduction: “Visions and Auditions”  11

be the same thing as an absence of any method whatever,” as Italo Calvino said in a lecture given at Amherst College in 1976.45 I say this because within our postcritical moment, after theory and amid much renewed interest in aesthetics, I still believe that there never was a shared method or philosophy that marked theory or aesthetics as such. There have only been only theoretical objects and affects—aesthetic figures and conceptual personae—at work within variegated, durational becomings that comprise aesthetic history. This history anticipates our encounters with artworks. But it also prehends—as part of its critical-creative paideia—an openness to the inaugural force of a past-future event that transmits the unrepresentability of the virtual past as discourse or object. Such sense-events demand not a pastiche of historical forms nor a subjective presentist interpretation; instead, they reverse these poles in a force-form of mad love wherein the past itself has ontological being (it is) and thus resists, exerts, and differentiates itself though our present actualizations of it. This is the real lesson of the DJ aesthetic, for example. For artists like J Dilla and 9th Wonder the virtual past is not inert and plastic (or vinyl) but morphogenetic as it resists and becomes sensible and thinkable only through the specific divisions, reflections, flashes, snippets, and the monstrous transformations of truly creative acts.46 Art-work actualizes “a bit of becoming” as it reconfigures the whole of the virtual past, thus rendering and recommencing new morphic fields and dissolving ourselves as distinct, autonomous, individuals within this “clinch of forces.” “We attain to the percept [nonhuman landscapes of nature] and the affect [nonhuman becomings of man] only as to autonomous and sufficient beings that no longer owe anything to those who experience or have experienced them” because “great creative affects can link up or diverge, within compounds of sensations that transform themselves, vibrate, couple, or split apart: it is these beings of sensation that account for the artist’s relationship with a public, for the relation between different works by the same artist, or even for a possible affinity between artists,” Deleuze and Guattari insist.47 It is certainly a challenge to deframe and compose with such ontological-aesthetic forces. But we must become worthy of facing a sense-event with an ontological-aesthetic tropism that attentiveness requires, which in turn forces us to think as never before. As Nathalie Sarraute has written, to become here-now is never a simple return, but a passage through the gaps and aporias of memory itself: “ ‘My memory is full of holes’, people say causally, nonchalantly, not wishing to dwell on the matter…But what it has left behind there, this opening, this disjointed, dislocated breach, makes everything reel.”48 Morphogenetic properties and capacities counter any crass animism or realism, let alone any fixed relation between individuals or groups. So there is no pregiven method here, but only a concerted attentiveness to the aesthetic philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, which is always already an historiographic experimentation with events, an aesthetic of intensities.49 We have never truly reckoned with its full implications, let alone the aesthetic philosophies at work in the putative non-philosophy of Emily Dickinson, Gayl Jones, Louis Kahn,

12  Introduction: “Visions and Auditions”

Cy Twombly, the Otolith Group, or Cecil Taylor, et al. Thus all the quotations, allusions, mediators, conceptual personae, and aesthetic figures that will have been presented here are discontinuous segments, stammerings, sketched force-diagrams, knots, and threads of “a vast net” that gives shape to a field—a section of the ocean— so that we may encounter a single wave, a work of art, rendered visible, perceptible, individuated, signaletic, modal. What follows is an attempt to apprehend a wave passing between the siren-call of either socio-political interpretation or formalism (close reading). Transmissibility heeds Kaf ka’s line: “the Sirens are silent.”50 We are written by events whose movement is indiscernible and often imperceptible. From within this immanence of being and thought, forces and forms, past and future we encounter singularities of these and other events. Traces, fragments, indices. We labor to read these traces of past-future events. Threaded, doubling back, redacted legends, flashes, “visions and auditions” at midnight as well as noonday. We become these impersonal traces. An event becomes a trace. And thus another unforeseen event is written on and through us. Another movement undulates forward and pulls back. For newness “never comes all at once, in a single phrase or act of creation,” but “emerges like a series… with gaps, traces and reactivations of former elements that survive under the new rules. Despite isomorphisms and isotopies, no formation provides the model for another.” Consequently we “must pursue the different series, travel along the different levels, and cross all thresholds” by forming “an oceanic line” that reveals that there are aesthetic and historiographic thresholds that “mobilize knowledge in a direction that is different to that of science.”51 Thresholds that transmit intensive affects and concepts, singularities rather than subjects. Here we are within a veritable ocean of events that life as such writes. As it does we become belated-imminent: the only immanent vantage point from which to apprehend a wave. La mer. Le onde. Palo/mar. A theory-practice of waves. Onde. On…de…on…de…on…. We are of the waves. Possessed and dispossessed, composed “between-times, between-moments.”52 Within a life “time becomes a subject because it is the folding of the outside and, as such, forces every present into forgetting, but preserves the whole of the past within memory: forgetting is the impossibility of return, and memory is the necessity of renewal.”53 Since the future, “as of a now.” “I read in a book,” entitled If on a winter’s night a traveler, that “the objectivity of thought can be expressed using the verb ‘to think’ in the impersonal third person: saying not ‘I think’ but ‘it thinks’ as we say ‘it rains’. There is thought in the universe—this is the constant from which we must set out every time. Will I ever be able to say, ‘Today it writes’, just like ‘Today it rains’, ‘Today it is windy’? Only when it will come natural to me to use the verb ‘write’ in the impersonal form will I be able to hope that through me is expressed something less limited than the personality of an individual. And for the verb ‘to read’?… ‘I read, therefore, it writes’.”54

Introduction: “Visions and Auditions”  13

For this reason a book never bares a single face, but only a simultaneity of delayed aspects, profiles, unrecounted gazes, betrayed expressions. A book is all “vision and auditions” because every veritable creation opens a past-future: To transmit: “this intensive way of reading, in contact with what’s outside the book, as a flow meeting other flows…as a series of experiments for each reader in the midst of events that have nothing to do with books, as tearing the book into pieces, getting it to interact with other things, absolutely anything…is reading with love.”55 Could we not get the waves to be heard all through?56 Notes 1 Within physics, for instance, transmissibility refers to material properties conveying or carrying forces, that is, when a force acts upon a body the effect of the force is the same at every point on its line of action (pushing or pulling on the same line of action). In engineering, it is the ratio of force transmitted to force applied. Or, as in broadcasting, transmitting signals or data. 2 Albert Camus – Banquet speech. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2022. Thu. 12 May 2022. www.nob​elpr​i ze.org/pri​zes/lit​erat​u re/1957/camus/spe​ech/ 3 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, p. 19. 4 Toni Morrison, Beloved, New York: Plume, 1988, p. 275. I am deeply indebted to  Homi  Bhabha for drawing my attention to the complexity of this line; see his  deservedly canonical The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 18. See Jae Emerling and Homi Bhabha, “ ‘Words Have a Charge’: Six  Moments from  a Dialogue,” Journal of Visual Culture 21.3 (December 2022): forthcoming. 5 Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (1958), trans. Stuart Woolf, The Complete Works of Primo Levi Volume I, ed. Ann Goldstein, New York: Liveright, 2015, pp. 1–195; Levi’s preface includes the lines cited here, which were translated by Jonathan Galassi, p. 7. 6 See Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. 7 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 208. 8 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 209. 9 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 209. As Deleuze wagers elsewhere: “each sign has two halves: it designates an object, it signifies something different. The objective side is the side of pleasure, of immediate delight, and of [historiographic] practice. Taken this way, we have already sacrificed the ‘truth’ side. We recognize things, but we never come to know them. What the sign signifies we identify with the person or object it designates. We miss our finest encounters, we avoid the imperatives that emanate from them: to the exploration of encounters we have preferred the facility of recognition.” Emphasis in original; Proust & Signs: The Complete Text, trans. Richard Howard, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p. 27. 10 For learning is nothing other than the “comprehension of problems as such, in the apprehension and condensation of singularities and in the composition of ideal events and bodies,” Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 192.

14  Introduction: “Visions and Auditions”

11 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 112. 12 Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri, “Vicissitudes of Constituent Thought,” In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, p. 139. 13 Marc Auge, The Future, London and New York: Verso, 2014, pp. 20, 25. 14 Craig Lundy, Deleuze’s Bergsonism, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, p. 116. For us, aesthetics forces us to think and to create. It is an encounter. Deleuze explains further: “Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter. What is encountered may be Socrates, a temple or a demon. It may be grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed. In this sense it is opposed to recognition. In recognition, the sensible is not at all that which can only be sensed, but that which bears directly upon the senses in an object which can be recalled, imagined or conceived. The sensible is referred to an object which may not only be experienced other than by sense, but may itself be attained by other faculties. It therefore presupposes the exercise of the senses and the exercise of the other faculties in a common sense. The object of encounter, on the other hand, really gives rise to sensibility with regard to a given sense. It is not an aisthēton but an aisthēteon. It is not a quality but a sign. It is not a sensible being but the being of the sensible. It is not the given but that by which the given is given. It is therefore in a certain sense the imperceptible [insensible]. It is imperceptible precisely from the point of view of recognition–in other words, from the point of view of an empirical exercise of the senses in which sensibility grasps only that which also could be grasped by other faculties, and is related within the context of a common sense to an object which also must be apprehended by other faculties. Sensibility, in the presence of that which can only be sensed (and is at the same time imperceptible) finds itself before its own limit, the sign, and raises itself to the level of a transcendental exercise: to the ‘nth’ power.” See Difference and Repetition, pp. 139–40. See also Simon O’Sullivan’s indispensable Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005 and Paul Atkinson’s Henri Bergson and Visual Culture: A Philosophy for a New Aesthetic, London: Bloomsbury, 2021. 15 Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, New York: Harcourt, 1956, p. 325. 16 Auge, The Future, p. 2. 17 Auge, The Future, p. 13. 18 Auge, The Future, p. 13. 19 Auge, The Future, pp. 25–6. 20 Auge, The Future, p. 27. 21 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and The New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 17. 22 Derrida, Spectres of Marx, p. 21 23 Derrida, Spectres of Marx, p. 31. 24 Derrida, Spectres of Marx, p. 37. 25 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 105. 26 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 114. I draw our attention to one of the greatest lines on memory ever written, one which transmissibility presupposes: “Wherever we used the word ‘memories’ in the preceding pages, we were wrong to do so; we meant to say ‘becoming’, we were saying becoming.” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Volume II of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 294. 27 “Such is the link between imperceptibility, indiscernibility, and impersonality—the three virtues. To reduce oneself to an abstract line, a trait, in order to find one’s zone of

Introduction: “Visions and Auditions”  15

indiscernibility with other traits, and in this way enter the haecceity and impersonality of the creator. One is then like grass: one has made the world, everybody/everything into a becoming, because one has made a necessarily communicating world, because one has suppressed in oneself everything that prevents us from slipping between things and growing in the midst of things…Movement has an essential relation to the imperceptible: it is by nature imperceptible…However, we are obliged to make an immediate correction: movement also ‘must’ be perceived, it cannot but be perceived, the imperceptible is also the percipiendum. There is no contradiction in this. If movement is imperceptible by nature, it is so always in relation to a given threshold of perception, which is by nature relative and this plays the role of a mediation on the plane that effects the distribution of thresholds and percepts and makes form perceivable to perceiving subjects. It is the plane of organization and development, the plane of transcendence, that renders perceptible without itself being perceived, without being capable of being perceived. But on the other plane, the plane of immanence or consistency, the principle of composition itself must be perceived, cannot but be perceived at the same time as that which it composes or renders. In this case, movement is no longer tied to the mediation of a relative threshold that it eludes ad infinitum; it has reached, regardless of its speed or slowness, an absolute but differentiated threshold that is one with the construction of this or that region of the continued plane [of immanence],” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 280–281. 28 These points of reference are from Mario Praz’s A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts given at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. in 1967. I admire these lectures published as Mnemosyne: The Parallel Between Literature and the Visual Arts, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974. Praz discusses Hazlitt’s notion that the critic must “formulate a verbal equivalent for the aesthetic effects of the work under consideration” as well as Diderot, Ruskin, and Wilde on p. 36. 29 There is an indirect conversation taking place here with some of the positions Ruth Felski takes regarding criticism and aesthetics in our postcritical moment. See Felski, Hooked: Art and Attachment, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020; also Ruth Thaventhiran’s excellent review of Felski “What’s the Hook?” in London Review of Books, 44.2 ( January 2022): 41–2. We should always recall Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on encounter, becoming, and sobriety rather than ecstasy, let alone systematicity: “This requires much asceticism, much sobriety, much creative involution,” A Thousand Plateaus, p. 279. 30 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 109. 31 Tom Crewe, “Short Cuts: Found Objects,” London Review of Books 43.16 (August 2021): 27. 32 In order, the references in this line are: Hayden White, The Practical Past, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014; Crewe, “Found Objects,” p. 27; and on Spinoza and imagination, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press, 2009, p. 99. 33 Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003, p. 54. 34 Keith Ansell Pearson, “Bergson on Memory,” Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, eds. Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz, London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 71. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. S. Palmer, New York: Zone Books, 1991. 35 Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Zone Books, 1988, p. 55. 36 Deleuze, Bergsonism, pp. 56–7, 63. 37 Emphasis in original; Ansell Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual, London and New York: Routledge, 2002, p. 7.

16  Introduction: “Visions and Auditions”

38 This term “extimacy” was coined by Jacques Lacan. It signifies “the intimate exteriority” that is “the Thing [das Ding],” which is the focus of his seventh seminar. See The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, trans. Dennis Porter, New York: W.W. Norton, 1992, p. 139. Lacan discusses how in Freudian psychoanalysis, objects and words are “closely linked,” but das Ding is “found somewhere else,” p. 45. Deleuze and Guattari use the phrase “intimate exterior” throughout their work together in ways, of course, at odds with Lacan’s. 39 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 5. 40 Quoted phrases are from Deleuze and Guattari’s inverted conclusion to AntiOedipus: Volume I of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, “Introduction to Schizoanalysis,” trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, New York: Penguin Books, 2009, pp. 321, 319, 318, and 300. 41 Guattari interview in Diacritics in 1974, cited in Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 300. 42 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. 319, 322. 43 Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, London: Verso, 2005, p. 92. 4 4 Roland Barthes gives us the phrase “Sisyphean labor” in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill & Wang, p. 66. The remainder of the quotation here is from an interview with Cahiers du Cinéma; see Emilie Bickerton, A Short History of Cahiers du Cinéma, London and New York: Verso, 2011, p. 42. 45 Italo Calvino, “Right and Wrong Political Uses of Literature,” The Uses of Literature, trans. Patrick Creagh, New York: Harcourt, 1986, p. 99. 46 I am complicating here Nicolas Bourriaud’s thesis from Postproduction. Culture as Screenplay. How Art Reprograms the World, trans. Jeanine Herman, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2006. His use of Deleuze and Guattari to articulate an “art of postproduction” has been critiqued by others (see especially Éric Alliez, “Capitalism and Schizophrenia and Consensus: Of the Relational Aesthetic” in Deleuze and Contemporary Art, eds. Stephen Zepke and Simon O’Sullivan, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2010, pp. 85–99), but my point is that such an “art,” or the “altermodern” itself, is not at all a historically unique response to what he calls the “cultural chaos” of our contemporary moment wherein artists are now supposedly all DJs and programmers. Such returns, mediations, and re-conceptions of artistic “originality” and function have long been part of art and cultural history, as the concept of transmissibility demonstrates. Also, his acceptance of capitalist technoscience as the reason for artworks now being part of a “network of signs” rather than socially, culturally, and economically autonomous is suspect and, regardless, it was already a transformative insight of the October group and other critical postmodernists. In addition, I accept that art-work is conditioned by capitalist culture, perhaps even authorized and encouraged by an “experience industry,” but it nevertheless performs a certain autonomy, which even Alain Badiou accepts, and thereby gives us empirical means of resisting and dissolving the individual and other concrete assemblages via their own qualities and relations. Bourriaud gives us a reading of Deleuze and Guattari as if the intensive realm of singularities (percepts, affects, concepts) wasn’t their primary focus; instead, he gives us only more symptomatic, phenomenological, representational “lived experience” that accepts rather than creates or breaks with traditional historicism. He never works to give us a life, a radical immanence within the fold of artist and spectator, self and other, past and future that must be the unbecoming of the self, the “I,” and the fields wherein both have previously taken on consistency. I draw our attention to Jan Jagodzinski’s astute overview of all these issues in “The ‘Relations’ of Relational Aesthetics within Altermodernity: Revisiting the Case of Nicolas Bourriaud,” etum: e-journal of Theatre and Media 1.1 (2014): 1–8. For Badiou’s assertation that “artistic procedures have to be

Introduction: “Visions and Auditions”  17

accorded their own autonomy vis-à-vis political procedures,” see Badiou, Cinema, ed. Antoine de Baecque, trans. Susan Spitzer, Cambridge: Polity, 2013, p. 113. 47 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, pp. 182 “clinch of forces,” 168, 175. 48 Nathalie Sarraute, Here, trans. Barbara Wright, New York: George Braziller, 1997, p. 17. Of course, her inimitable first book, published in 1939, is Tropisms, trans. Maria Jolas, New York: New Directions, 2015. 49 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 244. 50 Franz Kaf ka, “The Silence of the Sirens,” trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, New York: Schocken, 1971, pp. 430–432. 51 Deleuze continues: “instead of simply displaying phenomena or statements in their vertical or horizontal dimensions, one must form a transversal or mobile diagonal line” along which we must move; see Foucault, trans. Seán Hand, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 21–22, “oceanic line” p. 44, “thresholds” p. 20. 52 Deleuze, “Immanence: A Life,” Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, New York: Semiotext(e), 2007, p. 391. 53 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 108. In words that always bear repeating as they are the wound that opens my own work, Deleuze insists that “a life contains only virtuals. It is composed of virtualities, events, singularities. What I am calling virtual is not something that lacks actuality. Rather, the virtual becomes engaged in a process of actualization as it follows the plane which gives it its proper reality. The immanent event is actualized in a state of things and in a state of lived experience, and these states bring the event about. The plane of immanence itself is actualized in an Object and a Subject, to which it attributes itself. But, however separable an object and a subject may be from their actualization, the plane of immanence is itself virtual, in as much as the events that populate it are virtualities. Events or singularities impart to the plane their full virtuality, just as the plane of immanence gives virtual events their full reality,” “Immanence: A Life,” p. 392. 54 Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler, trans. William Weaver, New York: Harcourt, 1981, p. 176. 55 Deleuze, “Letter to a Harsh Critic,” Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 8–9. 56 The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume 3: 1925–1930, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, New York: Harcourt, 1981, p. 236.

II TWENTY-FIRST SERIES OF AESTHETIC HISTORY

One of the most disturbing phenomena today is the tendency of everyone to suppose that he or she is an artist. Everyone thinks he or she is able to see beyond the surface of the world around us. One must not confuse a genuinely intelligent and corporeal quality—which is to say a passionate intensity, a steadfastness of will, a vocation to confront reality—with the random little fantasies that one has every day. —Antonio Negri1

1.

In a letter dated 12 June 1938 Walter Benjamin wrote to his friend Gershom Scholem about Franz Kaf ka, characterizing the latter’s work as an experience of “tradition falling ill.”2 This “negative characterization” is levied not to claim that Kaf ka passively reflects the epistemic dissolution of tradition that many posit defines modernity as such. Instead, Benjamin argues that this “negative characterization probably is altogether more fruitful than a positive one” by emphasizing Kaf ka’s attempt at an allegorical reversal, a Kunstgriff, that is, his attempt to reimagine a relation to an anemic, ruined tradition (the “consistency of truth that has been lost”) via the work of art.3 In the key passage from this letter Benjamin justifies his famous assertion that “to do justice to the figure of Kaf ka in its purity and its peculiar beauty” is to understand him as a “figure of failure.” He writes: Kaf ka was far from being the first to face this situation [modernity as the dissolution of tradition and thus truth]. Many had accommodated themselves to it, clinging to truth or whatever they happened to regard as such, and with DOI: 10.4324/9781003015666-2

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a more or less heavy heart, had renounced transmissibility. Kaf ka’s real genius was that he tried something entirely new: he sacrificed truth for the sake of clinging to transmissibility…Kaf ka’s writings are by their nature parables. But that is their misery and their beauty, that they had to become more than parables.4 “Transmissibility” (Tradierbarkeit) here signifies the means by and through which something (truth, law, history) is conveyed, shared, learned. But the “immodesty” of Kaf ka’s parables is that they assume the role of transmitted message/object and the means at once. In modernity, they had “to become more than parables.” (A similar fate befalls Pier Paolo Pasolini’s films, which transmit Marxism through parables and fables without the consistency of the doctrine (the “gospel”) itself.)5 With this schema one could say, perhaps, that the means of transmitting the truth becomes the truth itself.6 But there is a further complication. Namely, that artworks are a means to an end: they exist to transmit something (truth, spirit, cultural ethos, theodicy, socio-political ideas, subjectivity) other than themselves. The presupposition that art is a metonymic messenger results in the following logic, shared with Benjamin by many others: rather than transmitting an organic, necessary link to the past and hence the future, cultural objects and artworks in modernity transmit only silence and loss as there is no message sent, perhaps even no messenger sending it. This premise renders so much criticism melancholic.7 One could also argue that this premise motivated many of the activities of the Hegelian “paranoiac avant-garde” throughout the twentieth century.8 However, even this putative alienation or sacrifice of the truth (a shattered chain of tradition, the absence of a vital connection between past, present, and future)—severing content and expression, thing and act—means neither that the past loses all value nor that we must overcompensate for this situation by conceiving of an artwork as an end-in-itself rather than as mere means. Far from it. For some time I have been studying this concept of transmissibility. Beginning with its presence as a concept within Benjamin’s philosophy, but always with the desire to re-create it as an image of aesthetic thought. This intensified during seminars and informal conversations with Giorgio Agamben at UCLA and in Europe between 2002 and 2005. Transmissibility wends through Agamben’s early work Stanzas (1977) to The Man without Content (1994). Both are unmistakably Benjaminian texts.9 It also appears in the early short piece “Project for a Review” published in Infancy and History, which stemmed directly from his discussions with Italo Calvino and Claudio Rugafiori between 1974 and 1976 in Paris.10 Agamben’s summation of these discussions centers on transmissibility, which in turn can also be found implicitly in Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium (see Part III on Calvino). It was Agamben’s work—his methodology and the conceptual personae of the philosophy itself—that consigned me to transmissibility as a concept.11 I am indebted to his archeologia filosofica.

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Curiously, it was Agamben who led to my encounter with Gilles Deleuze. Specifically, his brilliant essay “Absolute Immanence” necessitated my becoming Deleuzian. Simply put, to think transmissibility as a nontraditional historiographic and aesthetic concept, that is, as the pars destruens and pars construens within creative acts, I needed Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s philosophy. Transmissibility is an act of deframing and composing at once: competitive, poetic, haunting; constructive-expressionist, productive. Never melancholic, nostalgic, presentist, or eschatological. It focuses our attention on the ontological-aesthetic body of an artwork as a discontinuous aleatory past-future channel or passage. It is this problematic that forces me to rethink aesthetic theory and art historical method as historical-becoming rather than as a historicist social science (Kunst—or Bildwissenshaft) or political praxis. 2.

This desire to construct a problematic that avails itself not to a simple solution, but rather to a multiplicity of thoughts and experiences that are its real conditions is the strategy of Deleuze’s philosophy. This is precisely what Michel Foucault identified in his famous review of Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969) when he explained that Deleuze forces us “to think problematically rather than question and answer dialectically” because the problematic is a “nomadic and dispersed multiplicity” rather than a single, coherent Platonic, Cartesian, or even Hegelian idea.12 One is forced to think under problematic conditions, to touch an outside, to sense an encounter with an unforeseen and unimaginable alterity that only becomes visible, articulatable, and thinkable under certain material conditions.13 Problematics are the ideational and material conditions from which we think and create. The entire critical language Deleuze and Guattari create to discuss artworks—singularities, sensation, intensities, affects, and percepts— is understandable only within the parameters of a specific problematic that a given painter, musician, writer, dancer, filmmaker, or architect attempts to solve creatively. We should add that by definition a problematic is not answerable with an affirmative or negative answer. A problematic is not a simple question.14 Rather, it is the act of surveying a section of a field wherein art produces potentialities (open-ended solutions) that affirm chance and thereby remind us that “thought and art are real and [as such] disturb reality, morality, and the economy of the world.”15 Thus we aver that “the very notion of the problem has its roots beyond history, in life itself.”16 But one must “know how to play” this problematic game, Deleuze insists. One must know how to discern a problematic, to create with and alongside it—in medias res. We recommence from the middle, not from an imaginary beginning or a desired end: “I was not only in the middle of the current but the current was running through me and I had no control over it whatever.”17

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“Originality, or the new” is “precisely how problems are resolved differently, but most especially because an author figures out how to pose the problem in a new way.”18 Few statements of aesthetic labor are as insightful in these terms as when Nam June Paik writes: “Usually I don’t, or cannot have any pre-imagined VISION before working. First I seek the ‘WAY’, of which I cannot foresee where it leads to. The ‘WAY’…that means, to study the circuit, to try various ‘FEED BACKS’, to cut some places and feed the different waves there, to change the phase of the waves etc.”19 Within “extremely simple, concrete situations” we begin to construct problematics. Deleuze encourages us to “stick to the concrete, and always return to it.”20 From and within “simple, concrete situations” we open ourselves to intensive, transformative ontological, historical, and aesthetic experiences (senseevents). An intensive experience being one wherein “a multiplicity is apprehended instantly as multiplicity” rather than as extensive part–whole relationships. A multiplicity is an assemblage of singularities. For artistic creation, it is within perceptions and affections that percepts and affects (aesthetic singularities) will be encountered by re-searching for and experimenting with the “conditions under which something new is created.”21 To study the circuit, to try various “FEED BACKS,” to cut some places and feed the different waves there, to change the phase of the waves. But this “way” or creative line must understand the state of things (any actual subject or context) neither as given nor as a unity or totality; but rather as discrete and continuous multiplicities, as actual-virtual compounds. We are motivated only to “bring out the concepts that correspond to a multiplicity,” which means “tracing the lines that form it, determining the nature of these lines, and seeing how they overlap, connect, bifurcate.” These lines are “veritable becomings [events] distinguished from both unities and the history in which these unities develop” because multiplicities are “made of becomings without history, individuations without subjects.”22 So to begin constructing our problematic we re-ask simple, almost naïve, questions. What modes of experience are foreclosed on by conceiving an artwork as distinct or autonomous from such “becomings without history, individuations without subjects” (an ontological question)? Are the properties of a given artwork capable of transmitting a sense of time itself—an intensive experience of temporality as becoming and individuation (an aesthetic question)? How must we revitalize a historical-contemporary discussion about the promise of art as a way of doing, an action, means, or technique, and as a noun, as a specific mode of created things? Are artworks capable of forming a vital relation between the past and the future? If so, how precisely? Under what conditions is it possible to reconceive the relationship between art and life, art and history? But these questions presuppose even others that are perhaps more direct and challenging. Such as, shall we pose problematics across disciplinary boundaries?23 What becomes a problematic in aesthetic history? Or, is something called aesthetic

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history itself a problematic field—an intercession, a medial-mediator or relay transmission?24 3.

First wager: if an artwork is an ensemble of properties and capacities that enact a sense-event, then it must be involved in an ontological and aesthetic becoming that renders the real itself (not merely the possible or the imaginary) anew. This ontological and aesthetic becoming takes place amidst a context, within a crosssection of the plane of composition, because “we can speak of events [meaning the actualization of a capacity] only in the context of the problem[atic] whose conditions they determine.”25 Second wager: the infinitive verb to transmit constructs a history of sense-events that dissolves extensive periods of history and involutes them in ways that are distinct from art as an end in-itself (autonomy, formalist doctrine) as well as the meansend logic of the Hegelian “paranoiac avant-garde” or later versions of critical postmodernism (anti-aesthetics).26 As a problematic, that is as a mode of an event, transmissibility is pure means: meaning that non-historical knowledge is sensed through an opening within formal history itself.27 It is what Deleuze and Guattari call a “nonsignifying passage” between descriptions, ekphrasis and interpretation (historical threads). Transmissibility re-embodies virtual pasts, actualizing them anew through aesthetic labor and historiographic, exegetical written threads. “To find the solution…one must dissolve,” as Jean-Luc Godard affirms. 4.

The interpretative methods of the humanities are extensive—formalism, contextualism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, social history, iconology, critical theories. But we are uninterested in positing an interpretative historiographic method or an augury. Transmissibility is a problematic posed across our (post) humanistic disciplines. We are constructing this problematic field so as to study a concept—transmissibility—that occurs within various cultural histories. Such a study traverses the history of art, literature, music, film, and architecture because the concept itself is inseparable from the problematic field that it co-creates. A concept is “wild,” “connective,” “vague,” “plurivocal,” “vagabound” as it cuts across fields and practices, problematizing them.28 To create a concept is to weave a net to cast into the open ocean. Thus “it is as if one were casting a net, but the fisherman always risks being swept away and finding himself in the open sea when he thought he had reached port.”29 So we will cast transmissibility as both a precarious act of capture and as theatrics.30 We will cast a net over an impetuous, moving open sea; conceiving it as a virtual field that must take on some consistency. We will name this consistency “aesthetic history.” We will also cast transmissibility by giving it personae (e.g.,

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the Sibyl of Cumae, Josephine the Singer, Bob Dylan, Mr. Palomar) in order to focus our attention on art-work, meaning both aesthetic labor (ontologicalhistoriographic configurations) and on how such configurations of ideas and uses necessitate a reimagining of the histories we compose. Hopefully, while always bearing this in mind: “the primary feature of a concept is its novel distribution of things.”31 Moreover, any field—literary studies, anthropology, film studies, philosophy, media archaeology—is rendered intelligible only by interfering with and reimagining itself and/as other fields. Within such intensive intermezzi we are “carried along or set down, put in motion or at rest, shaken or calmed,” “without an idea of the whole.”32 Within our affective experiences there are neither images nor interpretations, but only intensities and becomings. Only when we stop reading/viewing/listening/writing, do images (representations) appear. It is with this “image-intensity complex” that we must experiment in order to compose a problematic field that resonates by traversing history-becoming, individualperson, past-future because “life experience is by nature intensive, it is intensities that pass; and these intensities are not representative.”33 All we are saying is experiment with new ways of thinking, seeing, and feeling (singularities). Be creative and experimental, yes, but also, courageous: visionary, never prophetic. 5.

Historically, aesthetics as a field itself may not necessarily help us experiment with this “image-intensity complex.” As Jacques Rancière notes: “Aesthetics has a bad reputation. Hardly a year passes by without a new book proclaiming either that its time is over or that its harmful effects are being perpetuated. In either case the accusation is the same. Aesthetics is charged with being the cautious discourse by which philosophy, or a certain type of philosophy, hijacks the meaning of artworks and judgments of taste for its own benefit.”34 Hence we cannot let aesthetics signify some kind of generality or essence between the artistic, aural, verbal, gestural, and spatial arts. Nor must it only be comprised of ontological syllogistic rules and definitions. Let alone judgments.35 On the contrary, the field itself, what we are promising here as aesthetic history, is constructed and expressed only within its problematic originary geophilosophical fold as ars-technē (an anachronistic noun and verb).36 This substantive noun itself is an instance of transmissibility. A Roman reception-creation of an already overdetermined preexisting Greek concept, which does not disavow a violent history of colonial spoil. Anachronistic, of course, because there is no return to an origin here (Greek technē). Instead, within the very materiality of our own language, we sense and create with Roman-Greek heterogenous series, channels, passages opening and resonating within obscene futures.37 Aesthetics has a constitutive history as ars-technē that affords it an ontological movement within our historiological frameworks, which tend to domesticate

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aesthetic labor and thought via continuity, causality, resemblance—academic disciplinary watchwords of legitimacy and authority. Our operative definition of aesthetics is a population of individuated expressive fields that neither converge on some “final truth” or unveiling nor do they have any internal necessity, but only diverge through contingent synthetic encounters as they track “a reality that is itself divergent.”38 With Guattari, we put forward aesthetics as whenever “the finitude of the sensible material” is rendered so as to become “a support for the production of affects and percepts which tend to become more and more eccentred with respect to preformed structures and [spatio-temporal] coordinates.”39 He continues in terms crucial to our work here: “To produce new infinities from a subversion in sensible finitude, infinities not only charged with virtuality but with potentialities actualisable in given situations, circumventing or dissociating oneself from the Universals itemized in traditional arts, philosophy, and psychoanalysis: all things that imply a permanent promotion of different enunciative assemblages, different semiotic recourses, an alterity grasped at the point of its emergence—nonxenophobic, non-racist, non-phallocratic—intensive and processual becomings, a new love of the unknown.”40 For us, then, aesthetics is historical and ontological desire (“love of the unknown”) to increase the unconscious (non-historical, non-actualized, non-psychological) effects (flows and connections, reversions, undertows, transversal waves) of a-signifying signals within social-historical, signifying assemblages. Aesthetic history responds to such signals and “patterns which connect.”41 Stochastic thought series, contextual shaping, recursive circuits—aesthetic history as sensing, thinking, mapping, and writing “patterns which connect.” This needn’t be conceived as a “fixed affair” because “although it is easier and lazier that way” doing so is “all nonsense.” Instead, we must think aesthetic history as “a dance of interacting parts” with and against forces of contingent contextual shaping (taking on a consistency, a pattern between codependent, interacting variables).42 Aesthetics = effects → effects → effects. We reiterate Gregory Bateson’s premises here, but in another context, within another story, with aesthetics (sense-events) as the ante, as its hazard. First, “what needs to be investigated and described is a vast network of or matrix of interlocking message material and abstract tautologies, premises, and exemplifications.” Second, “a world of sense, organization, and communication is not conceivable without discontinuity, without threshold. If sense organs can receive news only of difference, and if neurons either fire or do not fire, then threshold becomes necessarily a feature of how the living and mental world is put together.”43 Aesthetic history is one such threshold. As such it is inextricably linked to sense. Sense has

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nothing to do with beauty or pleasure, with anything morally sound, or with anything that transcends the everyday. The “logic of sense” presents aesthetic history as “the effect of the perception of an object, scene, or event on the bodily sense and the cognitive weight of such an effect.”44 Such an effect on bodily sense and thought is an encounter with the fact that “all consciousness is threshold,” as Deleuze writes in The Fold (1988). An encounter with the aesthetic-ontological as historical-becoming.45 In Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology there are two non-hierarchical, interdependent, enfolded histories: the actual (historical processes creating the socio-political state of things in the present) and the virtual (which is real but not actual). Immanent histories, having very complex interactions with each other, of a single substance (life as such, univocity). A “double series of events,” Deleuze explains, “echoing without resembling each other.”46 History and becoming: a process ontology of phase states, assemblages, thresholds, and problematics. Artwork is an “abstract machine” in this process; it is the and rendering fluxes of actual-virtual, past-present, properties (extensive)-capacities (intensive). It gives us what “differentiates history and becoming,” what “lies between them, passing back and forth from one to the other.” A sense-event affects us by forcing us to create “further compositional forms” that are capable of “surpassing historicism and pure becoming by inhabiting the space between them.”47 Simply put, we desire art-work. Contingent, migrant, geophilosophical artwork.48 Desire that its affects traverse social-historical and ontological fields. To practice aesthetic history means producing “patterns which connect” by rethreading the traces of events. Especially as there is no aesthetic as such. Instead, there is only art-work: individuated practices shaping problematics and generating necessary-contingent (actualized, historical, cultural) solutions to them; solutions which, in turn, reshape and repose the problematic. Hence, “this little affair of being is over,” as Virginia Woolf tells us in The Waves. Art-work is a “flash which appears in consciousness as a disturbance of consciousness” whereas aesthetic history becomes a relational capacity to affect and to be affected by that flash.49 Such a flash is a singularity within history. Historical-material singularities weave multiplicities into a heterogenous continuum, which insures the virtual a certain autonomy from corporeal-actual causes even as it is produced (woven) out of the actual, historical state of things. Thus we desire “a form of history that is sufficiently non-linear and creative,” one that is “not confined to the actual, but neither is it exclusively virtual” because it is “not opposed to becoming but rather promotes a differential composite of history and becoming—both together for the production of another.”50 Both art-work and aesthetic history must acknowledge that “thunderbolts explode between different intensities, but they are preceded by an invisible, imperceptible dark precursor, which determines their path in advance but in reverse, as though intagliated” and whereby differences of intensity enter into communication, expressing and enacting “a drama beneath every logos”51

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6.

Such a capacity requires that our understanding of history face the invaluable insights of Hayden White’s “fictions of factual representation” and reject any assertion of “posthistory.” “Metahistory” remains a vital challenge, one we must face as we create transmissibility. But Arnold Gehlen’s notion of “posthistory,” first articulated in his Zeitbilder (1986) and taken up by art historians such as Hans Belting, remains dubious with its wager that “from now on there can be no longer any development in art that is art’s own development. Any somehow meaningful art history is over and done with. What is to come, already has happened: the syncretism of a mess of all sorts of styles and possibilities.”52 Belting’s conservative position laments the “syncretism” and pastiche of contemporary art practice and postmodern literature since the 1960s and asserts (yet again) a Hegelian autotelic history of art exhausting itself. Our indifference to this seductive notion of “development” does not presuppose that “meaningful art history is over and done with.” The production of meaning(s) is discursive and epistemic. As such it can discipline us into rhetorical clichés and thoughtless patterns, but discourse occurs discontinuously as it is contrived, regardless of any putative naturalness (biological, linguistic, or historical causality) imparted to it. Contextual and semantic meanings interfere and contradict one another; redefining evidentiary models of history with aesthetic tactics. Just as the contrived/natural aspects of discourse itself are equivocal rather than absolute. We will leave aside the illogic of equating “what is to come” with what has “already happened.” Transmissibility is the fundamental concept of aesthetic history conceived as the movement between traces and threads. Traces of ontological-aesthetic senseevents. Never the “history of events” where “event” signifies putatively “great” or socio-political or technological transformations or turning-points (the history of ideas Gehlen desires above). Threads signify the historiographic narratives we write with and around these traces: histories, anecdote, references. Here lines of writing indicate both textual and spatial thresholds between the res gestae and the historia rerum gestarum. Lines become passages.53 The historical, sociopolitical traces of sense-events become threads; and threads inversely become historiographic traces. We compose histories of “objects” that are in fact traces and threads—threads as traces, traces becoming threads. Carlo Ginzburg and other historians have been working to embody this “space of experience” between traces and threads without reducing historiography to a textual dimension alone, nor by reasserting a fully present historicist object of study.54 Any approach between traces and threads must be “based on a definite awareness that all the phases through which research unfolds are constructed and not given: the identification of the object and its importance; the elaboration of the categories through which it is analyzed; the criteria of proof; the stylistic and narrative forms by which the results are transmitted to the reader.”55

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Here we can draw on White’s interest in the “practical past.”56 In The Practical Past (2014), he asserts that “the past is made up of events and entities which once existed but no longer do; that historians properly believe that this past can be accessed and made sense of by studying the traces of this past existing in the present; and that, finally, the historical past consists of those referents of those aspects of the past studied and then represented (or presented) in the genres of writing which, by convention, are called [professional, academic] ‘histories’.”57 Beyond the historical past there is the past as such (the pure, undifferentiated, virtual and real past). The “historical past” is only a small corpus of social scientific (positivistic, objective, “disinterested,” evidentiary) corrected-redacted writing that is “constructed as an end in itself, possesses little or no value for understanding or explaining the present, and provides no guidelines for acting in the present or foreseeing the future.”58 Moreover, “nobody ever actually lived or experienced the historical past because it could not have been apprehended on the basis of what it was that past agents knew, thought, or imagined about their world during their present.”59 Contrariwise, the past as such, to recall Wallace Stevens, is “description without a place”: “it is not | The thing described, nor false facsimile. | It is an artificial thing that exists, | In its own seeming, plainly visible, | Yet not too closely the double of our lives, | Intenser than any actual life could be.”60 Between the historical past and the past as such lies the practical past. It is different in kind from the past as such and the historical past, which is legitimized and authorized by professional histories. The practical past lacks historicity but is nevertheless real and pragmatic. We could put it this way: the historical past and the practical past are disjointed cross-sections (or planes) of the past as such (an immanent field). The practical past refers to “those notions of ‘the past’ which all of us carry around with us in our daily lives and which we draw upon, willy-nilly and as best we can, for information, ideas, models, formulas, and strategies for solving all the practical problems…met with in whatever we conceive to be our present ‘situation’.”61 It is utilitarian, ethical, technical, and personal. This practicalempiricist past is the very “space of experience” that literary modernism creates with in order to deframe the historical past and actualize (reassemble, shape) the past as such. “Modernism probes the depths of the historical event,” White adds in a brilliant line, “in much the same way psychoanalysis probes the depths of the psychic event, and indeed changes the relation between the event and its context by dissolving the line between them.”62 The contextualist historical past is rendered by the “open work” (and not simply presentist) desire within many modernist creative acts.63 Such creative acts “repudiate”—in practice as well as theory—“the aestheticist conception of the substance of art [as transcendent, autonomous, beautifying, edifying] and, secondly, the identification of narrative writing with realism” as “the best way of representing the past ‘realistically’.”64 Working with this practical past redefines an event: (1) it is related to the “field of, on, or against which it happens, as a ‘part’ of a process can be opposed to the ‘whole’ of which it is a part”; (2) but the event can never be the entirety of the

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process itself as it is a part; and (3) it “revises our idea of the event, so that it no longer has the crispness and perceptibility of the billiard ball struck by the cue ball and can no longer be plausibly represented in terms of linear causality.”65 For White, a historical event should be understood as “a sign of a rupture in a series [a historical, discursive sequence] and a point of metamorphosis from one level, phase, or aspect of the historical continuum to another.”66 7.

Now our Deleuzian inflections on White’s terms begin to take shape. Recall how Manuel Delanda defines a Deleuzian event: “a historical series of actual events genetically involved in the production of other events” and “an equally historical series of ideal events defining an objective real of virtual problems [rather than essences or linear causal patterns] of which each actualized entity is but a specific solution.”67 In other words, the historical sign-form of things (narrative threads, actualized objects of study) coexists with its constitutive forces (unrepresentable traces of the past as such). Coexistence and individuation require intensive passages between traces and threads. Art-work offers us a practical space of affective experience between the past as such and the historicist past. It is experimentation with the practical past. Within such affective experiences we encounter both the being of the sensible (the virtual past as such, “a leap into ontology” as Henri Bergson calls it) and the sense of its difference in kind from the historical actualized states of things. As mode of the practical (empiricist) past, art-work gives us traces of events from the “ontological unconscious.”68 It gives us a sense-event of historical difference as such, without any teleological ends or, what Deleuze and Guattari call “ridiculous cosmic evolutionism.”69 Thus art-work becomes “remarkable,” which means it forces us to re-mark again, to retell and retrace an event via intransitive written threads.70 To remark on such becoming requires us to experiment with both history and writing. It demands that we give up the “narrowly historical point of view of before and after in order to consider the time rather than the history” of aesthetics.71 This “time” is a “coexistence that does not exclude the before and after but superimposes them” so that ontological (non-psychological) becoming “crosscuts its history without being confused with it.” 72 Temporal becoming is the “nonthought within thought,” “the possibility of the impossible” that is certainly “born in History, and falls back into it, but is not of it” because “in itself it has neither beginning nor end but only a milieu.” 73 Between the historicist past and the pure past there must be aesthetic and historiographic experimentation. Because “what History grasps of the event,” Deleuze and Guattari argue, is “its effectuation in states of affairs or in lived experience, but the event in its becoming, in its specific consistency… escapes History.” 74 As Craig Lundy has brilliantly explicated, when Deleuze and Guattari discuss the movement between history and becoming, which is never a simple opposition,

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it is the wissenshaftliche premises of historicism that they seek to unravel in order “to reaffirm the continual contingency of history.” 75 With Lundy, we are seeking the immanence of history and becoming: an event in its specific consistency. For it is “incorrect to equate the actual with history and what exceeds or evades being actualized with virtual becomings” because history (in whatever mode) has a “virtual status” and “the virtual is itself in part historical” as “its very nature is produced and defined in part by the creative history that it is laden with.” 76 He adds: to be rich with the past is not merely to retrospectively posit it or to “recollect” it in a certain way, for this would be nothing more than a form of presentism… [because] the past moments of the series must themselves be alive and vital, effective of and within the present. The past series, in other words, must be intensive and dynamic, nomadic and irreducible to the present…a veritable past-in-itself.77 Without history, “experimentation would remain indeterminate and unconditioned,” but experimentation is not historical; it is, rather, an attempt to grasp “the past at the place where it is in itself, and not in ourselves, in our present.” 78 The past-in-itself is “not the particular past of a particular present,” but is rather “an ontological element,” a terrain that is the “condition of the ‘passage’ of every particular present.” 79 To sense the “past at the place where it is in itself ” is to experiment—to think, to create, to write, to design, to dance, to act—with opening a passage, a channel, a cipher. As Schiller wrote in his “Twenty-first Letter”: “in the aesthetic condition, then, man is a cipher” between a virtual past and an open future because “experimentation is always that which is in the process of coming about—the new, remarkable, and interesting that replace the appearance of truth and are more demanding than it is.”80 There is no more moving example of this real experience of historical-becoming than the final pages on “Carbon” from Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table (1975). Here we encounter a becoming-carbon, elemental yet written: “a gigantic tiny game that no one has yet described. It is this cell which at this instant, out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos, causes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, to mark it with these swirls that are signs; a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy guides this hand of mine to impress upon the paper this point: this.”81 Aesthetic history is such a “topos study.”82 It experiments with immanence wherein both aesthetics and history become “known only by way of ‘traces’ or material entities which indicate not so much what the things that produced them were,” but rather, “the fact that ‘some thing’ passed by a certain place or did something in that place.”83 But the nature of “what it was that had passed by” must remain a “mystery” because, as Deleuze and Guattari write, this “something” is “sensation as being,” “the mystery of passive creation.”84

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Put another way, form-as-force indicates the complicated and explicated coexistence of past-future that an artwork constructs wherein the virtual past as such becomes sensible and thinkable “as of a now” (Cecil Taylor’s remarkable phrase) before veering off again, anew, pluripotent, counter-actualized.85 Rather than imagine any autotelic historical system, historicist contextualism, or even a presentism that disavows temporal and ontological difference, there must be an attentiveness to the very material constructive-expressive work that artists (regardless of field) perform and present. Aesthetic labor demands shuttling between sign-forms to signal-forces because between traces and threads we encounter sense-events, which are dated yet keep producing unforeseen, aleatory affects into the future (divergent series, incompossible consistencies). We after something akin to what the poet Muriel Rukeyser described when she wrote: “Organize the full results of that rich past | open the windows: potent catalyst, | harsh theory of knowledge.”86 8.

Transmissibility is the “abstract machine” at work differently within every aesthetic, epistemic, and cultural context: Hellenism, Italian Renaissance, Neoclassicism, (Post)Modernism, Contemporary, Postcolonialism, etc. For example, rather than influence (no matter how anxiety-ridden) or period distinction, quotation/citation has long presented itself as one tactic of transmissibility as evidenced by Piero della Francesca in the fifteen century and then again when he is “rediscovered” in the second half of the nineteenth.87 Or, Manet’s quotations can be read in this light as T. J. Clark has shown: Manet’s “art turns inward on its own means and materials—clinging with a kind of desperation, to the fragments of tradition left to it.”88 Or, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot debating over whether translation or quotation best defines “modern poetry,” which each writer couches explicitly in terms of transmissibility (poetics-aesthetics-history). Consider Pound’s definition of “modern poetry” as “a transmission of the impulse intact.” By “impulse” he means carrying forward an “energy” or a “pulse” from the past, hence transmitting the vitality of the metamorphic past, which nonetheless remains unchanged.89 Eliot, of course, equally works to theorize “modern poetry” as a historical category distinct from Romanticism in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and “The Function of Criticism.”90 Within the poems themselves, he uses quotation to extend and break with the past—to preserve and to mock much like Manet. However, Eliot too hedges and reasserts “tradition as an ideal order” in the otherwise radical and Bergsonian “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”91 His critical prose aside, something else happens within the poems, something less than “ideal” (unchanging, timeless), but nonetheless remarkable. “Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and | fingertips,” he writes in “Portrait of a Lady.” Much like Pound’s “make it new” (the phrase itself a translation from ancient Chinese), Eliot’s phrasing transmits Chopin but through

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bodily affects (hair, fingertips, vibrations, sensation) that problematize the proper name “Chopin” and its musical effects. The Preludes themselves as a multiplicity inhering in Eliot’s own “Preludes”: best to just “Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh.”92 But nothing forbids us to go forward and/or backward as there is no tradition (an “ideal order”) waiting there intact to be honored, cited, referenced, alluded to outside of the futural return itself. I can’t help but think of “The Prelude” by Jay-Z from 2006. Double movement: past-future, future-past. For example, Giorgio Vasari created a twinned concept (the Renaissance and Greco-Roman antiquity); the “rebirth” was never a literal, static, unidirectional return as much as it is a double-capture. An articulation of transmissibility as “to recall your steps” (Virgil), as “the issue and the return” (Wallace Stevens), so as “to return with bloodshot eyes” (Deleuze and Guattari).93 Such an articulation (com-)prehends aesthetic history as (co-)creation: sense-event and field of composition. A virtual past differentiating itself into futural events rather than a fixed representation of the past by a given present. Quotation in Renaissance painting. Grecian imitation in Neoclassicism. Appropriation in Postmodernism. However, since “every writer creates his own precursors,” as Jorge Luis Borges reminds us, we are far from that tired trope of “Giotto born again” as the American art historian Bernard Berenson said of Masaccio because aesthetic labor is iterative, performative, asymmetrical past-future becoming. It is re-search.94 This is precisely the point Mieke Bal makes to open her “preposterous” history Quoting Caravaggio, itself a beautiful text of aesthetic history since it rewrites Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: “art is inevitably engaged with what came before it, and that engagement is an active reworking” and this fact has “important implications for the ways we conceive of both history and culture in the present.”95 So let us encounter: Floating Points-Pharoah Sanders, Amazish and Malian desert blues, Louis Kahn’s architecture, William Basinski’s Disintergration Loops, the Otolith Group’s “past potential futures,” Sir John Soane’s house-museum, Cy Twombly’s Untitled (Bacchus), Valie Export’s Body Configurations, Black Thought’s epic 2017 freestyle, Eugenio Montale’s “stile e tradizione,” Cecil Taylor’s possession of Thelonious Monk’s “Bemsha Swing,” Geoffrey Hill’s “recusant figures” (Desnos, Peguy, Celan, Blake), Marlene Dumas’ The Image as Burden, Candida Höfer’s “architecture of absence” filtered through De Chirico’s “corridor houses” (casa passatoie in Giacomo Leopardi’s untranslatable phrasing), how J Dilla shapes samples, Massimo Bottura’s betrayal-translation (tradire-tradurre) of the traditional cucina italiana… All are gestures-fluxes-atmospheric-molecular events like Levi’s last lines cited above. “A flux is something intensive, instantaneous and mutant—between a creation and a destruction,” as Deleuze said. Recommencing: “making an event— however small—is the most delicate thing in the world: the opposite of making a drama or making a story. Loving those who are like this: when they enter a room they are not persons, characters or subjects, but an atmospheric variation, a

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change of hue, an imperceptible molecule, a discrete population, a fog or a cloud of droplets. Everything has really changed.”96 “Making an event however small” is inseparable from the underlying problematic of transmissibility. These events are possible solutions to the same transhistorical problematic. Solutions colored by their specific socio-cultural, economic, historical contexts certainly; but they are also indissolubly part of a multiplicity of aesthetic solutions to a problematic that traverses, extends, and complicates these contexts as well as the problematic itself.97 Between relative variables such as forms of content (visibilities) and forms of expression (statements), properties (finite, extensive) and capacities (infinite, relational, intensive), art-work embodies possible solutions, which, in turn, remake and re-present the problematic (virtual idea) itself. Hence “tradition” itself is not conservative, linked, continuous. Rather, it survives only to the degree that it is decreated (neither a negation nor a return to an uncreated state), embodied anew, rendered otherwise, masked for a discontinuous future.98 In contemplating the Nostoi (returns) of Homer’s Odyssey, which themselves put pressure on that possessive diacritic that renders Homer an author, Italo Calvino discerns the nuance and vitality of cultural memory: “What Ulysses saves from the power of the lotus, from Circe’s drugs, and from the Sirens’ song, is not just the past or the future. Memory truly counts–for an individual, a society, a culture—only if it holds together the imprint of the past and the plan of the future, if it allows one to do things without forgetting what one wanted to do, and to become without ceasing to be, to be without ceasing to become.”99 Or, as Deleuze writes in one of the most beautiful passages in aesthetic history: A great painter never recapitulates the history of painting in his own work in an eclectic manner. Nor does this history correspond directly to the painter’s periods, though the periods may have an indirect relation to it. It does not even correspond to the separate aspects of a given painting. Rather, it would be like the space covered by the unity of a simple gesture. The historical recapitulation consists of stopping points and passages, which are extracted from or reconstitute an open sequence.100 Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and | fingertips. 9.

We begin to sense the disquiet of the past (pace Hegel), which falls outside of representational schemas by absconding and evading ever entirely coming to being. Motivated by neither nostalgia nor resentment, transmissibility evokes only disquieting muses to present an aesthetic-historical idea that is decreated and actualized anew at each repetition, recommencing along each creased line (folded-unfolded-refolded).

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We thought it was simple: art + history. But simple addition became differential calculus within the folds of the plus, the “and” that is “neither a union nor a juxtaposition, but the birth of a stammering, the outline of a broken line which always sets off at right angles, a sort of active and creative line of flight.”101 The and doubles, impersonates, dissolves into proliferating series engendering unforeseen couplings and genealogies. Such an intensive experience of art-work demands that transmissibility become an experimental capacity to take place without ever becoming present. For it exists only within a meanwhile, an interval (“un éclair… puis… fugitive beauté” as in Baudelaire’s line). To survive we devise past-future “vital little plans,” as Jane Jacobs told us. In order to transmit, to render visible, to re-search, we will engender monstrous lineages from the disquiet of the past, with “a sense of memory” that flirts with oblivion.102 “Memory speaks…I can’t be still | I’m here | in your mirror | pressed leg to leg beside you | intrusive inappropriate bitter flashing | with what makes me unkillable though killed,” as Adrienne Rich writes in An Atlas of a Difficult World (1991). Thus there are no “intricate evasions of as,” despite Wallace Stevens’ ambivalent desire for the thing itself. Nor are there ever part–whole structures (e.g., a tradition in ruin). There are only movements from “minute perceptions to conscious ones, from molecular perceptions to molar perceptions” wherein the whole itself (the very idea of aesthetic history) is as imperceptible as the parts it becomes.103 These movements are an intensive space of history, a field of individuation. All of this is “completely without interest if it does not undertake to awaken a dormant concept and to play it again on a new stage, even if this comes at the price of turning it against itself.”104 (We could have titled this aesthetic history The Book of Disquiet since, as Jacques Derrida tells us, “a title is always a promise.”)105 10.

“Those who study,” Agamben has written, “are in a situation of people who have received a shock [“un éclair…puis…] and are stupefied by what has struck them, unable to grasp it and at the same time powerless to leave hold” because “this shuttling between bewilderment and lucidity, discovery and loss, between agent and patient, is the rhythm of study.”106 Studying transmissibility decenters us from habitual thought patterns, assured opinions, and discursive certainties. It demands we risk an ontological and aesthetic definition of art-work (ars-technē) and that we experiment with these implications. To be equal to this study—an amor fati of aesthetic history—we must create a “vital idea” (as Henri Michaux said) that goes beyond the abstractions of ideas and images in order to “arrive as quickly as possible at mental objects determinable as real beings.”107 Thus we will “make use of fictions and abstractions, but only so far as is necessary to get to a plane were we go from real being to real being and advance through the construction” of a concept.108

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11.

We posit therefore that “composition is the sole definition of art.”109 Aesthetic composition is “the work of sensation” and must not be confused or substituted for technique (technical mastery) because art-work is “never produced by or for the sake of technique” or communication (the sharing of received opinion). On the contrary, “art takes a bit of chaos in a frame in order to form a compound of chaos [the virtual, pure past, time as such] that becomes sensory.”110 “Chaos” is “not pure indifferentiation” because it possesses “a specific ontological texture” as “it is inhabited by virtual entities and modalities of alterity.”111 Ontologically and aesthetically art-work renders sense-events because it “brings back from chaos varieties [unforeseen possibilities, meanwhiles, synaptic gaps, potentialities] that no longer constitute a reproduction of the sensory in the organ but set up a being of the sensory, a being of sensation, on an anorganic plane of composition” that is able to “struggle against opinion” and history.112 This “anorganic plane” is a cross-section—a milieu, the virtual “power of a ground”—within the plane of immanence itself (life as such) which art must reach and co-create with.113 Thus a sense-event renders, which means at once to violate, to tear, to melt, to return in kind, to yield and to deliver, to restore, to echo, to perform a service for another, to depict, to execute the motion of. Alas, even this infinitive verb, to render, is itself an aesthetic microhistory. An aesthetic of intensities: for to create with and alongside is to resist.114 Hence our intensive experience of the athleticism of artists, writers, musicians: “not an organic or muscular athleticism but its inorganic double…an athleticism of becoming that reveals forces that are not its own.”115 One must swim like a star in the trackless ocean of time. One must have the patience of radium buried beneath a Himalayan peak.116 We must be clear that art-work never undertakes “a return to origins” (a rediscovery of some “bestial or primitive humanity, proto-opinion or Urdoxa of phenomenology”); it never performs some historicist group fantasy that posits “history as a form of interiority in which the concept [of being itself ] necessarily develops or unveils its destiny” (as in Hegel and Heidegger).117 The plane of immanence is not ascribable to a lived, transcendent subject; nor is it a void (nothingness) because it has its own texturology. It is a genetic, productive, populated shared zone—an “irreparable rent” Italo Calvino called it—wherein sensations pass between beings because “it is a question only of ourselves, here and now; but what is animal, vegetable, mineral, or human in us is now indistinct—even though we ourselves will especially require distinction.”118 As Fernando Pessoa and his various aesthetic figures remind us: “I always become, sooner or later | The thing I feel kinship with, be it stone or | A yearning, | A flower or an abstract idea, | A multitude.”119 12.

Within the threshold between the actual and the virtual, finite and infinite, past and future, intensive singularities (affects and percepts) are the (im)material, (in)

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corporeal, (im)practical traces of events constructing passages between ontology and aesthetics. Aesthetic history minimally means “to study” or “to engage with the intensive itself.”120 This means encountering singularities—quasi-causes, virtual entities, dark precursors, sensations—that constitute the being of the sensible itself. These singularities do not refer to psychological reality (perceptions, affections). The difference between the sensible and a sense-event is the logic wherein difference is intensity. Difference in intensity is “the being of the sensible and simultaneously that which cannot be sensed (by fully actualized individuals) since it is normally covered by extensivities and qualities.”121 The being of the sensible—ontology-aesthetics— is itself “imperceptible psychologically given that intensities are hidden beneath qualities [form] and extensities [substances].”122 But, we, like Pessoa intimated above, “must reach that intensive state where one can leave one individuation field to enter another, where one can reach ‘a zone of indetermination, of indiscernibility, as if things, beasts, and persons…endlessly reach that point that immediately precedes their natural differentiation’.”123 “Life alone,” Deleuze and Guattari insist, “creates such zones where living beings whirl around,” but, crucially, “only art can reach and penetrate them in its enterprise of co-creation” because as soon as the material properties of an artwork pass into sense-events “it lives on these zones of indetermination,” intensifying experience.124 Art-work experiments with a materialist-vitalist becoming that is isomorphic with the virtual in order to construct a plane of composition, an intensive zone of individuation—the asymptotic-affective threshold between actual-virtual, pastfuture, individual-collective, organic-inorganic. This plane (re-)envelops us in other fields, other lines of intensive becoming. “Artists are the presenters of affects, the inventors and creators of affects,” but they “not only create them in their work, they give them to us and make us become with them, they draw us into the compound.”125 Within this compound “the capacity to transmit information is maximized.”126 Deleuze puts it this way: “music-writing-sciences-audio-visual, with their delays, their echoes, their working interactions” are “intermezzi as sources of creation.”127 Intermezzi: the and that is neither the one nor the other, nor even the one which becomes the other, but that which constitutes a multiplicity as discrete and continuous, as actual-virtual at once, differentiating in intensity, individuating, becoming. AND all those of whom we speak, AND me, would appear as so many distorted images in running water.128 “Echoing without resembling each other”: a double series of events, one actual and one virtual, one representational and one aesthetic, ontological and fully historical, having complex, isomorphic interactions with one another.129 Between these two series or “histories” there is an intensive dimension that art-work creates with and exposes us to. As Delanda explains, in Deleuze’s ontology “each entity

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is a product of a definite historical process of individuation and, to the extent that an individual’s identity is defined by its emergent properties and that these properties depend on the continuing causal interaction among an individual’s past, each entity is itself a historical causal process.”130 However, the “realm of the quasi-causal—the intensive—is also fully historical but it possesses its own original form of temporality and thus bears no resemblance to causal history.”131 One historical series of actual causes and an equally historical series of ideal events defining an objective realm of virtual problematics [rather than essences or linear causal pattens] of which each actualized entity is but a specific solution (a solution that reorients and reassembles the coordinates of the problematic field itself ). Artwork flows between these two series, these two histories, allowing us to sense the univocity of being, that is, the infinite individuations of luminous, transverse waves across “oceanic chaos.” We argue that art-work expresses and constructs with “traces left by the virtual in the intensive.” Traces that render the intensive as a zone or “information channel” (signal-forces) wherein singularities (quasi-causes) do not create but “operate” a relay mechanism allowing for the communication and expression, but not the processing or storage of information, between different, infinite series of ideal events.132 This “operation” assembles “heterogenous multiplicities into a plane of consistency [composition].”133 Eliot resonates here: “human kind | Cannot bear very much reality” but we must steel ourselves with art-work to encounter “the trilling wire in the blood” that “sings below inveterate scars.”134 13.

We posit Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense as the haunting event of an aesthetic history to come. It is an “inexhaustible book,” as he himself said of Bergson’s Matter and Memory (1896).135 A book that puts into play so many issues and concepts, most notably “a work of art yet to come,” that is, a sense-event that allows us to encounter an intensive realm, a chaosmos (e.g., Bloom on the beach, “Wandering Rocks”).136 A sense-event “assures the passage” from actual to virtual and virtual to actual (counter-actualization) (51). However, “if one tries to play this game other than in thought nothing happens; and if one tries to produce a result other than the work of art, nothing is produced” because “the game is reserved” for thought and art as long as they traverse a borderline between life and language (60). Deleuze provokes us to “become worthy of what happens to us,” an amor fati to the events that we encounter, to the (un)becoming ones that give us another life, another mode of being (149). Such events “signal and await us,” they “invite us in” (148). A sense-event represents but in a very special manner. What it represents is “always still in the future and already in the past” (150). Its representation is “unfolded without being ruptured” (150). Sense-events are capable of actualizing an event in the present moment because it is embodied in states of affairs, an individual, or person. But they also “delimit” this mode of actualization,

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“disengaging” the event as “an abstract line,” thereby preventing the event from being fully actualized, preserving its effects on another anorganic, virtual plane (150). Deleuze refers to this as “the double structure of every event: its actualization in bodies, modes of expression (life and language), and its counter-actualization (an aleatory point that allows for this double-movement and our ability to bear it and to become).” Composition and chaos. Form and force. A sense-event has, therefore, an ontological logic wherein it embodies a historical point of view (a definitive present), but it also occurs as an aesthetic “instant” that counters or doubles this actualization with other contours, movements, and relations. Along this line of counter-actualization it gives us an illumination of the “future and past of the event considered in itself, sidestepping each present, being free of the limitations of a state of affairs” (151). By embodying a virtual effect and allowing it to subsist within an extensive body, a sense-event gives us an intensive experience wherein the actual and the virtual fold along a frontier or “crack.” This “crack” (which Deleuze develops from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up”) is not immediately present to the organic senses as it is silent, imperceptible, incorporeal, and ideational. But it allows us to experiment with “concrete empirico-ideal notions” that aid us in bearing the real itself (the incorporeal, effective “being of the sensible”) and not merely its actual, existent, “abstract” forms.137 This is because the elements of the virtual, which is real and ideal, such as singularities (quasi-causes), heterogenous series (lines), the expressed plane of immanence itself—are neither given a priori nor are they immutable.138 The virtual, as a multiplicity, is produced out of the actual. One premise being that effects (incorporeal) differ in nature from causes (bodies, actual), which allows effects to enter into relations of “quasi-causality” with one another. For Deleuze, the quasi-cause is itself incorporeal and assures effects “a very special independence” (169). “Independence” with respect to necessity and contingency as incorporeal effects are neither. Effects (events) maintain a relation of causality with their physical causes, but they also have “between them [effects, events], or with the ideational quasi-cause, no longer a relation of causality” but rather a “relation of expression” (170). Events are immanent and vital without existing in the same manner as corporeal entities. Although it is neither corporeal action nor passion, sense is productive (expressive). Even though it results from the actions and passions of physical bodies, it is an effect and thus also “shelters sonorous language [the univocity of being] from any confusion with the physical body” (91). This “sonorous line” is the pure means of transmissibility, which shelters and assures the movement of events amongst themselves. A composed-aleatory movement of echoes, resonances, continuous-time signals, hauntings, that produce sense as always past-future and never present (only ever “as of a now”) and assure the nomadic distribution of singularities within an open space comprised of multiplicities, planar fractal surfaces.139 The logic of sense is an aesthetic-ontological signal-force; a vital instant traversing the arrow of time. For us, sense has the “power to draw together

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or to express an incorporeal effect distinct” from a material body and its actions so that these effects subsist and inhere it (87). Sense is thus expressible-attributable, a-parallel evolution, productive empiricist movement that recommences in both directions—past and future—at once. We can say that sense-events are “sonorous” in their relations of expressivity among one another; they are singular aspects of inorganic life as such opposed to the silence of existential/organic death. For example, love is a “sonorous” sense-event. As Deleuze writes: What makes an event compatible or incompatible with another? We cannot appeal to causality, since it is a question of a relation of effects among themselves. What brings destiny [necessity] about at the level of events, what brings an event to repeat in another in spite of all its difference, what makes it possible that a life is composed of one and the same Event, despite the variety of what might happen, that it be traversed by a single and same fissure, that it play one and the same air over all possible tunes and all possible words—all these are not due to relations between cause and effect; it is rather an aggregate of noncausal correspondences which form a system of echoes, of resumptions and resonances…in short, an expressive quasi-causality and not at all a necessitating causality. (170) A “system of echoes, of resumptions and resonances” between events is the logic of sense. These disjunctions or divergences affirm difference, that is, becoming the incorporeal quasi-causes or singularities that populate us, that we move between as we weave an immanent life.140 We must reiterate that to encounter is not to be effected by a cause; it is rather to be moved by (to be beside oneself ) as the one extends the fissure between self and other, life and language. Not through any identification between contraries or opposites, but through “the resonance of disparates, point of view on a point of view,” in other words, differentiation of difference itself (175). These becomings take place on a plane of immanence, which is the “locus of incorporeal events” and is “populated by effects which haunt it.” It is a topological metaphysical surface that is more “dangerous, more labyrinthine” than any actual depth or transcendent height (165). It is here that we “compose a unique verb in the infinitive” (248). For Deleuze, infinitive verbs are the semiotic of the event as they connect the “interiority of language to the exteriority of being [life]” (185). They “inherit therefore the communication of events among themselves” because the pure infinitive is Aion (life as such with its own temporality) and as such it “permits no distinction of moments, but goes on being divided formally in the double and simultaneous direction of the past and the future” (185). The “univocity of being” is thus “transmitted from Being to language, from the exteriority of Being to the interiority of language” (emphasis added, 185). An event is this movement between singularities, lines of becoming (individuations), and a plane of immanence.

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The univocity of being does not mean that there is one and the same Being; on the contrary, beings are multiple and different, they are not given but rather created by a “disjunctive synthesis” (179). Univocity insures “a unique event for everything that happens to the most diverse things” because “all things remain disjointed in it” but bring about the “resonance and ramification of their disjunction” thereby affirming their difference and noncausal communication (179–180). “A single voice for every hum of voices and every drop of water in the sea,” Deleuze writes (180). Or, as John Coltrane desired: “one note played in endless variations.” Or, as Hölderlin said on the verge of madness: “And every work of art is but one and the same rhythm…every work of art is a unique rhythm.”141 Or, when Black Thought ironically declaims that “it’s not hard to come from a continuous breath.” The work of sense is to transmit. The verb to transmit engages “the present, which indicates its relation to a denotable state of affairs in view of a physical time characterized by succession; and the infinitive, which indicates its relation to sense or the event in view of the internal time which it envelops” (184). A sense-event requires us to identify with and wait for the event. To understand it “independently of its spatio-temporal actualization” as “something eternally yet-to-come and always already passed” (146), but also to “will the embodiment and the actualization of the pure incorporeal event in a state of affairs and in [one’s] own body and flesh.”142 Give me a body then, Deleuze declares, transmitting a Spinozist event. Of what affects is a body capable? A sense-event is a circuit enfolded upon bodies/ things as an effect, but as such it is also linked to its quasi-cause (which insists and inheres within those actualities). Hence sense may be “directly apprehended only by breaking the circuit, in an operation analogous to that of breaking open and unfolding the Möbius strip” (123). A sense-event is, therefore, a “topological surface of contact” (103) wherein singularities (quasi-causes, sensations) are “topological events” that do not occupy the surface but “frequent” (103) and “haunt” (95) (verbs of movement) the “crack” between actual and virtual because they “live at the limits of things.” This “limit of things” is the “theater” of sense wherein transmissibility partakes of both life as such and language. But sense-events are “fragile.” They are “always in danger of being snapped up” by their causes (corporeal, more substantial qualities) (94), by “everyday banality” or even by “madness” (249). They escape this end and affirm their “irreducibility” only if “the causal relation comprises the heterogeneity of cause and effect—the connection of causes between themselves and the link of effects between themselves” (emphasis in original, 94). If we can grasp a sense-event, then we comprehend how and why it “inherits, participates in, and even envelops and possesses the force of its ideational cause” because we come to see that this quasi-cause is “nothing outside of its effect, that it haunts this effect, and that it maintains with the effect an immanent relation which turns the product [sense], the moment that it is produced, into something productive” (95). This logic of sense necessitates an ethics. “Is it possible,” Deleuze asks, “to maintain the inherence of the incorporeal crack while taking care not to bring it

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into existence, and not to incarnate it in the depth of the body?” (157). Can we take the virtual as our immanent object of study without rendering it fully actual? We focus on the movement of counter-actualization, but we refuse to disavow actual-material embodiment precisely because we hope for something to escape, to decode, and to survive the actual world. Fidelity to an event means keeping it ever-present yet mobile, transfigurative, a step beyond the subjects desiring to claim and ossify it. “Are we to become professionals who give talks on these topics? Are we to take up collections and create special journal issues?” (emphasis added, 157). No. Instead, Deleuze challenges us to “go a short way further” with an event, “to see for ourselves” and perhaps even “to extend the crack, but not enough to deepen it irremediably” (157). Because, while “it is true that the crack is nothing if it does not compromise the body…it does not cease being and having a value when it intertwines its line with another line, inside the body” (emphasis added, 161). Thus we do not desire a sense-event to fully exist, but only to become by actualizing and counteractualizing anew, only to keep transmitting ontological signal-forces. “Inscribed in the flesh,” yes, but at each instance we must “double this partial actualization” with a “counter-actualization, which limits, moves, and transfigures it” (161). The emphasis here is on the double, simultaneous movement: actualization–counter-actualization. Without this requisite double becoming there is only “buffoonery,” that is, someone imagining counteractualization operating alone (as in the cliché of art transcending the world), which “pretends to have the [melancholic, resentful] value of ‘what could have happened’” (italics in original, 161). We desire to liberate the event “always for other times,” to transmit it, which means nothing other than to create with and alongside “what effectively occurs, to double the actualization with a counter-actualization, the identification with a distance, like the true actor and dancer” in order “to give the truth of the event the only chance of not being confined with its inevitable actualization [accident]” (161). In other words, experiment with singularities (the material traces of sense-events); envelop them in other contexts, plait them with other lines of thought; create the capacity to harness ontological and aesthetic forces to construct “a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality.”143 14.

As this transmissible material-force, art-work—our hyphenated multiplicity— passes more clearly in view here as art (actual, noun, extensive properties, one aspect of an event) and work (virtual, verb, intensive capabilities, another aspect of an event). It labors to insure the different, coexisting temporalities of both incorporation (actualization) and “operation” (counter-actualization).144 Thus it gives us “sense itself, insofar as it is disengaged or distinguished from the state of affairs which produce it and in which it is actualized.”145 Production-expression, actual-virtual: sense-events trace these hyphenated “cracks” within entities thereby haunting all transitions, phase shifts, metamorphoses by transmitting

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signal-forces across and along these “cracks.” To comprehend aesthetic history, then, we turn our attention to the “transmitted forces” of the world and open ourselves to a “psychic mechanism of perception” enacted by “prehending” micro- and macroscopic fields: “the being-for the world of unconscious or minute perceptions, and the differential relations that hold for conscious perceptions.”146 Aesthetic history is an intensive threshold science comprised of micro- and macro-experiments with sense-events that transmit ontological-historical affects and disciplinary intermezzi because art-work breaks things open and yet composes itself immanently within/as that break. It is and constructs an opening within linear, historical time—“intensities within duration.”147 This is transmissibility: history and ontology. Which is nothing other than what it transmits: nonsignifying passages, futural forces, rendering openings within history. Within these “innermost narrows” we confront a difficult lesson: “Life is not your history.”148 Art is and opens us to a “vertigo of immanence,” a life that exceeds lived experience without abandoning art as an end-in-itself because “art is I-distance.”149 15.

What could it mean to write a history of such sense-events? Writing between history and becoming, between socio-historical contextualism and the feral productive forces of the creative act? To write, perhaps, with a fidelity to Georges Perec’s method: “to try meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.”150 Such a fidelity requires not only new modes of ontological-aesthetic thought (inexhaustible in number), but also new empirical-theoretical modes of writing. As Wallace Stevens intimated above, “the theory of description matters most.” For this reason we could argue that Calvino’s Invisible Cities is the finest aesthetic history ever written. If it weren’t already a singular work of literature. Thinking transmissibility avoids cancelling or undermining the distinctions between historical and fictional narratives. However, with Carlo Ginzburg and other historians, we posit a shared constructive-poetic threshold between them while accepting the different consistencies that each discursive form puts into play. We maintain “a conflict made up of challenges and reciprocal, hybrid borrowings.”151 Weaving together traces and threads. The very “form” of both an artwork and its requisite, supplementary historiographic threads opens the histories to forces immanently at work within the form(s) of every historical object. Such forces are historical, ontological, and aesthetic. Aesthetic histories cannot disavow these signal-forces within the representational schemas we construct. Thus we desire transverse waves, dissolutions, and undertows within our composed histories. An aesthetic thought experiment: stand alongside Mr. Palomar and try to grasp the uniqueness of an individual wave and then comprehend our mistake—the

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desire to identify an autonomous, distinct, unique subject. This desire becomes, nonetheless, the beginning of another way of encountering multiplicity, forces and forms, becoming and history, traces and threads as inseparable from a life that complicates and explicates each individuation because each wave is a mode. (Recall Spinoza’s insight that modes are like the waves of the sea.) This is individuation: a mode of existence between individual and person, an impersonal, immanent life. Art-work is a mode of individuation, an “audible wave, a luminous wave”; it is “sensation that appears for what it is: vibration, wave of forces or chaosmic fold, rhythm, scansion of a vital power that dissolves forms, plunges into chaos, opens onto the cosmos.”152 16.

Schwellen: Walter Benjamin too was fascinated by this undulating, plunging, dissolving, wave-like movement.153 His remarkable concept of “a turn of recollection” (eine Wendung des Eingedenkens) is precisely that through which time as such swells. Time itself becoming “more and less than what it appears,” a “distended res intensa.”154 My interest in Benjamin’s work emanates from his theory of collecting (to re-collect, recollection), which is an aspect of his thinking the “past in the present” as a “space of history” (Geschichtsraum). His “milieu theoretician,” the “genuine collector” (echter Sammler), is bound with this philosophy of history. In place of the nineteenth-century caricature of the collector as a sort of fetishistic antiquarian or as an inveterate souvenir hunter, Benjamin reconciles two seemingly opposite figures—the bourgeois collector and the destructive character—into a “genuine collector.”155 The mode of this collector is an attentiveness (Aufmerksamkeit) to objects, materials, the “scorned and apocryphal,” the kitsch and detritus (das Ausdruck) of modernity. This intrigues me because Benjamin’s attentiveness to materiality exposes an “ambivalence in his abilities.”156 Namely, his ambivalence between two distinct means of transmission or survival: impartability [Mitteilbarkeit, the mode of language as such as a theological means (Mittel) in which the “creative word of God” imparts itself ] and transmissibility (Tradierbarkeit). The entirety of Benjamin’s philosophy presupposes impartability (language as such, Sprache überhaupt, a divine gift) because it articulates itself along two parallel axes: historical and philological.157 Here we can confront Benjamin’s oft-quoted lines: “There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is never free of barbarism, so barbarism taints the manner in which it was transmitted from one hand to another. The historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from this process of transmission as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.”158 It is this “cautious detachment” from, or even disavowal of, transmissibility that we must challenge. His conception of language as such and even his “striking critique” of the history

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of forms are premised on indelibly theological grounds: history and philology, impartability (Mitteilbarkeit) with citation as its theological endgame.159 Nevertheless, the attentiveness to things offered through his contemplation of collecting offers us other insights. For, as Benjamin himself makes clear, “collectors are people with a tactical instinct” and the “true, greatly misunderstood passion of the collector is always anarchistic, destructive.” Inversely, this “tactical instinct” is absolutely necessary to the activity of the destructive character, who is also curiously a “traditionalist.” The complementarity of destruction and preservation within Benjamin’s “genuine collector” encourages us to reconceive transmissibility without recourse to divine language as such (impartability, citation). In other words, despite discovering “transmissibility” in Benjamin’s work, we create it as an aesthetic-historical concept by betraying his theology. This allows us to recollect transmissibility as an aesthetic-historiographic concept wherein art-work is pure means (the true task of Benjamin’s “genuine collector”). We envision art-work as “a turn of recollection” through which time as such swells, rendering the image of history into a passage (a “space of history”) composed of intersecting lines, variation, call-and-response; vital “sonorous lines” so “violent and transforming” within the world (individuation without interruption) rather than in hope of a world to come. 17.

What must also come into sharper focus is that the “tradition of the oppressed” is more varied, less defeatist than Benjamin imagines, and presents us with vital artistic modes of survival, renewal, and transmissibility. Moreover, there is no single “tradition of the oppressed.” I say this fully accepting the dire circumstances in which the German-Jewish Benjamin wrote his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940). Nonetheless, we can posit innumerable counterexamples, for instance avant-garde jazz in the 1950s–1970s. It is safe to say that AfricanAmerican culture, for example, certainly a “tradition of the oppressed,” presents us with alternatives to Benjaminian materialist/messianic interruption such as appropriation and reinscription (“critical mimicry”), indeterminism, variability, improvisation, and artistic competitiveness that completely redefines sublimation.160 As Amiri Baraka makes clear in the poem “In the Tradition” (1982): We are the artists | Dont tell me shit about a tradition of deadness & capitulation | … come out of europe if you can | … in the tradition | …when we remember | when we are our memory as the projection | of what it is evolving | in struggle | in passion and pain | we become our sweet black | selves | … once again, |in the tradition |in the african american |tradition | open us | yet bind us | let all that is positive | find | us | we go into the future.161

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Or, even more simply as he writes at the end of “Am/Trak” (1979), one of several poems motivated by Coltrane’s music: “And last night I played Meditations | & it told me what to do | Live, you crazy mother | fucker! | Live! | & organize | yr shit | as rightly | burning!” Becoming rather than melancholy: so “violent and transforming,” “vicious modernism.”162 Within jazz a whole world of micro-perceptions and sensations transmits anew an extimate (an intimate exterior) field (the American songbook, the standards) by rendering the standards otherwise, exceptional via unforeseen lines and projective repetitions. “Momentum rhythm,” Cecil Taylor writes of an event taking place between history and becoming, which makes Western musical language stutter, freeing it from the model of the standard itself.163 “Listen to it at your own risk,” the poet Bob Kaufman warned us.164 What could it mean to listen to such senseevents with an attentiveness to the “immanent identity of chaos and cosmos”?165 Or what of Thelonious Monk’s stride-minimalist singular genius? Singular because inimitable in any simple sense. Even Miles Davis confessed that a musician needed to learn and then completely forget a Monk song in order to perform it. Only within a threshold between memory and oblivion can one play a Monk song.166 It demands a kind of memory-work that doesn’t develop linearly or organically, but unfolds decreatively, with such beauty and attentiveness that its figures (motifs, runs) are exposed as inseparable from the creative-genetic expressive-constructive ground of life as such, which differentiates itself, indeterminately, variably, within each figure. Between art and life, transmissibility moves neither as imitatio nor allusion. There is no continuity because the putative always already there (the standard, the closed essence, Eliot’s “ideal order”) of tradition is rendered through another creative process that betrays and violates it to live. The duration of a senseevent works beneath representation, cutting subterranean passages, changing the phases and the phrasing. Taylor knew this from Monk: “passage is search against mirror held.”167 Here I admit I am writing at the edge of what I know. But one must to experiment with what transmits, with what resonates on different frequencies and channels, through all sorts of delays, false starts, static fields, and immediacies. How to know when the transmission is received? But within 1950s–1970s jazz—a renaissance period if we ever needed one—transmissibility is solved/dissolved through mediations on rhythm and time (the crisis in syntax (an ordering principle) that defines modernity itself ). Taylor’s piano compositions and their actualization (performative acts) follow varied rhythmic lines (“rhythm is life… space time danced through”) as if time itself was a plural noun, a “nerve center” Taylor calls it, linked to other nerved bundles and signal linkages. A “sequence” of musical lines is a “continuum across these nerve centers” for “rhythm is life.” Taylor’s pieces are built-rhythmed, threaded, unit structure by unit structure, undone, remade, retraced through this passage—searching “all the notes”—for a plane of consistency, a trace and/a thread to actualize or embody a virtual, differentiating, immanent idea. The intensive experience of a Taylor performance

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(note the sheer athleticism of his playing) is the coming to presence of a section of this plane wherein the no-where of his utopic, agonistic attempt to exhaust the possible becomes a now-here (“as of a now”), a “sound energy” ready to implode.168 It is all swinging potential-kinetic energy—“places of passage and things of forgetting,” intensive and extensive maps of a plane between trajectories (space) and becomings (time). Taylor’s art “joins” these sections together for his is a “cartography-art.”169 He raises the “power of the impersonal” not to “generality but to a singularity at its highest point.”170 This reveals how and why the plane of composition is not always already there: full, intact, discernible, set apart, conserved, actualized in a state of things. It is instead composed simultaneously within a creative (heterogenetic) act. The plane itself (as a transcendental field without subject–object distinction) and the work are deframed and composed together: co-created, com-prehended, co-woven anew in each complication-explication act of aesthetic labor. Thus the plane is joined; it is a cross-section, a “brilliant corner,” a microhistory of historical-becoming: matter and memory, past and present, subject and object, time and space. As Taylor’s art-work proves, the ontological and historiographic form of music itself (standard-repetition) is remade within this “momentum rhythm” as signalsforces rather than signs-forms. The “structural vitality” of such open-work is its intensive, “guerilla campaign against ourselves” and our times.171 Rhythm is art-work: composing units, sections, lines; searching to get a quarter-step beyond oneself and one’s time, always “against mirror held”, to touch an outside, to sense life within the lines. Lines as signal-forces wherein the practical past is condensed “in ways that are not at all continuous but instead confront it with a future that comes from outside.” Lines think their own history in order to free themselves and thus become “active and present to the outside so that something new will finally come about.”172 Taylor performs transmissibility, which always means to experiment and to problematize with “an outside that is farther away than any external world, and hence closer than any internal world.”173 His search is comprised of scream-history-love. It teaches us that tradition itself presupposes the infinitive verbs to betray and to translate as survival is always futural, always reassembled, always in the break. 18.

An aesthetic history of events, rather than objects, biographies, or socio-political states of things. If art-work is configuration—sensory becoming at once aesthetic and ontological, a vital material-force—then it opens us to radical alterity, to a life within the subject and states of things. All of this is possible without recourse to theology or socio-political critique masquerading as a form of judgment. We conceive transmissibility as a thoroughly secular concept. Of course, as we

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have already said, this in no way implies some return to an empty formalism, autotelic schemas, or syllogistic definitions. For even Plato’s respectful fear of art—that “divine terror” acknowledged but banned from his ideal republic—is motivated not because art transcends or flees the world, but rather because it immerses you more in its very fabric, into the funk, viscera, and sinew of another world’s becoming.174 All of this implies that we have the courage to instigate yet again a critical conversation about what precisely distinguishes a work of art from other objets d’art or cultural things that have survived from the past. This includes images or installations that are given memory-effects (filters, faux patina, etc.) as well as the many iterations of “pastology” that exist now.175 Even archival practices are not inherently part of the undertaking here, for far too many of them trade on nostalgia, the schmaltz of cultural loss, and documentary tactics (historical knowledge, information, cinematography). Of course there are major exceptions: Tacita Dean, for one. For us, this conversation is inseparable from the aesthetic labor an artist and an audience must produce in order for a work of art to complicate its very materiality (morphogenetic formal phenomena) and thereby render it expressive and constructive of unrepresentable forces. To touch an outside, to sense the immanence of being, temporality, and life as such is the Spinozist joy art-work offers. A sense-event owned by no one. Neither a metonym for the artist nor a cultural ethos or any other such nonsense. Transmissibility is a Janus-faced potentiality—something has just happened and something is going to happen. It is a “force of the future,” the “creation of the new,” rather than any repetition of the same. It is the future that enacts “the forced communication” of our temporal tenses, which “forces cracks in the stable set of past events to exhibit not-yet determinate chance effects, and conversely forces the future to have shown itself, at least darkly, in its precursors.”176 The work of art is the actualization of a futural becoming-other of the multiplicities (idiosyncratic memories, singularities, desire, socio-cultural histories, incorporeal becomings) at play within the form of art. It is at once, indissolubly sensible and intelligible, aesthetic and epistemic—it is transmissible. For this reason art-work possesses and thinks a radical untimeliness. Its ability to haunt stems not from historicity or melancholy, but rather from its ability to trace and thread real spaces (rather than imaginary ones) through the life of culture.177 19.

Art-work is performative-improvised, sent ahead, theōroi.178 “Vatic lines” traced across threshold anxieties, liminal pursuits, experiments with attentiveness, duration, and somatic endurance. We, non-artists, have rarely met these experiments even halfway. We should have something to say in the face of all of this. “Qui si parrà la tua nobilitate,” as Dante writes.179 Such encounters demand more than explanation or the production of meaning. What they require is an

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almost “negative capability” of remaining within the folds between history and becoming as we compose betwixt temporalities, cultures, and borders.180 After all, as Simone Weil writes: “The bridges of the Greeks. We have inherited them but we do not know how to use them. We thought they were intended to have houses built on them…We no longer know that they are bridges, things made so that we may pass along them.”181 We pass along them less as “horizon mergers” (syntheses, clarity) than as “opaque zones” within traces and threads.182 Writing aesthetic histories affirms that “against the intentions of whoever produced them, uncontrolled voices can be made to emerge” because every aesthetic trace and historiographic thread “includes uncontrolled elements.”183 Art-work is a disjunctive “non-relation” between statements and visibilities, a “non-place” between the variable forms of knowledge within a given culturalhistorical formation (episteme, culture, time period, etc.). We must write with and alongside this real passage, plaiting and wending through our own actualizations. We experiment with signal-forces that escape historicism in order to create unknown lines of aesthetic-historical thought, writing, and insight. 20.

A passage traced, threaded. We side with Paul Celan when he writes that art gives us a passage that remains a “leer/lehr” text (empty, open and yet forceful teaching, sensation) within time itself.184 It is not the destiny of an artwork to be “timeless” because we “receive it as what cannot be received” since “it marks that absence of what is ‘lived’.”185 We encounter this Singbarer Rest (“singable remainder”), this trace of a dated event, this aesthetic-historiographic singularity, only if we are attentive. Only if we become capable of an intensive experience of a memory that we have never had, that has never come to mind.186 This is a visionary mnemotechnē.187 It is promise. Transmissibility without interruption but with dark edits and feedback, with the phase of the waves changed. An (im)practical past recommencing as a futural event: en route, crossing “thresholds of perception” to “peer into the crannies of matter and read into the folds of the [virtual],” to move between traces and threads.188 Within the very “fabric of immanence,” aesthetic history encounters “infinite movements caught within each other, each folded in the others, so that the return of one instantaneously relaunches in another in such a way that [the fabric of immanence] is ceaselessly being woven, like a gigantic shuttle.”189 Within art and history, we become weavers and readers of threads explicating and complicating the folds (pli) of “the most diverse things and persons in the self-same tapestry, at the same time that each thing, each person, explicates the whole.”190 Each thing explicates the whole, the whole complicates each thing. Vide Virginia Woolf: “My net is almost indistinguishable from that which it surrounds” because “we who had been immersed in this world became aware of another” within it.191

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Thus our “period eye” becomes “myriad eyes, like one of those lamps that turn on slabs of racing water at midnight in the Atlantic.”192 We learn to become attentive to the “oceanic lines” of a sense-event and put aside antipathies and jealousies and not interrupt. One must have patience and infinite care and let the light sound…Nothing is to be rejected in fear or horror…One must be skeptical but throw caution to the wind and when the door opens accept absolutely. Also sometimes weep…And so (while they talk) let down one’s net deeper and deeper and gently draw in and bring to the surface.193 21.

For the love of art, we comprehend “a sense of the affinity of matter with life”; how and why matter is always already a “matter of expression”; and why “what is expressed does not exist outside its expressions.”194 To sense “something simply in its being-thus…but not for that reason necessary; thus, but not for that reason contingent—is love.”195 “Love is a word, another kind of open,” Audre Lorde writes.196 A veritable event. So it is with the traces and threads of a sense-event: ars theoretica. Transmissibility is pure means, a truly “difficult love.” So rather than an end, or a “farewell to an idea,” we will have an enriched “long conversation”: I can imagine a sentence that might someday end with the word, love. Like the one written by that asthmatic young man, which begins, At the risk of appearing ridiculous…It would have to contain losses, resiliencies, histories faced; it would have to contain a face—his yours hers mine—by which I could do well, embracing it like water in my hands, because by then we could be sure that “doing well” by one, or some, was immiserating nobody. A true sentence, then, for greeting the newborn. … (—Someplace else. In our hopes)…The music pirated from somewhere else: Catalan songs reaching us after fifty years. Old nuevos canciones, after twenty years? In them, something about the sweetness of life, the memory of traditions of mercy, struggles for justice. A long throat, casting memory forward.197 (A song should come on right now.) Notes 1 Antonio Negri, Negri on Negri, with Anne Dufourmantelle, trans. M. B. DeBevoise, London and New York: Routledge, 2004, p. 186.

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2 Walter Benjamin, Briefe, eds. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966, vol. 2, p. 763; Scholem and Adorno, eds., The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 565. In their discussion of Kaf ka, Benjamin and Scholem refer to the Jewish theological concepts of aggadah and halakhah: “Kaf ka’s writings are by their nature parables. But that is their misery and their beauty, that they had to become more than parables. They do not modestly lie at the feet of doctrine, as aggadah lies at the feet of halakhah. When they have crouched down, they unexpectedly raise a mighty paw against it.” “Haggadah” in Hebrew literally means “telling,” it denotes the nonlegal parts of the Talmud, for example Passover stories, anecdotes, parables, legends, etc. The Haggadah is meant to transmit or convey the message of the Halakhah, the “Jewish law.” The related term Halakhah (the “truth” in Benjamin’s terms here) refers to the rules and practices that one is bound to follow, the “path that one walks” to redemption. The relation between the two interrelated terms is very difficult to define, even within Jewish rabbinical circles. In Benjamin’s work, however, the relation is somewhat analogous to his relation of commentary and critique. With commentary being the aggadah and critique being the halakhah. See his essay “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” (1924–25) and in the introduction to The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, London and New York: Verso, 1999. In the former we read: “Commentary seeks the material content (Sachgehalt) of a work of art; critique seeks the truth content (Wahrheitsgehalt).” He writes that “the material content and the truth content, united at the beginning of a work’s history, set themselves apart from each other in the course of its duration, because truth content always remains to the same extent hidden as the material content comes to the fore,” Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–2926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996, p. 297. Note also Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: New York Review Books, 2003, pp. 214–221. 3 In several essays Benjamin references the German Romantic writer Ludwig Tieck. Tieck forwarded this notion of a “turning point” in his theory of the Novelle. It is defined as a point at which there is an unexpected yet in retrospect not unmotivated turn of events, a reorientation. Tieck’s notion of a “turning point” is noted by Beatrice Hanssen, who posits that Benjamin “charged that the operation of allegory triggered meaning…through a dialectical trick [Kunstgriff ], as through a spring. At the deepest point of its fall or immersion into nothingness, allegory in fact turned into a redemptive figure of itself…a dialectical trick that imbued lifeless matter with the spirit of resurrection.” She adds that this Kunstgriff is found in Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama, where it is called a “reversal” (Umschwung). See Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000, pp. 100–101. Also note Emerling and Donald Preziosi, “Kunstgriff: Art as Event, Not Commodity,” Esse: Arts + Opinions special volume Taking a Stance 85 (Fall 2015): 7–11. 4 Scholem and Adorno, eds., The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940, p. 565. As this letter to Scholem is the basis of what becomes Benjamin’s essay “Some Reflections on Kaf ka” an identical passage is to be found in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1968, p. 143–144. 5 See Alain Naze, Temps, récit et transmission chez W. Benjamin and P.P. Pasolini: Walter Benjamin et l’histoire des vaincus, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011. 6 Akin to the logic of mass media Marshall McLuhan discerned; see Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, introduction by Lewis H. Lapham, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994, and Alex Kitnick’s insightful Distant Early Warning: Marshall McLuhan and the Transformation of the Avant-Garde, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021.

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7 See Michael Ann Holly, The Melancholy Art, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Note also the special section of The Art Bulletin (v. LXXXIX, n. 1: March 2007: 7–44) with various responses to Holly’s thesis, especially Hayden White’s and Stephen Bann’s commentaries. 8 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 75. 9 They were also written under the sign of the art historian Aby Warburg following Agamben’s time (1974–75) at the Warburg Institute in London thanks to the invitation of Frances Yates. 10 Calvino is the link between Agamben and Yates. 11 A first attempt at thinking through it is to be found in my UCLA doctoral dissertation The Gesture of Collecting: Walter Benjamin and Contemporary Aesthetics (2006). 12 Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984 Volume II, ed. James Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley, et al., New York: The New Press, 1998, pp. 358–359. 13 As Franco Moretti writes, “problems without a solution are exactly what we need in a field like ours, where we are used to asking only those questions for which we already have an answer,” Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, London: Verso, 2005, p. 26. 14 A problematic is a conjunction of question and answer beyond the logic of everyday usage and life. Deleuze writes: “The question is developed in problems, and the problems are enveloped in a fundamental question. And just as solutions do not suppress problems, but on the contrary discover in them the subsisting conditions without which they would have no sense, answers do not at all suppress, nor do they saturate, the question, which persists in all of the answers. There is therefore an aspect in which problems remain without a solution, and the question without an answer,” The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, p. 56. 15 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 60. 16 Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Zone Books, 1991, p. 16. 17 Thomas H. Moore, ed., Henry Miller on Writing, New York: New Directions, 1964, p. 5. 18 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007, p. 218. 19 This statement is used as the epigraph to the remarkable We Are in Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik, eds. John G. Hanhardt, Gregory Zinman, and Edith Decker-Phillips, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019. 20 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, p. 367. 21 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, p. 309. 22 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, p. 310. Note that “multiplicities cannot be reduced to the distinction between conscious and unconscious, nature and history, body and soul. Multiplicities are reality itself. They do not presuppose unity of any kind, do not add up to a totality, and do not refer to a subject…Every ‘thing’ is made up of them. A multiplicity certainly contains points of unification, centers of totalization, points of subjectivation, but these are factors that cannot prevent its growth or stop its lines. These factors are in the multiplicity they belong to, and not the reverse.” Deleuze, “Preface for the Italian edition of A Thousand Plateaus,” Two Regimes of Madness, p. 315. 23 There are many excellent, ongoing discussions of inter- and transdisciplinarity. For me, one of the most important as both a historical survey of this discourse and its contemporary implications are the remarkable essays collected in the 2015 and 2016 special issues of Theory, Culture and Society and Radical Philosophy. These issues include texts by David Cunningham, Éric Alliez, Peter Osborne, Michel Serres, Étienne Balibar, and others. See Transdisciplinary Problematics in Theory, Culture and Society,

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v. 32, nos. 5 and 6 (September–November 2015): 37–158; and “Dossier: Romantic Transdisciplinarity 1,” Radical Philosophy 196 (March-April 2016): www.radica​lphi​loso​ phy.com/iss​ues/196. Aesthetic history, as I am conceiving it, is perhaps another pass at Friedrich Schlegel’s desire to produce “a historical philosophy of art” (eine historische Philosophie der Kunst), which receives much attention in the Radical Philosophy dossier. I share the insistence voiced by Cunningham and others regarding the requisite irreducibility of art, as a mode of heterogenetic (ontological and historiographic) production, to any single aesthetics. In addition, see Kamini Vellodi’s masterful “Diagrammatic Transdisciplinarity: Thought outside Discipline,” Deleuze, Guattari, and the Problem of Transdisciplinarity, ed. Guillaume Collett, London: Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 105–131. 24 Mediators embody the very act of creation because they are the means—the relay transmission—in and through which forms of content and expression are possible. Without them, there would be no vital encounter between precedents, rivals, friends, or disciplines, defined in those same terms but certainly not limited to them. Instead, there would only be “separate melodic lines in constant interplay with each other,” Deleuze, Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 125. However, and Deleuze is insistent here, this “interplay between different lines isn’t a matter of one monitoring or reflecting another” because “you have to make a move.” A “move” here is a creative act, a betrayal of one’s own position (aesthetic mode, discipline, subject position) by “giving or taking” to and from another. See Emerling, “To Betray Art History,” Journal of Art Historiography 15 (December 2016). It is along this medial-line that research moves, changes, and becomes otherwise. I return to this concept of “mediators” in Part V: From Oceanic Chaos…A Luminous Wave: Transmissibility in the Aesthetic Thought of Deleuze and Guattari. 25 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 56. Manuel Delanda explains that “the time of a pure becoming, always already passed and eternally yet to come, forms the temporal dimension of the impassibility…of multiplicities. But I also said that the quasi-causal operator [a singularity], far from being impassible, is defined on the contrary by a pure capacity to affect, acting in parallel with physical causality in the production of the virtual. In particular, the quasi-cause must be capable of weaving multiplicities into a heterogeneous continuum and to do so constantly as to endow the latter with a certain autonomy from the corporeal causes.” Delanda, Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy, London: Continuum, 2002, p. 108. 26 Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, New York: The New Press, 1983. See also the editors’ introduction and essays by Éric Alliez and John Rajchman in Aesthetics and Contemporary Art, eds. Armen Avanessian and Luke Skrebowski, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011. Other key discussions on aesthetics: Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009; Art History Versus Aesthetics, ed. James Elkins, London and New York: Routledge, 2006; Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies, eds. Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2002; Michael Kelly, A Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art, New York: Columbia University Press, 2017; and Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic, eds. James Elkins and Harper Montgomery, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. 27 This concept of “pure means” stems from Benjamin’s philosophy, appearing in his “Critique of Violence” (1921) and elsewhere throughout his work, most notably in his thoughts on collecting and history. Agamben has most thoroughly addressed this idea. See his Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000; the original Italian edition is Mezzi Senza Fine: Note sulla politica, Turin: Boringhieri, 1996. I have also benefited very much from Werner Hamacher’s “Afformative Strike: Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’,” Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy, eds. Andrew Benjamin and Peter

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Osborne, Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000, pp. 108–136; and Beatrice Hanssen’s “On the Politics of Pure Means: Benjamin, Arendt, Foucault,” Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination, ed. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997, pp. 236–252. 28 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994: “connective” p. 91, “vague” and “plurivocal” p. 90, “vagabound” p. 143. 29 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 203. Note Novalis’ line that “theories are nets and only he who casts will catch,” cited in Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, p. 91. I love Moretti’s work, specifically when he writes on the same page: “Yes, theories are nets, and we should evaluate them, not as ends in themselves, but for how they concretely change the way we work: for how they allow us to enlarge the literary field, and re-design it in a better way, replacing the old, useless distinctions (high and low; canon and archive; this or that national literature…) with new temporal, spatial, and morphological distinctions.” I am framing transmissibility as a conceptual net that attempts to give shape to a becoming, a virtual movement: an artwork as a wave. This extends Deleuze and Guattari’s work on Virginia Woolf, especially The Waves (1931): “the abstract machine of the waves,” for Woolf “made all of her life and work a passage, a becoming, all kinds of becomings,” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 252. See also the fine book by Beatrice Monaco, Machinic Modernism: The Deleuzian Literary Machines of Woolf, Lawrence, and Joyce, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 30 In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze alludes to these nuances of to cast as chance and theatrics; see pp. 103, 125. He writes that sense traverses heterogenous series making them resonate and “enveloping…all the emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast,” p. 103. Deleuze also argues that “staging means that the written text is going to be illuminated by other values, non-textual values,” Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina, New York: Semiotext(e), 2004, p. 144. This is also implicit in “The Method of Dramatization,” Desert Islands, pp. 94–116. Additionally, he and Guattari state that “artists are stagemakers” in A Thousand Plateaus, p. 316. This is Foucault’s insight when he titles his review “Theatrum Philosophicum.” See also Stephen Zepke’s “Hermeticism instead of Hermeneutics: The History of Philosophy Conceived of as Mannerist Portraiture,” Deleuze, Guattari, and the Problem of Transdisciplinarity, pp. 133–161. 31 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, p. 385. 32 Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988, p. 129. 33 These comments are from Deleuze and Guattari’s previously unpublished interview with Raymond Ballour from 1973; see Deleuze, Letters and Other Texts, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2020, especially pp. 222– 223, 225. For my review of this book, see Emerling, “Deleuze and Us,” Journal of Visual Culture, 19.3 (December 2020): 433–436. 3 4 Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, pp. 1, 11. Over the course of several books, Rancière has been developing his notion of the “aesthetic regime of art,” in which “aesthetics” designates “a general regime of the visibility and the intelligibility of art and a mode of interpretative discourse that itself belongs to the forms of this regime.” He begins with the insightful premise that if “aesthetics is the name of a confusion,” then this “confusion” is one that “permits us to identify what pertains to art, i.e. its objects, modes of experience and forms of thought–the very things we profess to be isolating by denouncing aesthetics” (11). See Emerling on Rancière in Theory for Art History, Second edition, London and New York: Routledge, 2019, pp. 203–209.

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35 See Deleuze, “To Have Done with Judgment,” Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pp. 126–135. 36 Aesthetic history diverges from the history of aesthetics. Although there are some key points of connection and convergence, most notably Michel Foucault’s 1982 genius commentary “Pierre Boulez, Passing through the Screen,” Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robery Hurley, et al., New York: New Press, 1998, pp. 241–244; Fred Moten’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003; the five volumes of Éric Alliez’s, in collaboration with Jean-Claude Bonne, Undoing the Image of Contemporary Art, trans. Robin Mackay, Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2017–2023; Christoph Menke’s Force: A Fundamental Concept of Aesthetic Anthropology, trans. Gerrit Jackson, New York: Fordham University Press, 2013; Sjoerd van Tuinen and Stephen Zepke’s edited volume Art History after Deleuze and Guattari, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2018; Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004; Ernst van Alphen, “Affective Operations of Art and Literature,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 53/54 (2008): 20–30; and Kamini Vellodi’s Tintoretto’s Difference: Deleuze, Diagrammatics and Art History, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. See my review of Vellodi’s book entitled “Image-Intensity Complex, or Art History,” Art History ( Journal of the Association for Art History), (September 2021): 890–893. 37 Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood use the great phrase “complex feedback effects” and explain its complex historical-theoretical usage in their indispensable Anachronic Renaissance, New York: Zone Books, 2010, p. 37. 38 Delanda, Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy, p. 93. 39 Félix Guattari, “The New Aesthetic Paradigm,” Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis, Sydney: Power Publications, 1995, pp. 100–101. See Simon O’Sullivan’s astute commentaries on Guattari in “Guattari’s Aesthetic Paradigm: From the Folding of the Finite/Infinite Relation to Schizoanalytic Metamodelisation,” Deleuze Studies 4.2 (2010): 256–286. 40 Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 117. 41 Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979, p. 10, emphasis in original. Bateson defines “aesthetic” as a “response to the pattern which connects.” 42 Bateson, Mind and Nature, p. 12. 43 Bateson, Mind and Nature, pp. 18 and 189. 4 4 Hayden White, The Practical Past, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014, p. 107, n. 5. 45 I draw our attention to the ending of Michael Kelly’s Iconoclasm in Aesthetics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, where he writes that “the point here is that history is embodied in art instead of being merely the phenomenon or condition that generates art without appearing. That is, art is not just a trace of history but is itself a mode of history; we experience history through one of its modes called art,” p. 204. Note also Linda Hutcheon’s astute comment that postmodern fiction is, at its best, “historiographical metafiction” that shows “fiction to be historically conditioned and history to be discursively structured.” See Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, London and New York, Routledge, 1988, p. 120; cited in White, The Practical Past, p. 106, n. 12. On ontology and/as aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari, there are no better works than Stephen Zepke, Art as Abstract Machine: Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari, London and New York: Routledge, 2005; and Éric Alliez, The Signature of the World: What Is Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy?, trans. Eliot Ross Albert and Alberto Toscano, London: Continuum, 2004. 46 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 189.

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47 Craig Lundy, History and Becoming: Deleuze’s Philosophy of Creativity, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012, p. 11. I am truly inspired by Lundy’s two exceptional books: History and Becoming: Deleuze’s Philosophy of Creativity and Deleuze’s Bergsonism, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Lundy’s astute reading of Deleuzian “historical creativity” as a “form of history…irreducible to both historicism and pure becoming,” begins by insisting that Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy centers on the production of concepts within “a heterogenous continuity that foster creativity…[but] this process is not foreign to history, if by history we mean an historical ontology of creativity that is distinct from historicism,” History and Becoming, pp. 9, 159. For “between the dualism of historicist succession and simultaneous becoming” we can locate and experiment with “a historical process that is indeed intensive, dynamic and nomadic,” p. 132. To Lundy’s line of thought regarding the possibilities of a creative, experimental form of historical practice/writing, what he calls a “form of historical creativity,” we link our aesthetic history. 48 On “geophilosophy” see Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, pp. 85–113. 49 Gregory Bateson, A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of the Mind, ed. R. Donaldson, New York: HarperCollins, 1991, p. 300. 50 Lundy, History and Becoming, pp. 144–145. 51 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 119; “The Method of Dramatization,” Desert Islands, p. 103. 52 Cited in Hans Belting, “Postmodernism or Posthistory?,” Art History after Modernism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 182–183. 53 See Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. “Stanza” means both a section of poetical verse (writing) and a room (a space), both of which stem from Latin cognates of “standing” or “standing-place.” A similar idea is at work in Rosalind Krauss’s great early book Passages in Modern Sculpture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977. 54 See Carlo Ginzburg, Threads and Traces: True False Fictive, trans. Anne C. Tedeschi and John Tedeschi, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012; and Eelco Runia’s work, for example. See Runia, “Presence,” History and Theory, v. 45 (February 2006): 1–29; and “Spots of Time,” History and Theory, v. 45 (October 2006): 305–316. I became aware of Runia’s intriguing essays through Keith Moxey’s Visual Time: The Image in History, Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. On Erfahrungsraum, or “space of experience,” see Reinhardt Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004 (original pub. date 1979), pp. 255–275. 55 Emphasis in original; Ginzburg, Threads and Traces, p. 212. 56 A concept he develops from Michael Oakeshott, On History and Other Essays, Oxford: Blackwell, 1983. White extends the implications of Oakeshott’s “practical past,” noting that it shifts “the burden of constituting a usable past from the guild of professional historians to the members of the community as a whole. With this distinction, the modern professional version of historical studies is suddenly revealed to be a theoretical, rather than the practical discipline it had been thought to be when history was regarded as magistra vitae, ‘philosophy teaching by example’, and the linchpin of a secular moral pedagogy. And ‘the past’ which the ordinary citizen carried around with him as an archive of experiences on which to draw for purposes of problem-solving, decision-making, and models of possible actions in the present suddenly returned as a legacy to own or renounce, without having to check the authenticity of any memories thereof with the historians who, in any event, had little interest in the ordinary citizen except as a subject of the state or a member of the multitude over which the state presided by ‘historical’ right,” The Practical Past, p. 99. 57 White, The Practical Past, p. xiii. 58 White, The Practical Past, p. 9.

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59 White, The Practical Past, p. 9. He adds that the past as such is “a constantly changing whole or totality of which [the historical past] is only a part” (p. xiii). 60 Wallace Stevens, “Description without Place”, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play, ed. Holly Stevens, New York: Vintage Books, 1990, pp. 275–276. 61 White, The Practical Past, p. 9. 62 White, The Practical Past, p. 57. 63 See Umberto Eco, “The Poetics of the Open Work,” The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989, pp. 1–23. Of course, this essay is essential, but I would like to foreground Eco’s use of “field of possibilities” and the “structural vitality” of an open work in relation to our concept of transmissibility. An open work, Eco explains, “posits the work of art stripped of necessity and foreseeable conclusions [approaching pure means], works in which the performer’s freedom functions as part of the discontinuity which contemporary physics recognizes, not as an element of disorientation, but as an essential stage in all scientific verification procedures…every performance explains the composition but does not exhaust it…we can say that every performance offers us a complete and satisfying version of the work, but at the same time makes it incomplete for us, because it cannot simultaneously give all the other artistic solution which the work may admit,” p. 15. He adds: “the ‘openness’ and dynamism of an artistic work consist in factors which make it susceptible to a whole range of integrations. They provide it with organic complements which they graft into the structural vitality which the work already possesses, even if it is incomplete. This structural vitality is still seen as a positive property of the work, even though it admits of all kinds of different conclusions and solutions for it,” p. 20. But, there is a crucial difference between how science speaks of an “open” causal chain and how Eco addresses it in relation to aesthetics and how we are using it here. “An open causal chain,” he writes, “actually represents the guarantee of a closed order of events in which connections proceed according to an irreversible order. But if a ‘closed’ chain is established, then an event can become the cause of its own remote cause. In such a case it is no longer possible to attribute an order to time,” The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce, trans. Ellen Esrock, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989, p. 75. Eco notes that Finnegan’s Wake is “an ‘impersonal’ construction that becomes the ‘objective correlative’ of a personal experience” (The Aesthetics of Chaosmos, p. 77), which essentially defines a singularity, percept. An idea that Samuel Beckett first identified in Joyce’s work. 64 White, The Practical Past, p. 92. On pp. 77–78, White summarizes his position visà-vis modernism and the practical past as follows: (1) he rejects the oversimplified presumption that literary modernism [his sole focus] is “supposed to have repudiated any interest in ‘history’ considered either as ‘the past’ or as an object of scientific study, in favor of a kind of ‘presentism’ that flattens out the difference between present, past, and future”; (2) in place of this oversimplification, he posits that literary modernism (Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Kaf ka, Stein, Stendhal, Dickens, Musil, et al.) works itself through the practical past rather than the historical past, which focuses us on how these art-works “discover the multilayeredness of the experience of time and temporality,” and seek to present it in such a way as to shatter our confidence in the narrativistically ordered temporality of the folktale, fable, and ‘history’ ”; (3) this reassociates art with ethics since the practical past is a site of ethical discourse (White draws on Foucault here), challenging the autonomy of art and the aesthetic as a noun signifying transcendent beauty; (4) literary modernism thus deconstructs the myth of the omniscient narrator and how it wields historical knowledge. 65 White, The Practical Past, pp. 55, 77–78. 66 White, The Practical Past, p. 49. 67 Manuel Delanda, Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy, London: Continuum, 2002, p. 155.

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68 Note that “Bergson does not use the word ‘unconscious’ to denote a psychological reality outside consciousness, but to denote a nonpsychological reality–being as it is in itself. Strictly speaking, the psychological is the present. Only the present is ‘psychological’; but the past is pure ontology; pure recollection has only ontological significance,” as Deleuze writes in Bergsonism, p. 56. See Bergson, “Of the Survival of Images. Memory and Mind,” Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer, New York: Zone Books, 1991: 133–177. 69 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 49. 70 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 82. See also Roland Barthes, “To Write: An Intransitive Verb?”, The Structuralist Controversy and the Science of Man, eds. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979, pp. 134–144. 71 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 58. 72 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, pp. 58–59. 73 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, pp. 58–59, 110. 74 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 110. 75 Lundy, History and Becoming, pp. 9–12. 76 Lundy, History and Becoming, p. 136. 77 Lundy, History and Becoming, p. 136. 78 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 111. 79 Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 56. 80 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 111. 81 Primo Levi, The Periodic Table (1975), The Complete Works of Primo Levi Volume II, ed. and trans. Ann Goldstein, New York: Liveright, 2015, p. 946. 82 This phrase is from Paul Celan’s “The Meridian” speech from 1960. For us, “topos study,” or re-search, is inextricably tied to “I-distance” as when Celan argues that “Art creates I-distance.” See Celan, The Meridian: Final Version-Drafts-Materials, eds. Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull, trans. Pierre Joris, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011, pp. 6, 10. 83 White, The Practical Past, p. x. 84 White calls the “nature” of this “something” “conjectural,” The Practical Past, p. x. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, pp. 167, “the power of a ground”, pp. 173, 212. 85 Cecil Taylor’s phrase is part of a song title, “Unit Structure/As of a Now/Section” from the album Unit Structures, Blue Note Records, 1966. Regarding form-as-force, note its original presence in D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961. Thompson’s text effects a variety of diverse fields and thinkers, from Archigram to Moretti. See Hadas A. Steiner, Beyond Archigram: The Structure of Circulation, London and New York: Routledge, 2009, p. 188; Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, p. 92. 86 Muriel Rukeyser, Selected Poems, ed. Adrienne Rich, New York: The Library of America, p. 4. 87 Bruce Cole, Piero della Francesca: Tradition and Innovation in Renaissance Art, New York: HarperCollins, 1991. 88 T. J. Clark, “Preliminaries to a Possible Treatment of Olympia in 1865,” Screen, v. 21, n. 1 (Spring 1980: 18–4; reprinted in Francis Frascina and Jonathan Harris, eds., Art in Modern Culture: An Anthology of Critical Texts, London: Phaidon, 1992, pp. 105–119. In these terms, Manet anticipates Benjamin’s reading of Kaf ka. 89 Ezra Pound, Selected Letters: 1907–41, ed. D. D. Paige, London: Faber and Faber, 1970, p. 23. See David Herd, “Distributing: Ezra Pound,” Enthusiast!: Essays on Modern American Literature, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007, pp. 79–108. I appreciate how Herd concludes his work with these lines: “This book has been about the transmission of literature. It has shown various writers taking responsibility for that transmission, whether within their writing or cultural activism. The word for both kinds of action has been enthusiasm,” p. 197.

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90 T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1917) and “The Function of Criticism” (1923), Selected Essays 1917–1932, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1950, pp. 3–11, 12–24. George Kubler notes that André Malraux uses some of Eliot’s ideas from these essays, particularly “Traditional and the Individual Talent,” in his The Voices of Silence (1954). See Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008, p. 124, n. 5. I am also indebted to Kubler’s work transmitting Henri Focillon’s art historical thought along the linked concepts of relays, signals, and the complexities of actuality. See Kubler, pp. 14–23; Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, trans. Charles Beecher Hogan and George Kubler, New York: Zone Books, 1992; Emerling, “Relays, Signals, Actuality: A Return to Focillon,” Journal of Art Historiography 27 (December 2022). 91 On Eliot and Bergson, see Philip Le Brun, “T.S. Eliot and Henri Bergson,” The Review of English Studies 18.70 (May 1967): 149–161; Paul Douglass, Bergson, Eliot, and American Literature, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2014. 92 T. S. Eliot, “Portrait of a Lady” and “Preludes,” Collected Poems 1909–1962, New York: Harcourt, 1963, pp. 8 and 15 respectively. 93 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 172. I am also drawing on the brilliant chapter on Vasari in Georges Didi-Huberman’s Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005, pp. 53–84. 94 As Marquard Smith has written, “to research, which by definition is ‘to look for with care’, is an act not only of interpreting the world but changing it.” He asks that we recognize how and why “each historical moment has its own épistéme of re-search.” Smith hyphenates “re-search” to emphasize this complicated structure of repetition and difference, of searching again, of always being in the middle between past and future. See Smith, “Theses on the Philosophy of History: The Work of Research in the Age of Digital Searchability and Distributability,” Journal of Visual Culture: The Archives Issue 12.3 (December 2013): 375–403. This remarkable essay was preceded by an edited volume: What Is Research in the Visual Arts?: Obsession, Archive, Encounter, eds. Michael Ann Holly and Marquard Smith, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. 95 Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, p. 1. 96 Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London and New York: Continuum, 2006, p. 49. 97 As Deleuze writes: “the abstract machine is the map of relations between forces, a map of destiny, or intensity, which proceeds by primary non-localizable relations and at every moment passes through every point,” it is “a non-unifying immanent cause that is coextensive with the whole social field.” See Foucault, trans, Seán Hand, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988, pp. 36, 37. He continues in language that we will address below, insisting on the immanence of history and becoming: “what do we mean here by immanent cause? It is a cause which is realized, integrated and distinguished in its effect. Or rather the immanent cause is realized, integrated and distinguished by its effect. In this way there is a correlation or mutual presupposition between cause and effect, between abstract machine and concrete assemblages.” 98 By decreating (destroying and creating) the state of things, I am refining the concept of “decreation” that I first encountered in Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace (1947), where she presents it as a concept at once theological, aesthetic, and historiographic. See Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr, London and New York: Routledge, 1997, pp. 32–39. Relatedly, this line from Henry Miller: “Impossible ever to posit such a thing as the un-created” (Moore, ed., Henry Miller on Writing, p. 73). Moreover, Agamben’s writings on art, which include essays on Twombly, Melville, Kaf ka, Walser, and others, stem from Weil’s concept of decreation. Weil is certainly a “hidden figure” in Agamben’s entire philosophy, which renders

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decreation as “the paradigm of a politics to come”: see the final pages (pp. 141–142) of “In This Exile (Italian Diary, 1992–94),” Means without End: Notes on Politics, pp. 121– 142; and the section “The Experiment, or On Decreation” in the essay “Bartleby, or On Contingency” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, pp. 243–271. 99 Italo Calvino, “The Odysseys Within The Odyssey,” Why Read the Classics?, trans. Martin McLaughlin, London and New York: Penguin Books, p. 13. 100 Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003, p. 109. 101 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, pp. 7–8. 102 The phrase “a sense of memory” is from Nadia Fusini’s introduction to Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway, New York: Everyman’s Library, p. xv. Note particularly, “memory and forgetting are for Clarissa in the same relation as light and darkness. Light is not the exact opposite of darkness, nor is forgetting the exact opposite of memory. The effort for Virginia Woolf is precisely to get to perceive and express subtler degrees of reality, lesser and lesser variations in the scale of light, states of visibility that consort with invisibility, dark passages with light filtering in.” 103 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 87. 104 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 83. 105 A reference, of course, to Fernando Pessoa’s great text. “Jacques Derrida,” Memoires for Paul De Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, et al., New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 115. 106 Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose, trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whittsitt, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995, p. 64. 107 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, pp. 159, 207. Michaux’s “vital ideas” is cited on p. 207. 108 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 207. 109 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 191. 110 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 206. 111 Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 81. 112 Emphasis in original; Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, pp. 202–203. 113 There are a multiplicity of planes on the plane of immanence itself. As Deleuze explains: “It is truly a plane of immanence because it possesses no dimension supplementary to what occurs on it; its dimensions grow or decrease with what occurs on it, without its planitude being endangered (plane with n dimensions). This is no longer a teleological plane, a design, but a geometrical plane, an abstract drawing, which is like the section of all the various forms, whatever their dimensions…It is a fixed plane, but ‘fixed’ does not mean motionless; it indicates the absolute state of movement as well as that of rest, in relation to which all variations in relative speed themselves become perceptible. This plane of immanence, of consistence, includes fogs, plagues, voids, jumps, immobilizations, suspensions, hastes. For being thwarted is a part of the plane itself: we always have to start again, start again from the middle, to give the elements new relations of speed and slowness, which make them change assemblage, jump from one assemblage to another. Hence, the multiplicity of planes on the plane, and the voids which form part of the plane, as silence forms part of a plane of sound,” Dialogues II, pp. 69–70. 114 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 244. 115 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 172. 116 Moore, ed., Henry Miller on Writing, p. 31. 117 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, pp. 174, 95. 118 Emphasis added; Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 174. Calvino’s phrase “an irreparable rent” appears in If on a winter’s night a traveler, trans. Willian Weaver, New York: Harcourt, 1981, p. 67. Also note his incredible lines: “just as the cavemen

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felt the need to decorate the cold walls of caves to become masters of the tormenting mineral alienness, to make them familiar, empty them into their own inner space, annex them to the physical reality of living,” p. 47. 119 Pessoa, “Time’s Passage,” Fernando Pessoa & Co. Selected Poems, ed. and trans. Richard Zenith, New York: Grove Press, 1998, p. 146. A nod as well to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, New York: Penguin, 2004. 120 Delanda, Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy, p. 173. 121 Delanda, Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy, p. 176. 122 Delanda, Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy, p. 173; Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 230. 123 Delanda, Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy, p. 174. Delanda is citing Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 164. Drawing on genetics and molecular biology, Delanda is illuminating on this point, which is crucial for our interests here regarding a sense-event and transmissibility: “the vicinity of phase transitions is a special place when it comes to the emergence of spontaneous information transmission (as opposed to processing or storage)” and “it is the existence of this emergent capacity in systems which come very close to but do not actualize the phase transition, which justifies us in postulating such an entity as a quasi-causal operator.” He adds: “given that essences are typically postulated to explain the existence of individuals or of natural kinds, eliminating them involves giving an alternative explanation, not just reducing these individuals and kinds to social conventions” by “detailed description of the intensive processes of individuation which generate actual forms” and by describing “concrete mechanisms of immanence to explain how the virtual is produced out of the actual.” Emphasis in original, p. 80. 124 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 173. 125 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 175. 126 Delanda, Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy, p. 79. 127 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, p. 21. 128 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, p. 26. 129 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 189. As Delanda explains, “all the entities that populate the world come into being through specific temporal processes that affect both their materiality and their (nonlinguistic) expressivity. All identities are, in this sense, historical, as long as the word is used to refer not only to human history but to geological, biological, and even cosmic history. This constitutive history implies that objective entities are inherently changeable.” See Delanda, Deleuze: History and Science, New York and Dresden: Atropos Press, 2010, p. 33. 130 Delanda, Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy, p. 155. 131 Delanda, Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy, p. 155. 132 The phrase “information channel” and the quotation in the preceding sentence are from Delanda, Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy, pp. 76–77. 133 Delanda, Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy, p. 102. 134 Eliot, Four Quartets, in Collected Poems 1909–1962, pp. 176–177. 135 Deleuze, Letters, p. 55. 136 Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 248. All subsequent references to this book in this section will be parenthetical. In The Signature of the World, Alliez already made these points quite beautifully so that they resonate with aesthetic history: “Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense: it is under this double heading that the dazzling play of conceptual variation elicited by the monographic analysis of the early works—works where everything already tended towards the ‘great identity’ Spinoza-Nietzsche—will be taken up again and thought through as such. Spinoza filtered through Cervantes, Borges through Bergson; Nietzsche unfastened from Heidegger, meets Lewis Carroll before being delivered over to the becomings-animal of his ‘poietic’ metamorphoses.

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The concept thus becomes narrative and philosophy a new genre of story in which description takes the place of the object, in which point of view replaces the subject,” p. 5. See James Joyce, “Wandering Rocks,” Ulysses, ed. Hans Gabler, New York: Vintage Books, 1986, pp. 180–209. As Umberto Eco shares, “the central episode, ‘Wandering Rocks’, in its eighteen paragraphs, reproduces the techniques of the eighteen major chapters, in a minor scale,” The Aesthetics of Chaosmos, p. 48. 137 Delanda, Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy, p. 78. 138 Delanda, Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy, p. 78. 139 Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 93. To clarify: a multiplicity is an assemblage of singularities. For Deleuze, philosophy, art, and science do not deal with universals (One or Being), but with singularities. There are mathematical singularities, physical ones, chemical singularities (e.g., freezing point, boiling point), psychological ones. Basically, when a body changes states, from liquid to a solid state, for instance. Phase transitions. Movement. Becoming. On singularity-events, Deleuze writes: “What is an ideal event? It is a singularity—or rather a set of singularities or of singular points characterizing a mathematical curve, a physical state of affairs, a psychological and moral person. Singularities are turning points and points of inflection; bottlenecks, knots, foyers, and centers; points of fusion, condensation, and boiling; points of tears and joy, sickness and health, hope and anxiety, ‘sensitive’ points…The singularity belongs to another dimension than that of denotation, manifestation, or signification. It is essentially pre-individual, non-personal, and a-conceptual…Singularity is neutral…[it] is opposed to the ordinary,” Logic of Sense, p. 52. 140 Deleuze adds that “how could we not feel that our freedom and strength reside, not in the divine universal nor in the human personality, but in these singularities which are more us than we our ourselves, more divine than the gods, as they animate concretely poem and aphorism, permanent revolution and partial action?…It suffices that we dissipate ourselves a little…to make pre-individual and nonpersonal singularities speak—in short, to produce sense,” Logic of Sense, p. 72. 141 Or, the philosophy-art-science of origami. Or, the Mandelbrot set. Hölderlin cited in Maurice Blanchot, “The Future and the Question of Art,” The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989, p. 225. 142 Deleuze, Logic of Sense, p. 146. This is the key instance regarding an event that Alain Badiou misses when he admits to being nonplussed about what sense has to do with an event at all, calling a sense-event “a chimera, an inconsistent neologism” because Badiou demands a break with empiricism, a break with language and immanence: “the event must be thought as the advent of what is subtracted from all experience: the ontologically un-founded and the transcendentally discontinuous… it must be subtracted from Life in order to be released to the stars.” See Badiou, “The Event in Deleuze,” trans. Jon Roffe, Parrhesia n. 2 (2007): 37–44. This text is also in Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II, trans. Alberto Toscano, London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 143 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 142. 144 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 168. 145 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 185. 146 The phrase “transmitted forces” is from Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 155. Deleuze, Foucault, pp. 88, 90, 94. Deleuze uses Alfred North Whitehead’s concept of prehension to elaborate this position. Prehension denotes how and why the perceiver of reality actually incorporates aspects of the perceived thing into itself. Prehension is a passage, Deleuze explains, wherein “an element is the given, the ‘datum’ of another element that prehends its…everything prehends its antecedents and its concomitants and, by degrees, prehends a world. The eye is a prehension of light. Living beings prehend water, soil, carbon, and salts. At a given moment the pyramid prehends Napoleon’s soldiers (forty centuries are contemplating us),

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and inversely. We can say that ‘echoes, reflections, traces, prismatic deformations, perspective, thresholds, folds’ are prehensions that somehow anticipate psychic life… But the prehended, the datum, is itself a preexisting or coexisting prehension, such that all prehension is a prehension of prehension, and the event thus a ‘nexus of prehensions’. Each new prehension becomes a datum,” The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, p. 78. Isabelle Stengers gives a limpid explanation of the concept in Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts, trans. Michael Chase, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014, pp. 146–148. 147 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 331, n. 14. 148 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, p. 4. 149 Celan’s characteristically untranslatable German phrase is deine allereigenste Enge, which Pierre Joris translates into English as “innermost narrows.” John Felstiner renders it as “narrow strait,” referring to Celan’s use of the word eng in other poems as well; see Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, p. 35. See Celan, Gesammelte Werke Band III: Gedichte III. Prosa. Reden, eds. Beda Allemann and Stefan Reichert, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1986, p. 200. Both “narrows” and “strait” denote water, movement. 150 Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, ed. and trans. John Sturrock, New York: Penguin Books, 1997, p. 92. I could equally have posited as another possible method the brilliance of Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s experimentaltheoretical writing in The Hundreds, Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 151 Ginzburg, Traces and Threads, p. 2. 152 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 77; Alliez, The Signature of the World, p. 70. 153 On Benjamin’s use of schwellen, see Winfried Menninghaus, Schwellenkunde: Walter Benjamins Passage des Mythos, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986. Also note Samuel Weber’s Benjamin’s abilities, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008, pp. 232–233, 351 n. 7. 154 Weber, Benjamin’s abilities, p. 233. Transmissibility is not one of the abilities Weber addresses. 155 He does this in between his essay “The Destructive Character” and the other crucial one from the same year (1931), “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,” Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999, pp. 541– 542, 486–493. While the latter is more well known and often taken as his definitive statement on collecting, it remains incomplete without the former. “Some make things transmittable (this marks the conservative nature of all collectors),” he writes, “others make situations handy, citable [zitierbar] so to speak: these are the destructive characters.” A distinction is made here between the figure of the collector, who makes things “transmissible” (tradierbar), and the “destructive character” who makes situations “citable” (zitierbar). However, this is no simple distinction as Benjamin makes clear in his assertion that “collectors are people with a tactical instinct” and the “true, greatly misunderstood passion of the collector is always anarchistic, destructive.” This “tactical instinct” is absolutely necessary to the activity of the destructive character, who is curiously a “traditionalist.” This complementarity of destruction and preservation presents Benjamin’s “genuine collector” as one who wields a critical form of memory (recollection, Eingedenken) by citing the transmitted elements of the past in the present. Citation destroys the illusion of any discrete temporal context with the presence of the what-has-been (das Gewesene), which is immanent within any and every instantiation of a present. The goal of citation is “not to preserve, but to purify, to tear from context, to destroy.” For Benjamin, citation robs the past of any pretense of completion—of any claim to posit itself—by rendering it incapable of fulfilling itself in the present; it does not transmit the past

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as much as force it to take place as irretrievable. See Emerling, “An Art History of Means: Arendt-Benjamin,” Journal of Art Historiography (December 2009). 156 Weber, Benjamin’s abilities, p 121. 157 Among the notes for his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” we find the following: “Historical method is philological method, a method that has as its foundation the book of life. ‘To read what was never written’, is what Hofmannsthal calls it. The reader referred to here is the true historian.” Benjamin’s method is at once historical and philological. His interest in language as such and, more importantly perhaps, his methodical aim—to expose what he termed the expressionless (das Ausdruckslose), the agrapha (the unwritten) by reading the insignificant objects and fragmented materiality (das Ausdruck) of modernity itself—are indelibly colored by theological concepts and structures. But what does it mean to confront history as a “reader” (“to read what was never written”)? For Benjamin, the “reader” is the “true historian” because “readability” (Lesbarkeit) is a messianic moment of thought “in which the practice of the ‘historian’ and the practice of the ‘philologist’, the experience of tradition and the experience of language, cannot be told apart.” See Daniel Heller-Roazen, “Editor’s Introduction: ‘To Read What Was Never Written’” in Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, p. 1. 158 Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935–1938, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002, p. 392. 159 Citation is inextricably linked to theology by Benjamin. It is both an act of quotation (a new mode of historiography in his mind) and a theological summons (a judgment). In fact, Benjamin’s endgame of messianic interruption is presented explicitly in terms of citation. Note his line “la citation à l’ordre du jour” ( Judgment Day) in the third thesis on the philosophy of history. Throughout Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” and his unfinished Das Passagenwerk [The Arcades Project] there is an emphasis on discerning the “quietest approach” of redemption through the profane. As Benjamin himself intimated: “My thinking is related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it. Were one to go by the blotter, however, nothing of what is written would remain,” The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999, p. 471. By positing modernity as a soporific, profaned “artificial paradise,” that is, as “homogenous, empty time” (a reign of myth, barbarism, and exception), Benjamin set himself the aesthetic and historiographic task of being able “to read what was never written” in order to cite the what-has-been (that which the present forecloses on) in order to “blast open,” to “interrupt,” to enact “a weak Messianic power” (eine schwache messianische Kraft), which is shorthand for the potentiality of humanity to interrupt the “state of emergency” in which we live. Thus his messianic-materialist citational endgame. 160 The phrase “critical mimicry” is from Homi Bhabha’s “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, pp. 85–92. 161 Amiri Baraka, “In the Tradition,” The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, ed. William J. Harris, New York: Basic Books, 2009, pp. 302–310. 162 Baraka, “Am/Trak,” The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, p. 272. He writes in “Return of the Native” from Black Magic (1969): “Harlem is vicious | modernism. BangClash. | Vicious the way its made. | Can you stand such beauty? | So violent and transforming,” The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, p. 217. 163 All of the thoughts from Cecil Taylor quoted in this section are from the astonishing liner notes to Unit Structures, New York: Blue Note Records, 1966. Deleuze often spoke of great writers and musicians making language itself stammer, sending the structural balance of language as such into disequilibrium, decoding it and making it minor, creative, new. In these terms, we should add the “Monk effect” as Thelonious

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Monk is a genius of musical “stuttering,” rendering a foreign language within Western music itself. See Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, p. 5; on Monk, see Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007, p. 38 as well as the essential work by Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, New York: Free Press, 2009. The effects of Monk on Taylor are a given; see Kelley, pp. 280–282. 164 Bob Kaufman, “War Memoir,” Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness, New York: New Directions, 1959, p. 52. 165 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 128. 166 Cited in Kelley, Thelonious Monk, pp. 106–107. 167 Taylor, liner notes to Unit Structures. 168 The phrase “exhausting the possible” is from Deleuze’s masterful essay on Samuel Beckett “The Exhausted” in Essays Critical and Clinical, pp. 160–161. This idea of “exhausting the possible” resonates with Taylor’s work. See the documentary on Taylor directed by Christopher Felver entitled All the Notes (2003). 169 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, pp. 66, 67. 170 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 65. 171 This phrase “guerilla campaign against ourselves” is used by Deleuze as an epigraph to Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. The phrase “structural vitality” is from Eco, The Open Work, p. 20. 172 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 119. 173 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 117. 174 On Plato’s “divine terror,” see Donald Preziosi in Art, Religion, Amnesia: The Enchantments of Credulity, London and New York: Routledge, 2014. 175 On “pastology,” see White, The Practical Past, p. 99. 176 Jay Lampert, Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History, London: Continuum, 2006, p. 66. 177 In “I as in Idea,” Deleuze says that “ideas are rather haunting—they come and go, and disappear and take on diverse forms, and through these diverse forms, as varied as they may be, they are still recognizable.” See Gilles Deleuze From A to Z, with Claire Parnet, dir. Pierre-André Boutang, trans. Charles Stivale, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012. The phrase “real spaces” is an allusion to David Summers’ Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism, London: Phaidon, 2003. 178 On the relation between the ancient Greek figure theōros (pl. theōroi) and theōriā, see Gregory Nagy, “Ancient Greek Poetry, Prophecy, and Concepts of Theory,” Poetry and Prophecy: The Beginnings of a Literary Tradition, ed. James L. Kugel, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990, pp. 56–64, especially 62–63. 179 Dante, Inferno, Canto II: line 9. In Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1867 English translation: “Here thy nobility shall be manifest.” More colloquially, “here your value will be proven.” 180 John Keats’ notion of “negative capability” is discussed in his famous December 1817 letter to his brothers. 181 Simone Weil, “Metaxu,” The Simone Weil Reader, ed. George A. Panichas, New York: McKay, 1977, p. 364. I first encountered this passage in Karen Lang’s Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006, p. 242, n. 139. 182 “Horizon mergers” is a key concept in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics, wherein “understanding” is a “historically effected event” requiring a “fusion of horizons” (past and present); see Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, London: Continuum, 2004, pp. 299, 305–306. Ginzburg, “opaque zones,” Traces and Threads, p. 4. 183 Ginzburg, Traces and Threads, p. 4.

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184 On Celan’s poetic word Leertext [“text-void” in Felstiner’s translation; “empty-text” in Joris’] and its homonym Lehrtext, see his poem “Die Posaunenstelle” in Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry, A Bilingual Edition, trans. Pierre Joris, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014, p. 438. 185 Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, trans. Andrea Tarnowski, Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 20. See also Pierre Joris, “Introduction” in Celan, Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry, pp. xxix–xxviv. 186 Lacoue-Labarthe discusses this Singbarer Rest; see p. 21. Celan’s idea that poems are “gifts to the attentive” is explained in Felstiner, Paul Celan, p. 181. 187 On such a “mnemonic turn” I am indebted to the work of Marek Tamm, especially his essays “Memory,” The Routledge Companion to Historical Theory, ed. Chiel van den Akker, London and New York: Routledge, 2022, pp. 544–557; and “Future-oriented History,” Historical Understanding: Past, Present and Future, eds. Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Lars Deile, London: Bloomsbury, 2022, pp. 131–140. See also his outstanding edited book Afterlife of Events: Perspectives on Mnemohistory, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 188 Deleuze, The Fold, p. 3. 189 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, p. 268. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 38. 190 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, p. 268. 191 Virginia Woolf, The Waves, annotated by Molly Hite, New York: Harcourt, pp. 157, 202. We share Antonio Negri’s affirmation that “for us, there has never been an alternative to the world, but always an alternative within the world.” See Negri, Art & Multitude, trans. Ed Emery, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011, p. 9. In addition, as John Mullarkey notes, since the actual (molar forms) are presented as foldings, “the fold is a complication of surfaces that offsets any temptation to step beyond the wholly immanent plane”; it is “a conception of matter” rendered into “a universal texturology” that enfolds finite and infinite. Thus, significantly, “matter has an inorganic life and a Dasein of its own,” which is “far from the worldless category that Heidegger, for one, thought it to be.” See Mullarkey, “Deleuze and Materialism: One or Several Matters?” A Deleuzian Century?, ed. Ian Buchanan, Durham: Duke University Press, 1999, pp. 77–78. 192 “Period eye” is a concept from the acclaimed art historian Michael Baxandall’s Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. See also his Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Experience of Pictures, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. I admit a starting point in Baxandall’s “Excursus against influence” wherein he calls influence “a curse of art criticism” and “shifty.” I couldn’t agree more. Also note his conclusion that “tradition” is “not some aesthetical sort of cultural gene but a specifically discriminating view of the past in an active and reciprocal relation with a developing set of dispositions and skills acquirable in the culture that possesses this view. But influence I do not want to talk about,” Patterns of Intention, pp. 58–62. 193 Woolf, The Waves, p. 145. 194 Deleuze, The Fold, pp. 6, 35. 195 Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, p. 106. Consider also Nietzsche’s lines from March–June 1888: “If we subtracted all traces of this intestinal fever from lyricism in sound and word, what would be left of lyrical poetry and music?—L’art pour l’art perhaps: the virtuoso croaking of shivering frogs, despairing in their swamp—All the rest was created by love,” The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufman, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Vintage Books, 1968, p. 427.

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196 Audre Lorde, Coal, New York: W. W. Norton, 1976, p. 6. On love as an event, see also Alain Badiou with Nicolas Truong, In Praise of Love, trans. Peter Bush, London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012. 197 Adrienne Rich, “A Long Conversation” in Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995–1998, New York: W. W. Norton, 1999, p. 64. The phrase “farewell to an idea” is an allusion to T. J. Clark’s use of a line of poetry from Wallace Stevens. See Clark’s Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

III TWENTY-FIRST SERIES OF AESTHETIC HISTORY Hypomnemata

In one of his last texts entitled “Self Writing” (1983), Michel Foucault discusses the writing and use of hypomnemata as one aspect of “the art of living,” technē tou biou. Drawing on Plutarch and Seneca, he presents them as one means of constructing an “aesthetic life,” but one that stoically refuses the future “due to its uncertainty,” which “causes anxiety and agitation of the soul.” He redirects our attention “toward contemplation of the past,” explaining that the role of the hypomnemata, “personal notebooks,” was to enable the formation of the self out of the collected discourse of others. One wrote down quotes in them, extracts from books, examples, and actions that one had witnessed or read about, reflections or reasonings that one had heard or that had come to mind. They constituted a material record of things read, heard, or thought, thus offering them up as a kind of accumulated treasure for subsequent rereading and meditation. They also formed a raw material for the drafting of more systematic treatises… They constitute, rather, a material and a framework for exercises to be carried out frequently: reading, rereading, meditating, conversing with oneself and with others. And this was in order to have them, according to the expression that recurs often, prokheiron, ad manum, in promptu. “Near at hand,” then, not just in the sense that one would be able to recall them to consciousness, but that one should be able to use them, whenever the need was felt, in action. It is a matter of constituting a logos bioethikos for oneself, an equipment of helpful discourses…The writing of the hypomnemata is an important relay in this subjectivation of discourse… Such is the aim of the hypomnemata: to make one’s recollection of the fragmentary logos, transmitted through teaching, listening, or reading, a means of establishing a relationship of oneself with oneself, a relationship as DOI: 10.4324/9781003015666-3

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adequate and accomplished as possible. For us, there is something paradoxical in all this: how could one be brought together with oneself with the help of a timeless discourse accepted almost everywhere? In actual fact, if the writing of hypomnemata can contribute to the formation of the self through these scattered logoi…[it is because] the writing of hypomnemata resists this scattering by fixing acquired elements, and by constituting a share of the past, as it were, toward which it is always possible to turn back, to withdraw.1 For us, these hypomnemata double what precedes them: Twenty-first Series of Aesthetic History. They “contemplate” aesthetic history as a “fragmentary logos, transmitted through teaching, listening, or reading,” but also reiterate the concept of transmissibility through other personae as a means of “constituting a share of the past…toward which it is always possible to turn back, to withdraw.” As such they are not case studies, but mnemotechnē: mediators (conceptual personae and aesthetic figures) that provide no self-evidentiary value, but only the mnemonic material—the concepts and affects of others—that mediate our own.2 Unlike evidentiary case studies, these hypomnemata are traces and threads of transmissibility as a concept and an affect. They “can never be reduced to mnēmē or anamnēsis” because they are hypomnēmata, “the mnemotechnical supplement or representative, auxiliary or memorandum.” Therefore this personal archive “will never be either memory or anamnesis as spontaneous, alive and internal experience” because a true archive “takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of said memory.”3 Writing them is a “technique of repetition.” It is “a matter of constituting a logos bioethikos for oneself, an equipment of helpful discourses.” They are “a set of singularities… turning points and points of inflection; bottlenecks, knots, foyers, and centers; points of fusion, condensation, and boiling; points of tears and joy, sickness and health, hope and anxiety, ‘sensitive’ points.” But the denotations, arguments, and signifying histories below are recollected and reread with an orientation toward the past as well as the future, despite Foucault’s late stoicism noted above. For these singularities belong “to another dimension than that of denotation, manifestation, or signification” because they are “essentially pre-individual, non-personal, and a-conceptual.”4 So we will repeat the past, recollect the actions, voices, and signifying semiotics of others, contrapose them to the ordinary, but in doing so subjectify them and therefore reorient ourselves to the a-signifying and intensive, a past-future event.5 We then “return with bloodshot eyes” to another, unforeseen future. We follow Foucault here as Aeneas relied on the Cumaean Sibyl, as Dante relied on Virgil, as “repetition, another layer…a catching on something else, an imperceptible difference, a coming apart and ineluctable tearing open” into an aleatory future.6 Our contemplation of the past, however, is less calm and reassuring than Foucault desired. Ours is vertiginous and moving because we reimplicate pastfuture lines transmitted via novel masquerades, touching retellings, and perhaps

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Janus-faced misreadings. For any and every “explication [of the past] must also reimplicate future versions.” 7 ~ Paul Celan gives us a “counterlight”: “poems are passageways: A toi de passer, Vie!” Your turn to pass through, Life! An opening for life as such to pass. Poetry constitutes a becoming-attentive to life as such within the act of reading, within the reality of the dated art-work itself, dated within its own construction and indexed to our reading in the present. We are then moved from “threshold to threshold” within a poem as it allows us to sense and to shape “that which happened” (historical events) within the ontological caesurae, intervals, and aporias of the enfolded language, voice, and breath that a poem embodies. This is why Celan insists that when questioning the possibilities of art-work “a certain sense for aporias should not be lacking.”8 Such an insistence is part of Celan’s “truly radical calling-into-question of art.”9 As a “passageway,” a poem is “a sending oneself ahead toward oneself, in search of oneself ” within the “innermost narrows” of a dated event. What occurs is an uncanny encounter with oneself, “a self-forgotten I” en route. “Can we find such a place,” Celan asks, “such a step?”10 A step beyond ourselves within the past. It is in this direction that his work orients us. This en route “return of art” is queried in Celan’s famous speech “The Meridian” (22 October 1960). It is put before us as a problem. “Art returns…with everything that belongs to it and will yet belong to it, [art] is also a problem, and as you can see, a mutable, tough and long-lived, I want to say, an eternal problem.”11 Celan’s questioning of himself, the capacities of his poems, and ourselves as readers—this intensive radikale In-Frage-Stellung der Kunst—concerns the very possibility of “the history the poetry takes in and makes audible, visible, sensed.”12 In other words, it doubts-avers the capability of art “to make history available to us.”13 Celan desires his poems “to be known as what ‘denounces’ that which has unjustly been” and “equally, it announces the more that could be seen and told: about what has existed, and what could be made to exist.” But, an intensive “great listening” is required to sense survival without full presence: Refusing consolation, Celan’s poetry had aimed not to pretend to redeem or return to life the millions murdered, but rather to bring our engagement with the poetry the particularities of loss that those irrevocable mass murders entail. Yet in its lightning-like power to galvanize our experiential awareness of all this, the poetry paradoxically also threatens—against its own intentions—to mask history’s madness when we may somehow feel that what the poem evokes is even faintly akin to having brought the dead back to life (a redemptive delusion that would deny rather than make available what Celan had designated as “that which happened” [dass, was geschah]).14

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Celan inscribes and marks this wound through substantive compound nouns and by (dis-)orienting his poems toward figures of caesura and opening— passageways—that channel without representing, shape without reforming that which has been lost. These poems offer not a “timeless” return to the past; rather, they seek to connect, to reiterate (echo, resonate, shape), and to encipher by reaching through time (“durch die Zeit hindurchzugreifen” as he conveys in his Bremen address) in order to grasp (greifen, both bodily and epistemologically) the “glowing text-void” of life as such: an immanent life for and in which “Nothing/ halts.”15 As Celan’s friend Jean Daive tells us, where there should be no life, Celan “auscultates time.”16 In turn, he reminds Daive that “it is the holes we have to write…don’t forget.” In Celan’s late poem “Die Posaunenstelle” (1969), we witness him experimenting with a poem as a passageway. In John Felstiner’s translation, we read: “The Trumpet Place | deep in the glowing | text-void, | at the torch height | in the timehole: | hear deep in | with your mouth.” Celan’s poetic word Leertext is rendered as “text-void” in Felstiner’s translation; “empty-text” in Pierre Joris’. It is a “glühenden Leertext,” a glowing text-void. Felstiner gives a truly insightful and moving explication of this poem focusing on Jewish theological concepts. He explains that if we “speak Celan’s word Leertext, it makes a perfect homonym with Lehrtext. Now Lehre means ‘teaching’, like the Hebrew word torah, the Mosaic law, and text-voids, such as the Bible’s lean account of Abraham’s sacrifice, are essential to Jewish teaching. They draw us in to explore unknowability.”17 The “unknowability” the poem invites us to sense is how a text can be “glowing and empty?” Felstiner also draws our attention to the complex ending of the poem: in the timehole [Zeitloch]: hear deep in with your mouth.18 The “text-void” transmits a sense of the law (halakhah) itself. It marks an absence (the law itself, or faith in the law itself ) “deep” within itself. But a reorganization of our senses—an organic, perhaps even anorganic, rewiring—takes place in order for us to sense (sens in French as sense and direction, orientation): trumpet-sound; deep/glowing/void-haptic sensation; torch-sight; a “timehole” that allows us to hear with our mouths. The poem embodies a sense-event that renders it possible for us to encounter “the presence of an absence that wants filling and glows with that want.”19 As Felstiner concludes, “a ‘text-void’ glows with use, however adverse.”20 Among his notes for “The Meridian” we find Celan referring to this “sense-movement toward an as yet unknown goal” as “a sort of tropism.”21 But this “sense-movement” is not merely a “tropism” of involuntary nervous system reactions because it demands a logic. It turns us toward the caesura, the stanza

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break. It forces us to become attentive to the gift of the passage/way itself. Even consciousness itself is a threshold in Celan’s poetry. The poem opens with a trumpet-shofar blast, then inhales (a deep breath, a spacing) before giving us four tight lines dis-coordinating, re-acclimating even, our senses after the horn-sound (a call). A call that announces not an actual place but one that takes place only within the sense-movement the poem constructs. (Celan calls this topos research.) It ends only after we find ourselves peering through a rent in time itself (Zeitloch), between the vertical dots that frame what we must hear within our own mouths, as our own voice. “At torch height | in the timehole” then a colon: “a pause value (stronger than the semicolon and less than the period) and a semantic value, which marks the indissoluble relation between two meanings, each of which is in itself partially complete.”22 After the compound “Zeitloch” (“timehole”) we find a colon before a hard return (an interesting typographic phrase here) that opens a further breech, a “void before a final imperative.”23 Between the history the poem transmits (but refuses to represent) and ourselves, as readers, there is a reciprocal incompleteness marked by the colon, which when doubled becomes the symbol for analogy. The colon signifies the passageway, an opening within the art-work as an actualization of “something—like language—immaterial, yet terrestrial,” of “languageemanations carried through life-hours, tangible and mortal like us” because “we still write for our life.”24 The colon places us in an immanent threshold between life as such and a singular life—life: history :: art: our life. The colon opens us to this threshold and its schwellen-rhythm. As Giorgio Agamben writes, the colon is “among ‘opening’ marks” and therefore “we can say that between immanence and a life there is a kind of crossing with neither distance nor identification, something like a passage without spatial movement. In this sense, the colon represents the dislocation of immanence in itself, the opening to an alterity that nevertheless remains absolutely immanent.”25 A colon opens a “breath pause” or Atemwende (a breath turn) that exposes what is being transmitted: an opening to alterity that remains immanent within ourselves and within this place (topos). A text-void becomes a timehole that allows us to hear and speak anew. “When we speak with things in this way,” Celan intimates, “we are also confronted with the question of their where-from and where-to: a question that ‘stays open’, ‘does not come to an end’, that points toward the open, empty and free—we are far outside.”26 Celan exposes the opening, the passageway, wherein the poem’s reality takes place as we read, as we become attentive, beside ourselves, within the threshold between actual-virtual, past-future. Within the act of reading, within its recursive here-now, we encounter new traces and threads of dated events that continue to produce affects and resonate into the future. Dated events that only art can give us. As Jacques Derrida writes: “Let us not believe that what thus becomes readable would be the date itself; rather, it is only the poetic experience of the date, that which a date, this one, ordains in our relation to it, a certain poetic seeking”27

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Derrida elaborates in his brilliant “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan” (1986) that Celan’s poetry is always attentive to the problematic of the date. “What assigns the singular [the unrepeatable, das Unwiederholbare] to its date?” Even more complex is Celan’s wager that “several singular events may be conjoined, allied, concentrated in the same date, which therefore become both the same and an other, to the one who cannot decipher such an absolutely closed date, a tomb, closed over the event that it marks.” Celan calls this “gathered multiplicity by a strong and charged name: concentration…the poem’s attention (Aufmerksamkeit) to all that it encounters.”28 The “memory of art”—of Celan’s poetry that “often runs ahead of us”—may cross thresholds of concentration and attentiveness such that “the memory of such a date” can “still dispose of a to-come [à venir],” an open, unforeseen futural aspect of a multiplicity rather than a futur that would become fully present.29 Derrida argues that within the poetry “despite the date, in spite of its memory rooted in the singularity of an event, the poem speaks: to all and in general, and first of all to the other.”30 A date, therefore, is “never what it is, what it says it is, always more or less than what it is.”31 Within the poems, Derrida explains, “the date succeeds only in effacing itself ” because no “metalinguistic or metahistorical overview” can explicate or restore the date to its singularity-event. Rather, “the given of the date leaves its trace in the poem. The trace is the poem.”32 The unreadable is readable as unreadable, unreadable insofar as readable; here is the madness that burns a date, consuming it from within. Here is what renders it ash…And during the finite time of incineration, the password is transmitted.33 A dated event transmits a password or shibboleth via “ellipsis, discontinuity, caesura, or discretion” and as such a dated event (a poem, an art-work) does not allow itself “to be reduced or sublated” because “no dialectic of self-certainty can reassure us about an archive’s safekeeping,” its continued existence. 34 Celan’s poetry labors to encipher and to transmit—to transmit by enciphering several singular events concentrated in one date. Poetry thus “belongs to the always eventful and damaged essence of the date to become readable and commemorative only in effacing what it will have designated, in becoming each time no one’s date.”35 We must follow Derrida closely here as this effacement is productive and heterogenetic because it embodies the force-memory of art. “Effacement,” he writes, “is not something that befalls [a poem] like an accident; it affects neither its meaning nor its readability; it merges, on the contrary, with reading’s very access to that which a date may still signify.” This means that “the date must conceal within itself some stigma of singularity if it is to last longer than that which it commemorates—and this lasting is the poem.”36 Derrida thus concludes that “the date (signature, moment, place, gathering of singular marks) always operates as a shibboleth. It shows that there is something not shown, that there

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is ciphered singularity: irreducible to any concept, to any knowledge, even to a history or tradition, be it of a religious kind. A ciphered singularity that gathers a multiplicity in eins, and through whose grid a poem becomes readable—thus giving multiplicity to be read.”37 It is an address to the other. An address not between given, fully present subjects (self and other, past and future); instead, it takes place within a threshold comprised only of singularities indexing other dated events. This threshold has a texture, a terrain, that alters and transforms the individual singularities that exist within and pass through it. Therefore, we never read the past (“that which happened”), but rather past-future threads of dated events (“threadsuns” Celan calls them) that remind us that “there are | still songs to sing beyond | mankind [der Menschen].” Such “threasdsuns” illuminate and expose a singbarer rest, a singable remnant. A dated event remains, as Derrida tells us, “without being” and only within a becoming kept open by “the force of music.” “It is not an effect of being, of some meaning of being; it is on this condition that its mad incantation becomes music.”38 For this reason that Celan tried to convince himself and all of us that art-work is a vocation, a calling to render passageways, to stage encounters, to touch an outside of human language and being. “Perhaps, I have to tell myself now— perhaps an encounter of this ‘totally other’ kind with a not all too distant, with a very close ‘other’ is—I am using here a familiar auxiliary verb—is thinkable— thinkable again and again.”39 To think is to test the real, to experiment with how long a “breath pause” can be made to endure, to voice this singbarer rest (a “singable remainder”). All are aspects of our vocation. Another is marked here: All that has been transmitted is only there once, as voice; its reappearance, its respective present is a becoming-voiced of what has stepped back and is stored in the voiceless; decisive for its new appearance is its new voice.40 We side with Celan when he insists that “distinguished professors exist thanks to poetry—not the other way around” and that we mustn’t “write for the edification of happy bookfair visitors.”41 On the contrary, we must “hear deep in | with your mouth” the vocation transmitted to us.42 Pay attention to “a history of the silence every word narrates.”43 In order words, this is our vocation: “Fidelity to that which cannot be thematized, not simply passed over in silence, is a betrayal of a sacred kind, in which memory, spinning suddenly like a whirlwind, uncovers the hoary forehead of oblivion. This attitude, this reverse embrace of memory and forgetting which holds intact the identity of the unrecalled and the unforgettable, is vocation.”44 For we still write for our life. Speak—But do not split off No from Yes…Speaks true who speaks shadow. Celan’s line requires a “great listening,” an attentiveness to “an uninterrupted line at our feet, line of writing or line of promise or line of torment that leads us beyond ourselves. Leaves us behind. Precedes us…Take note.”45

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~ Le gai savoir: Godard-Rousseau-Nietzsche, “a question of method” scripted in 1969 for television.46 6:52

8:00 8:23 9:34 10:38 10:53 11:13 11:30 16:10 20:20 20:33

21:33 51:43 51:55 52:45

We see the cover page of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967) with SAVOIR in red letters outlined in black ink; we hear: “Reduced to its simplest expression.” [“…That Dangerous Supplement”…Emile Rousseau (Emile, or On Education) and Patricia Lumumba (Patrice Lumumba, Republic of the Congo pan-African decolonization), Godard’s two characters; AFRANICS → FRANCAIS Godard writes.] “We study links, relations, and differences.” [The line above is repeated.] “Here, we’re going to dissolve image and sound.” “Images, do we choose them? Or, do we encounter then by chance?” “By chance, since I don’t know exactly what they are.” “Chance is structured like the unconscious.” “So in an image, we must discover a method…the discourse of its method.” “If we find this method, then it will give us the laws of fabrication.” “To research is to study. We must study.” “You are located at the crossing of unfastened forces.” [Godard’s voice] “Infinity is a gigantic animal, although it has no specific features or any senses that can report back from the exterior to itself…A double trajectory, risen from a force without guarantees and the question that is asked is farther from your memory, asks how to note at the same time the form and the sense by which link, tension and opposition can be translated into a sentence.” [Godard’s voice] “Time…turns over itself, imbeds, spreads and multiplies. Designating the moment, we work over here.” [Godard’s voice] “Thus, this simple sound is incredibly complex to transmit.” “Transmit to someone, into someone, who is living.” “The eye must listen before looking.”

~ A vision of her sitting there in a long red (or white or black?) dress, her hands on her lap, wooden chair, small table, gray floor. The Artist Is Present. This artwork was created anew every day of Marina Abramović’s 2010 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.47 But this “new” performance was actually a “reperformance” of Nightsea Crossing (1981–1987), which Abramović and Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysipen) performed twenty-two times over a six-year period. Rather than sitting across a table staring at the same individual (as she did in Nightsea Crossing), in The Artist Is Present Abramović sat at a minimal table awaiting museum visitors, who, if they wished, could, one at a time, sit opposite her, and then they could stare at each other—blankly, cynically, intimately, trustingly—for however long the visitor could endure. (Abramović broke, meaning altered her

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body language or smiled, only once when Ulay sat opposite her after not seeing one another for twenty years toward the very end of the retrospective’s run.) Aside from this being the largest exhibition of performance art ever mounted by MoMA, complete with large crowds themselves performing in front of and between the works, the retrospective circled around two concepts, one historiographic and one aesthetic, reperformance and exhaustion. Abramović frequently discusses her work as ritual, as attempts to purify her actions and to become attentive to her own state of mind, which she believes can change the “energy field” (her phrase) of the space her viewers collectively occupy. The aim of ritual being to take place. It is towards this point that she conceives of her work as a whole: “All my work is about emptying the mind, to come to a state of nonthinking.”48 However, many of Abramović’s works are also bound up in her own biography. But, perhaps in ways that are much less narcissistic than some stinting criticism affords her. So, yes, perhaps she was studying the nomadic and spiritual aspects of Tibetan and Australian Aboriginal cultures as she conducted The Great Wall Walk (1998/2008), in which she and Ulay, her partner of twelve years, began at separate ends of the Great Wall of China, a “metaphysical structure” in Abramović’s mind, and walked over 2000 kilometers until they met in the middle at a Buddhist temple where they were to be married. If only the physical act of the walk itself had not altered each of them, stammering their past confidences, only to dissolve their relationship upon meeting in the middle, and go their separate ways. Narcissism is only a difference of degree, not kind, between one person and the next. It reminds me of one of Kaf ka’s “parables and paradoxes” entitled “The Great Wall and The Tower of Babel,” which ends thus: “Human nature, essentially changeable, unstable as dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds, until it rends everything asunder, the wall, the bonds and its very self.” The Great Wall Walk: an affective, dis-embodied, rendering and dispersing the self in all directions [in alle Himmelsrichtungen zerreissen].49 At MoMA, the galleries offered notes and documentation of her performances: films, objects, photographs, written matter and, most notably, “reperformances” by other artists of five of Abramović’s now canonical works (two completed with Ulay and three done by her alone). Abramović has argued that reperformance is the best way to deal with the history of performance art and the accompanying demands of art institutions. She contends that it is a way to take responsibility for the history of performance work, or, in her words, “to take charge of the history of performance.”50 She asserts that it is necessary for these works to be “reperformed,” not to recreate or negate their initial historical, cultural, or political context, but rather as a way to keep the reiterable gesture of the work vital for practicing artists and not just for art institutions. For Abramović, it is not simply a question of faithfully repeating “the original thing” because such an assertion misses how and why a repetition is not a limitation but a creative possibility when it generates difference by counter-actualizing the

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“original” presentation itself. In theater this is obviously the case. No one claims that a reperformance of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, for instance, is an attempt to recapture the “original thing,” which never existed anyhow except as a script, as a potentiality, as a virtual-actual circuit. The same holds for a musical score. Each reperformance is a repetition; each repetition is not simply different, but it is difference as such. Difference and repetition involve tension and risk, but also offer new possibilities, new combinations, and new affects. A willingness to make this wager is what sets Abramović apart on this front. It began with her reperformances of iconic works by other artists in 2005 with Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim Museum, in which she reperformed Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1972) and Joseph Beuys’s How To Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965) as well as other works by Gina Pane, Valie Export, and Bruce Nauman. The reperformances also included Abramović repeating her own Lips of Thomas (1975) and creating a new piece Entering the Other Side (2005). This set of reperformances was neither simply a process of excising the referent piece from its originary context nor was it only a means to appropriate these earlier performances as Abramović’s own. The referent works are not authorities to be cited. Rather, they are paradigms, literally things beside themselves, doubled, caught in a process of becoming-other in order to survive within new lines of past-future. Each work, including Abramović’s own, is a repetition, an encore, that is always different and productive, and thus part of an infinite series: a sense-event. Abramović’s physical presence at her retrospective was certainly a focal point. In fact, most people witnessed, and in some cases participated in, a “reperformance” with Abramović herself before venturing in to see the retrospective itself. The title of the performance and the retrospective, a singular new work and the entire body of work, The Artist Is Present, led many to suspect that this work, and perhaps each and every work, was just another narcissistic piece of an elaborately constructed artistic biography, as we mentioned above. But the experience of the work counters this suspicion. People who sat across from Abramović and experienced the work generated a steady stream of comments on social media and in various articles. These accounts repeat certain responses, such as not having the stamina or desire to stare stonily at her as hundreds of spectators observe and comment. Aside from these expected responses, another, more interesting, observation that centers on intimacy and the sense of time. The most poetic comment that I’ve read comes from a thirty-two-year-old man, Dan Visel, who explained: “Time was passing, but I couldn’t tell. The overwhelming feeling I had was that you think you can understand a person just by looking at them, but when you look at them over a long period of time, you understand how impossible that is. I felt connected, but I don’t know how far the connection goes.”51 Confounding our perception of the passage of time as it relates to the (un)knowability of another person, especially if only by looking at their face, suggests that to understand fully Abramović’s best pieces such as Relation in Time (1977) or Rest Energy (1980) is to comprehend that performance is the becoming-image of a body. This becoming-image,

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however, happens only when one passes through tiredness and, at last, exhausts representation. Exhaustion is an event of presence, not for oneself but for another. Exhaustion reveals the transformative potentiality of an image, a fortuitous and yet precarious opening to alterity, to another temporality, another becoming. Each and every image transmits an opening that is always an encore that re-presents the face of the Other as a radical intimacy. Near the end of his life Gilles Deleuze wrote an essay entitled “The Exhausted” (1992) in which he said, “the exhausted is the exhaustive, the dried up, the extenuated, and the dissipated…it maintains a relationship with language in its entirety, but rises up or stretches out in its holes, its gaps, or its silences.”52 This outside of language is the exhausted, a domain wherein image and another possibility of life are invented. But only if an image is “not defined by the sublimity of its content but by…the force it mobilizes to create a void or to bore holes, to loosen the grip of words…a small, alogical, amnesiac, and almost aphasic image, sometimes standing in the void, sometimes shivering in the open.”53 To create thusly is to open an experiential space in which an image dissipates, actualizing its power to trace a boundary between said and seen, self and other, to open an immanent presence: An image, inasmuch as it stands in the void outside space, and also apart from words, stories, and memories, accumulates a fantastic potential energy, which it detonates by dissipating itself. What counts in the image is not its meager content, but the energy—mad and ready to explode—that it has harnessed, which is why images never last very long.54 Images dissipate, as do others, but in doing so they leave a sonorous line that resonates. To render a single aesthetic-historiographic image, one that resonates, would be to reperform, to persevere, but with an intimate difference: unstable as dust, enduring no restraint, not even presence. ~ In the posthumously published notes gathered as Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil includes a meditation on “decreation,” which is part of a constellation of concepts that define her thought: self-annihilation, alterity, the void, affliction, and beauty. As a supplement to Judeo-Christian divine creation of the world ex nihilo, Weil posits that “we participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.”55 As a de-limiting “reversal of the objective and the subjective” that aims “to undo the creature in us,” decreation is a curious gesture of making or doing: “Decreation: to make something created pass into the uncreated. Destruction: to make something created pass into nothingness. A blameworthy substitute for decreation.”56 Weil’s understanding of decreation opposes nihilism (“destruction”). Moreover, she presents decreation as a mode of potentiality (the ability to not not-be): “We should do only those righteous actions which we cannot stop ourselves from doing, which we are unable not to do, but, through

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well directed attention, we should always keep on increasing the number of those which we are unable not to do.”57 For Weil, then, decreation is a spiritual exercise that ends with the exposure of the self, the reduction of the self and its desires, to a state that acknowledges and grasps the unattainability of “grace,” that is, human life as a movement of “gravity and grace,” a lightness, here and now. On 15 January 1951, the American poet Wallace Stevens gave a lecture entitled “The Relations between Poetry and Painting.” Visual art was a longstanding interest of Stevens. In the 1920s Stevens met Marcel Duchamp, through Walter Arensberg, and toured his New York City studio. His response to Duchamp’s readymades was even-handed, if a bit self-critical: “I made very little of them. But naturally, without sophistication in that direction, and with only a very rudimentary feeling about art, I expect little of myself.”58 Over the course of his life, Stevens gave much attention to the visual arts, expressing particular admiration for modernists such as Kandinsky, Braque, and Klee. His poetry is replete with references and images drawn from and in dialogue with modern art (cf. “The Man with the Blue Guitar”). Stevens’ lecture attempts to locate “modern art” as such within a threshold between poetry and painting. Rather than asking questions meant to demonstrate the distinct “areas of competence” (vide Clement Greenberg) unique to each discipline or thinking through the implications of Duchamp’s readymade strategy, he attempts to bring “poetry and painting into relation as sources of our present conception of reality” by wagering that “modern reality is a reality of decreation, in which our revelations are not the revelations of belief, but the precious portents of our own powers.”59 Our aesthetic, decreative powers. Stevens posits an actual-virtual relation between poetry as such (“Poetry” as an immanent, generative field) and actual poems. In “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” we read: “Poetry is the subject of the poem, | From this the poem issues and | To this returns. Between the two, | Between issue and return, there is | An absence in reality, | Things as they are. Or so we say. | But are these separate?”60 Reframing this double movement is what Stevens appends to our understanding of Weil’s decreation. The “issue and return” of art-work that partakes of and reshapes any given idea as a multiplicity: giving us “the skeleton of the ether,” a “fitful tracing of a portal” in the “flesh” itself, which is “immortal” because although the “body dies; the body’s beauty lives” (“Peter Quince at the Clavier”). The real itself is the “fitful tracing” of this necessary, unending movement between actual (corporeal) and virtual (incorporeal). This is art-work. Thus Stevens gives us these lines: “I cannot bring a world quite round, | Although I patch it as I can…If to serenade almost to man | Is to miss, by that, things as they are, | Say that it is the serenade | Of a man that plays a blue guitar.” Or, in “Primitive Like an Orb,” we read: That’s it. The lover writes, the believers hears, The poet mumbles and the painter sees,

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Each one, his fated eccentricity, As a part, but part, but tenacious particle, Of the skeleton of the ether, the total Of letters, prophecies, perceptions, clods of color, the giant of nothingness, each one And the giant ever changing, living in change. “Living in change.” Becoming through this “portal.” Art-work does not imply the transcendence of poetic imagination over a base realism. On the contrary, it is the double movement, becoming itself, that decreates both the imagined real and the real imagined, between things as they are and things as they are imagined (as we read in Stevens’ only necessary-angelic artist statement). Poetry decreates not to present us with “what is absent, a halt | For farewells, a sad hanging on for remembrances.” Instead, it exposes “a coming on and coming forth” for it “was something imagined that has been washed away” and now a “clearness has returned.” A sober clearness. Art-work exposes (here Stevens shares a line with Celan). It exposes a “precious portent of our own powers,” an intensive threshold wherein univocity is sensed (“Inhuman, of the veritable ocean” in “The Idea of Order at Key West”), wherein we become “a visibility of thought, | In which hundreds of eyes, in one mind, see at once.” (“An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”). To decreate the actual (to virtualize what is taken as reality), and then to counter-actualize even that decreated (uncreated) real, thereby reassembling and transforming the virtual itself anew, is to “seek nothing beyond reality” but “within it, | Everything.” Because “it is not in the premise that reality | Is a solid,” that we become, but within the premise that “it may be a shade that traverses | A dust, a force that traverses a shade.” A force-signal, a molecular movement, is what art-work embodies for us, what it renders consistent, encounterable, sensible: To find, not to impose. Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation. ~ Twombly, “I work in waves.”61 In the Italian art journal L’Esperienza moderna in 1957 a young Cy Twombly wrote: “for myself the past is the source (for all art is vitally contemporary)” because to paint involves a certain crisis, or at least a crucial moment of sensation or release; and by crisis it should by no means be limited to a morbid state, but could just as well be one ecstatic impulse, or in the process of a painting, run a gamut of states. One must desire the ultimate essence even if it is ‘contaminated’. Each line now is the actual experience with its own innate history. It does not illustrate—it is the sensation of its own realization…The idea of falling into obscurities or subjective nihilism is absurd.62

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Here, in one of a few written statements about his work, Twombly anticipates and counters criticisms that had dogged him since the mid-1950s, namely that his work falls into “obscurities or subjective nihilism.” Far from it. His work is neither an esoteric formalism run amok nor a pictorial nominalism motivated by the antiquated dinge and dirge of the Mediterranean or the scatology of Roman graffiti. It is not his own life or some melancholic image of the past that Twombly works to actualize in the work. What he gives us are moments and affects intimately related to forces that the work never represents. Neither subjective nor objective, historicist nor formalist, his art-work presents us with dated events, “magnetic fields” of singularities that open us within time. He emphasizes “ecstasy,” ek-stasis, that is, decreating stillness and stasis by rendering perception in movement, giving us micro-perceptions and intensive durations. On 1 June 2005, in the midst of research, I found myself spending the afternoon alone in the Walter Benjamin archive at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. I was reading a handwritten version of Benjamin’s “In the Sun,” a small collection of aphorisms written in 1932 that contains one of his most moving pieces. Benjamin writes: “The Hasidim have a saying about the world to come. Everything there will be arranged just as it is with us. The room we have now will be just the same in the world to come; where our child lies sleeping, it will sleep in the world to come. The clothes we are wearing we shall also wear in the next world. Everything will be the same as it is here—only a little bit different. Thus it is with imagination. It merely draws a veil over the distance. Everything remains just as it is, but the veil flutters and everything changes imperceptibly beneath it.”63 After reading this passage, I had to leave the archive. It was unbearable. I quickly crossed the street, walked along the Charité hospital, and headed to the Hamburger Bahnhof. There, somewhat beside myself, in a station with no departures, I faced two Twombly paintings. Standing there hardened, supposedly educated, against any Stendhal syndrome, I was overcome. Despite myself. It was not the size of the paintings, School of Fontainebleau (1960) and Thyrsis (1977) that did it. It was the quiet within them. The paintings seemed almost to suspend the past within the present rather than represent it. The references to antiquity (here from the poetic competition in Virgil’s Seventh Eclogue) or to the mannerism of the School of Fontainebleau are not nominalist representations. Twombly did not use arbitrary or ostentatiously knowing references to the classical tradition; instead, he decreated that stultified, obscure, perhaps sundered, liberal arts tradition in order to create an intensive experience—an opening or passage between the past and the present. Without irony or shame, Twombly dissolved the cursive words of Thyrsis (“I am Thyrsis of Etna, blessed with a tuneful voice”) into a sonorous line. A poetic undoing of our image of the past that in turn offers a temporal immanence suffused with the force of another line of past-future as an event.

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Twombly’s returns, as in the Second Voyage to Italy (Second Version) from 1962 or Hero and Leander (To Christopher Marlowe) (1985) are repetitions that generate effacement and complication rather than citational clarity. He paints conceptual portraits of figures both named (the Elizabethan playwright and poet Marlowe) and unnamed (Lord Byron tried to double Leander’s mythic athleticism and swim the Hellespont to meet his lover). These doublings harness and net unthinkable forces and invisible affects: a sense-event of love, desire, longing, desperate acts. What we are challenged to face is becoming-actual as a recollection-image of something one has never perceived or experienced. For me, this is art-work: “veil flutters and everything changes imperceptibly beneath it.” Perhaps the association with graffiti and Twombly’s work has been overstated. The idiosyncratic notations (sums, measurements, tables) and the handwritten lines extracted from poetry and other sources that we encounter throughout the canvases suggest something more akin to a diagram. A diagram that offers us insight into artworks and our aesthetic encounters with them. Instead of conceiving of an artwork as merely a historical artifact or representation, we should simultaneously think of it as a diagram, as a material-force that functions. A diagram is not simply “an auditory or visual archive but a map, a cartography that is coextensive with the whole social field.”64 It as a “spatio-temporal multiplicity” because every diagram is intersocial and constantly evolving. It never functions in order to represent a persisting world but produces a new kind of reality, a new model of truth. It is neither the subject of history, nor does it survey history. It makes history by unmaking preceding realities and significations, constituting hundreds of points of emergence or creativity, unexpected conjunctions or improbable continuums. It doubles history with a sense of continual evolution.65 Such a conception of the diagrammatic aspects of art-work, in turn, demands an aesthetic history capable of grasping how and why such labor “acts as a nonunifying immanent cause that is coextensive with the whole social field” and not simply an effect of an underlying socio-historical cause. A diagram enacts an immanent becoming within time itself. As such it is embodied within and thus nonsensical without concrete assemblages. Historically things take on a consistency, becoming visible and intelligible within certain structural contexts and various discursive assemblages. An artwork is a concrete assemblage, but it also is what it does (an abstract machine): it takes on a consistency as it becomes visible, but only to the degree that it actualizes relations between unthinkable and imperceptible forces that move and cohere within its very materiality. “Things can be realized only through doubling or dissociation, creating diverging forms,” Deleuze explains, because the dualities and binaries such as self-other, past-future, public-private or even historical periods are realized around an unrepresentable, atemporal, a-signifying “immanent cause” that opens a passage between “a form of expression and a form of content, a

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discursive and a non-discursive form, the form of the visible and the form of the articulatable.”66 Twombly’s art-work is performative in these specific terms: it is precisely because the immanent cause [art-work as abstract machine, diagrammatic labor], in both its matter and its functions, disregards form that it is realized on the basis of a central differentiation which, on the one hand, will form visible matter, and on the other will formalize articulatable functions. Between the visible and the articulatable a gap or disjunction opens up, but this disjunction of forms is the place—or “non-place,” as Foucault puts it— where in the informal diagram is swallowed up and becomes embodied instead in two different directions that are necessarily divergent and irreducible. The concrete assemblages are therefore opened up by a crack that determines how the abstract machine performs.67 Let us follow this line of thought to get at something essential about art and temporality. As Deleuze writes: “What is in the present is whatever the image ‘represents,’ but not the image itself. The image itself is a bunch of temporal relations from which the present unfolds…Temporal relations are never seen in ordinary perception, but they can be seen in the image, provided the image is creative. The image renders visible…the temporal relations which cannot be reduced to the present.”68 Thus art-work renders “visible temporal relations which cannot be reduced to the present.” This ontological and aesthetic mode of art demands an aesthetic sense capable of encountering this diagrammatic, immanent becoming: singularities within qualities and forms. One possibility being art-work as transmissibility. It is not without interest that Deleuze and Guattari distinguish the diagrams constructed by abstract machines, i.e., art-work, from icons and indexes. Art-work is neither a determining material “infrastructure” nor is it a “transcendental Idea.” On the contrary. Any ontological-historiographic mode does “not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality.”69 It plays “a piloting role” between various preexisting and stratified planes of composition constructed by other artists and thinkers. Insofar as an artist, philosopher, or historian is “truly creative, they give rise to a plane that is theirs alone, utterly different from what has come before,” but these planes are “not disconnected from the past” because “every plane is not only interleaved but holed, letting through fogs that surround it.” 70 These “fogs” are the precipitates of past-future events in that they indicate the durations, intuitions, and trajectories that allow “past planes to rise up” and “immerse themselves with the new”: “at once and the same time the past is both subjected to the present and the air which allows the present to breath.” 71 Thus, there is “no diagram that does not include, besides the points which it connects up, certain relatively free or unbound points, points of creativity, change and resistance, and it is perhaps with these that we ought to begin in order to understand the whole picture.” 72

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This is how Twombly becomes a proper name. The Twombly-effect works to transmit a past-future relation via the piloting role of a sense-event, a poeticpainterly diagram of past-future that deframes the historical present with other becomings, composing other lines of time within it. For this reason a diagram is a “non-place” within historicism. To grasp the Twombly-effect we need to understand time as that which has no other mode of being than to coexist in its entirety with each passing present, thereby differentiating itself as it is actualized anew, time and again. If this Twombly-effect is writing, as Roland Barthes and many others contend, then it takes place between forms of expression and forms of content as it makes “the most delicate thing in the world,” that is, an event, because writing “has no other goal” than “to release what can be saved from life, that which can save itself by means of power and stubbornness, to extract from the event that which is not exhausted by the happening, to release from becoming that which will not permit it to be fixed in a term.” 73 The effect of Twombly’s diagrammatic writing is to transmit an immanent cause that cannot be exhausted by either historical time or organic life. It is an abstract line embodying an atmospheric variation: “a change of hue, an imperceptible molecule, a discrete population, a fog, or a cloud of droplet”—“a strange ecology.” 74 Twombly certainly has a style, but it is imagination and matter, legibility and involution, a mannerist life-experimentation because “experimentation is involutive.” Within his work we never forget that “in becoming there is no past nor future–not even present, there is no history” because there is “a matter of involuting; it’s neither regression nor progression” for “to become is to become more and more restrained, more and more simple, more and more deserted and for that reason populated.” 75 Twombly involutes an instant of past-future sensation whose only mode (becoming) is to pass on and to endure by refolding itself into another historical assemblage of line, color, spacing, gesture, artifice, (non)sense. After all, it is the imagination which “must grasp the process of actualization from the point of view of these echoes and reprises.” This is why art-work “crosses domains, orders and levels, knocking down the partitions coextensive with the world, guiding our bodies and inspiring our souls, grasping the unity of mind and nature.” 76 Thereby it becomes singular and transhistorical at once: “oceanic chaos” and a “luminous wave.” I work in waves. ~ “Listen: a fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos. Vehement breath of waters…it flows purling, widely flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling…A seachange this…We enjoyed ourselves immensely.” No mimesis here from James Joyce, only vision-writing-becoming in a section of Ulysses (1922) entitled “Proteus.” ~ An image by Candida Höfer comprises scale, luminosity, delirious repetition, brilliant crystalline color. All of which fragment the referent (the actual cultural, architectural space) given by the title (Dublin, Weimar, Napoli) because we are

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caught, so to speak, between (1) the referential space, (2) the actual experience of viewing and perceiving a photograph, (3) a title, (4) a set of signifiers within the picture that induce thought, and perhaps (5) a memory of another past experience of being in the physical space. One is never exactly before a Höfer as much as one is always already in the midst of it, immersed and excluded from the actual as well as the virtual. Such an experience recollects Walter Benjamin’s own in Napoli when he writes that what is “preserved” is the indefinite itself, the “scope to become a theater of new, unforeseen constellations.” 77 We are thus caught in a threshold of actual-virtual. Searching, being compelled by the tableau itself, recommencing from within it, engenders a sensation that complicates the body and our relation to another body, the photograph. What is extraordinary about Höfer is how each of her photographs is most “subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.” Her work proves Roland Barthes’ insight that photographs think without us. But only as long as what a photograph thinks is not what it says. Barthes is adamant on this point: its “force is nonetheless superior to everything the human mind can or can have conceived to assure us of reality—but this reality [our human reality] is never anything more but a contingency.” 78 There is a “logic” at work here; a thought-process, a photographic thinking. The “interplay” between place and memory, subject and object, space and time, picture and image thinks “portraits of space.” 79 An aesthetic and historiographic sensation of a futuredirected becoming, an opening for an essence—that is, a multiplicity of fragments of impersonal, asubjective experience that is inseparable from a material encounter with an artwork—to cohere and to transmit itself contingently but necessarily within an encounter with art-work. In this manner Höfer captures forces (temporal, virtual, sensations) within a history of forms. We are confronted with sensation and intelligibility at once. Time and again, in the midst of a Höfer photograph, we labor to affirm each and every detail, texture, color, and line of light within it, if only to let it exhaust them so that an image is sensed. In other words, there is an “essence” of the site that Höfer works with, one that generates a non-coincidence between the picture (the actual, physical photograph that one encounters) and the image (a virtuality that subsists and thinks within that physical frame). The immanence of picture (body) and image opens us to an “essence,” a sense-event, that “without ever reducing the many to the One, without ever gathering up the multiple into a whole” affirms “the original unity of precisely that multiplicity, affirming without uniting all these irreducible fragments.”80 This is the potency of Höfer’s repetition, not only the repetition of her historical and cultural projects, but the repetition of presenting them as a series of singular images that appear to be complete, perfect, autonomous. Her photographs are neither suffused with her own memory nor are they screens for the projection of the viewer’s perception-memory. Instead, they have a certain reticence, a withholding or “absence” that creates a space for an “essence” to be transmitted as a force of time itself. For “time signifies that

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everything is not given; the Whole is not givable” because time is a pluralismmonism (les temps, a plural singular). As such it has “a strange power to affirm simultaneously fragments that do not constitute a whole in space, any more than they form a whole by succession within time.” Time is an openness. The “transversal of all possible space, including the space of time.”81 This openness “renders justice to the space,” a beautiful phrase Höfer gives us. In other words, her “architecture of absence” opens the closed, material forms of photography and architecture to other expressive-constructivist possibilities, to a durational intuition that belies lived experience.82 So it is not culture or the historical past per se, but a “clinch of forces” that gives the virtuality of time (the “coexistence of sheets of the past”) a body, a passage, because “the elements of time require an extraordinary encounter in order to produce something new.”83 A memory that never takes place. For these reasons Höfer’s work spurs us on to experiment with Henri Bergson’s assertion “that an effort of this kind is not impossible, is proved by the existence…of an aesthetic faculty along with normal perception.”84 ~ In the final cantos of Dante’s Purgatorio, we reach the summit of Mount Purgatory, the Garden of Eden itself, the upper limit of the seven terraces of the mountain, which is nothing other than the allegorical inversion of the pit of l’inferno. Surveying the paradiso terrestre, Dante becomes aware of two rivers: Lethe and Eunoë. It is explained to him that drinking from Lethe “takes from men the memory of sin.”85 Forgiveness is granted by oblivion itself. But, this virtue only works if one tastes the water of both Lethe and Eunoë: the event unfolds itself “not except first it is tasted on this side and on that,” as Dante writes. The idea here is that even those who have expiated their sins must still be forgiven by God himself, that is, returned to a prelapsarian state of being. However, this act of loving erasure would render the sin, its expiation in purgatory, and the divine act of forgiveness nonexistent. Thus Dante is told that one must taste of Lethe and then Eunoë, which is Dante’s neologism comprising the Ancient Greek words eu (happy, good) and noe (mind, as in nous meaning understanding). After the waters of oblivion, one tastes the waters of Eunoë, which allows one to sense that one has been forgiven, something is missing (sin) that has been erased by God’s love. The precise details of the sins and their expiation are irretrievable. What remains is only an indexical caesura, a palpable absence of now absent sin. This absence is capable of transmitting a sensation of being loved because it recalls the good acts and thoughts one had during an earthly lifetime. It is an absence that transmits sensation. The work that remains is to move between the two rivers and to understand their immanent relation: the relation between memory and oblivion, between an index and a sensation of love itself. This relation is memory-work, precisely Virgil’s gift to Dante as his caretaker and cartographer, as the one who teaches him to see the inscriptions of light even in the dimmest regions and, more significantly, how to create images (literature, not theology).

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This memory-work gestures toward what is lost as much as to what is saved or remembered. It inheres within art-work, an index creating a passage between memory (the past as it has been represented, thought, discussed, imagined) and oblivion (not merely loss or deprivation, but the coexistence of other ways of representing the multiplicity of events that actualize the past anew). An index: an absence encountered as something tangible, embodied, sensible. Passage and retrieval cue. Aesthetic history courses between memory and forgetting. Aesthetic labor (both artistic and historiographic) is the ability to create sensations that embody and resonate the past anew—changed, altered, disguised, dissembling—from its differentiated, true place: the future. Aesthetic labor is this indexical link of past-future. By magnetizing forces (time, memory, will, imagination, desire) and embodying them within forms, art-work offers us “a promise of happiness” (as Stendhal assured us), but only if it is recognized not as a return to an origin or a faithful repetition of a preexisting state of things or perception (a memory). Rather, it is an unredeemed past. Happiness is proffered only within an enfolding of past-future, within a temporal passage that allows us to touch life as such, to sense an immanence that renders time without measure. A sense of memory. ~ In one of his most beautiful short pieces “Ibizan Sequence” (1932), Walter Benjamin writes that “foremost among the human capacities…is attention. But it shares this primacy with habit, which from the outset vies with it for preeminence. All attentiveness has to flow into habit, if it is not to blow human beings apart, and all habit must be disrupted by attentiveness if it is not to paralyze the human being.”86 Benjamin posits that between habit and attentiveness, Gewohnheit and Aufmerksamkeit, there is a “threshold,” which “we cross…in sleep. For what comes to us when we dream is a new and unprecedented attentiveness that struggles to emerge from the womb of habit.” In conceiving the nineteenth century as a “dreamtime [Zeit-traum],” Benjamin desires to develop “the art of experiencing the present as waking world, a world to which that dream we name the past refers in truth” because “awakening is namely the dialectical, Copernican turn of recollection [die dialektische, kopernikanische Wendung des Eingedenkens].”87 In the threshold between habit and attentiveness there is “ein Stuck Traumleben” (“a piece of dream life”) that must be grasped in an awakened state.88 What must be grasped is that to which we are oblivious, a “fragment of another history” existing within the present. We must grasp this fragment not as dream, but as a dislocating presence at its very heart, as the great scholar Werner Hamacher noted.89 For Benjamin, this threshold is a “constellation of awakening,” that is, a possibility for the solitary individual to seize the remnants of a collective dream-image, which he often calls happiness, or the “as yet unlived.” For between habit and attentiveness, dream and awakening, memory and oblivion, there is a movement of recollection. The collective dream-image—happiness, justice, redemption— that we seem to forget amid the rumor of chatter, progress, and “social media”

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peals is nevertheless, paradoxically perhaps, transmitted within its “rhythm of perception.” ~ An unforgettable passage of italicized genius from Gayl Jones’ Corregidora (1975), perhaps the most haunting instance of transmissibility ever: “Where do you get those songs? That’s devil’s music.” “I got them from you.” “I didn’t hear the words.” Then let me give witness the only way I can…Everything said in the beginning must be said better than in the beginning. Notes 1 Michel Foucault, “Self Writing,” Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: New Press, 1997, pp. 207–222. https://fouca​u lt.info/docume​nts/fouca​u lt.hypo​m nem​ata.en/ 2 Lauren Berlant, “On the Case,” Critical Inquiry 33.4 (Summer 2007): 663–672. Berlant draws our attention to Foucault’s critiques of “case-study forms” (p. 664 n. 3) as well as more recent ones such as Peter Galison’s argument, which also addresses Foucault, against “the naïve view of the self-evidence of case-study knowledge” (p. 663 n. 1). See Galison, “Specific Theory,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004): 379–383. 3 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 11. 4 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 52. 5 Simon O’Sullivan, “Guattari’s Aesthetic Paradigm: From the Folding of the Finite/ Infinite Relation to Schizoanalytic Metamodelisation,” Deleuze Studies 4.2 (2010): 256– 286, especially 273 and 284 n. 29. 6 Deleuze, Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 84. 7 Stephen Zepke, “Hermeticism instead of Hermeneutics: The History of Philosophy Conceived of as Mannerist Portraiture,” Deleuze, Guattari, and the Problem of Transdisciplinarity, ed. Guillaume Collet, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 133–161. 8 Celan, The Meridian: Final Version-Drafts-Materials, eds. Bernhard Böschenstein and Heino Schmull, trans. Pierre Joris, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011, p. 94. 9 Celan, The Meridian, p. 5. 10 Celan, The Meridian, p. 7. 11 Celan, The Meridian, p. 2. 12 Robert Kaufman and Philip Gerard, “Introduction with Paul Celan,” in Jean Daive, Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan, San Francisco: City Lights Books, p. 12. 13 Kaufman and Gerard, “Introduction,” pp. 15 and 14 (quoted in next line). 14 Kaufman and Gerard, “Introduction,” p. 24 note 12. 15 See the poem “Du liegst” from Schneepart, which ends “Nichts | stockt,” in Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry, A Bilingual Edition, trans. Pierre Joris, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014, p. 322. 16 Daive, Under the Dome, pp. 111 and 95. 17 John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, p. 274. 18 Joris gives us “listen your way in | with the mouth” in Breathturn into Timestead, p. 439.

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1 9 Felstiner, Paul Celan, p. 273. 20 Felstiner, Paul Celan, p. 274. 21 Celan, The Meridian, p. 101. 22 Giorgio Agamben, “Absolute Immanence,” Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, p. 222. 23 Felstiner, Paul Celan, p. 274. 24 Celan, The Meridian, pp. 12, 116. 25 Agamben, “Absolute Immanence,” p. 223. 26 Celan, The Meridian, p. 10. 27 Jacques Derrida, “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan,” Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, eds. and trans. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen, New York: Fordham University Press, 2005, p. 6. 28 Emphasis in original; Derrida, “Shibboleth,” pp. 5, 10. 29 Derrida, “Shibboleth,” p. 7. As Derrida’s writes elsewhere: “ ‘Experience’ of the past as to come, the one and the other absolutely absolute, beyond all modification of any present whatever. If it is possible and if one must take it seriously, the possibility of the question, which is perhaps no longer a question and which we are calling here justice, must carry beyond present life, life as my life or our life.” He spaces the ordinary word for the future avenir as “l’à-venir” to signify this infinitive verb (to come) as “a moment that no longer belongs to time, if one understands by this word the linking of modalized presents (past, present, actual present: ‘now’, future present),” as a time to come that is “furtive and untimely.” See Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and The New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, London and New York; Routledge, 1994, pp. xix–xx and 177 note 5. 30 Derrida, “Shibboleth,” p. 7. 31 Derrida, “Shibboleth,” p. 37. 32 Derrida, “Shibboleth,” pp. 49, 40. 33 Derrida, “Shibboleth,” p. 40. 34 Derrida, “Shibboleth,” p. 40. 35 Derrida, “Shibboleth,” p. 36. 36 Derrida, “Shibboleth,” p. 20. 37 Derrida, “Shibboleth,” p. 33. 38 Derrida, “Shibboleth,” p. 38. 39 Celan, The Meridian, p 8. 40 Emphasis added; Celan, The Meridian, p. 118. 41 Celan, The Meridian, pp. 169, 171. 42 Note that Felstiner’s added word “deep” (“hear deep in”) in his translation of hör dich ein “takes after dich and Celan’s earlier tief ” (“tief im glühenden”) in order to sound “the three-beat of te-ki-ah itself, the shofar blast,” which leads him “to echo the German staccato” but also to make heard “a common Yiddish command” used in Talmudic study, her dikh ayn, which means “pay attention, listen up,” take note. See Felstiner, Paul Celan, p. 274. 43 Edmond Jabès, “The Memory of Words,” Paul Celan: Selections, ed. Pierre Joris, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005, p. 220. 4 4 Agamben, “The Idea of Vocation,” Idea of Prose, trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995, p. 45. 45 Attributed to Celan; see Daive, Under the Dome, p. 82. 46 Emended translations of subtitles from Jean-Luc Godard, Le gai savoir, 1969, produced by Gaumont, DVD distributed by Kino Lorber. 47 A version of this section was first published in X-TRA: Contemporary Art Quarterly, 13.1 (2010): 26–35. 48 Bernard Goy, “Interview with Marina Abramović,” Journal of Contemporary Art, 3.2 (1990): 47–54.

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49 Franz Kaf ka, Parables and Paradoxes: In German and English, New York: Schocken Books, 1961, pp. 26–27. 50 Carol Kino, “A Rebel Form Gains Favor. Fights Ensue,” New York Times, 14 March 2010, AR25. 51 Cited in Jim Dwyer, “Confronting a Stranger, for Art,” New York Times, 4 April 2010, p. 24. 52 Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 162. 53 Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” p. 159. 54 Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” p. 160. 55 Simone Weil, “Decreation,” Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr, London and New York: Routledge, 2002, pp. 32–39. My infinite debt is to Giorgio Agamben who shared this text with me as well as his own writings on it; see especially the section “The Experiment, or On Decreation” of “Bartleby, or On Contingency” in Potentialities, pp. 259–271; and its spectral presence in his pieces on Cy Twombly: “Beauty That Falls” (1998) in Writings on Cy Twombly, ed. Nicola Del Roscio, Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2002, p. 283, and “Falling Beauty,” Cy Twombly: Sculptures, Munich: Pinakothek, 2006. 56 Weil, “Decreation,” p. 32. 57 Weil, “Decreation,” pp. 37, 44. For more on these ideas, see Robert Zaretsky, The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 58 Wallace Stevens, “The Relations between Poetry and Painting,” Poets on Painters: Essays on the Art of Painting by Twentieth-Century Poets, ed. J. D. McClatchy, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988, pp. 109–124. This quotation can be found on p. 109. 59 Stevens, “The Relations between Poetry and Painting,” pp. 124, 123. See also Eleanor Cook, “The Decreations of Wallace Stevens,” The Wallace Stevens Journal 4.3/4 (Fall 1980): 46–57; Ayon Roy, “From Deconstruction to Decreation: Wallace Stevens’ Notes Toward a Poetics of Nobility,” The Wallace Stevens Journal 29.2 (Fall 2005): 249–269. 60 The Stevens’ poems cited are from The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play, ed. Holly Stevens, New York: Vintage Books, 1990. 61 Cited in Mary Jacobus, Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016, p. 144. 62 Cy Twombly, “Signs,” L’Esperienza moderna 2 (August–September 1957); see Linda Norden, “What Painting Can Contain,” Cy Twombly: A Gathering of Time, New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2003. 63 Walter Benjamin, “In the Sun,” Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999, p. 664; Gesammelte Schriften Band IV:1, ed. Tillman Rexroth, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991, pp. 419. 64 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, translated by Seán Hand, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988, p. 34. 65 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 35. 66 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 38. 67 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 38. 68 This statement is from the extraordinary interview Deleuze gave to Cahiers du Cinéma in 1986. See “The Brain Is the Screen,” Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, ed. David Lapouade, trans. Anne Hodges and Mike Taormina, New York: Semiotext(e), 2007, p. 295. 69 Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 142. 70 Craig Lundy, History and Becoming: Deleuze’s Philosophy of Creativity, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012, p. 158.

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71 Lundy, History and Becoming, p. 158, citing Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 51. 72 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 44. 73 Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London and New York: Continuum, 2006, pp. 56, 49. I am referring as well to Roland Barthes’ famous texts on Twombly and writing; see “Cy Twombly: Works on Paper” and “The Wisdom of Art,” The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985, pp. 157–176, 176–194. 74 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, pp. 49, 56. 75 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, p. 22. 76 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 220. In his conclusion to a review-essay on Richard Leeman’s Cy Twombly: A Monograph, Paris: Flammarion, 2005, Benjamin Buchloh states only a relative historical consistency (one “specificity”) that Twombly’s work took on within a certain art historiography written in the 1980s and 1990s. We are interested in this relative historicist framing of the work, which is not a given but discursively argued, as well as its delayed receptions, misreadings, anachronistic echoes, and extensions: that is, we are interested in a mode of “transhistorical aesthetic experience” that refuses to be ahistorical because it is enacted as historical and ontological individuations that generate new actual forms, discourses, and historiographic interpretations. Our Deleuzian definition of singularity is certainly not shared by Buchloh. Here is Buchloh’s conclusion in full: “Ultimately, what Leeman’s admirable book forces us to consider is the value of our intense methodological differences, and the profoundly different conceptions of history and the ‘historical’ dimension of Twombly’s work. Leeman seems to argue, and for the most part, splendidly and convincingly, that what makes Twombly’s work ‘historical’ is in fact its singularity, its extraordinary refinement, the extreme differentiation of its subjectivity that align it in some kind of transhistorical continuity or elective affinity with the great traditions of the nineteenth century, be they Neo-Classicism or Symbolism. The price we pay for that extrapolation of Twombly into the spheres of transhistorical aesthetic experience, is of course the loss of the almost aggressive specificity of his work, the interventionist urgency with which it appeared in the late fifties in order to contribute to a crucial agenda of that period: to dislodge the myth of Pollock by transforming gesture into scripture, to reconceive the Surrealist unconscious and its belated American automatisms in an almost protoLacanian conception of the unconscious as textuality, and to transform painting itself into an allegorical incantation of a disappearing classical world of mythical experience, both mourning its loss and celebrating the transcendence of painting’s seemingly eternal bonds with the somatic and the cult,” “Cy Twombly: Ego in Arcadia,” Critique d’art 25 (Spring 2005). 77 Walter Benjamin, “Naples,” Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, New York: Schocken Books, 1978, p. 166. 78 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill & Wang, 1981, pp. 38, 87. 79 In an interview with Carolyn Yerkes, Höfer explains her concept of “interplay”: “I work to create an image that is composed of my memories of the space when I photographed there, which may have been some time before, depending on my work schedule and the print or prints that come out of the machine…My work then is simply to balance the one with the other in creating an image that, in my view, renders justice to the space, and this then always requires cropping, and occasionally, other interventions.” Yerkes, “Interview with Candida Höfer,” Museo Magazine (2010): emphasis added, unpaginated.

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80 Deleuze, Proust & Signs: The Complete Text, trans. Richard Howard, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p. 126. 81 Deleuze, Proust & Signs, pp. 129–130. 82 Candida Höfer: Architecture of Absence, New York: Aperture, 2004. 83 The phrase a “clinch of forces” is used by Deleuze and Guattari in What Is Philosophy?, p. 177. The other quotations are from Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, pp. 115 and 147 respectively. Note also, Höfer: “I make individual images…I am not interested in any kind of completeness. Each image is, for me, a new inquiry into the relationships of an individual space,” Yerkes, “Interview with Candida Höfer,” unpaginated. 84 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell, New York: Dover Publications, 1998, pp. 176–177. 85 Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, trans. Thomas Okey, London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1964, p. 357. 86 Benjamin, “Ibizan Sequence April-May 1932,” Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927– 1934, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone, et al., Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999, p. 592; Gesammelte Schriften Band IV:1, p. 407. 87 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999, p. 389; Gesammelte Schriften Band V:1, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991, p. 491. 88 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 207. 89 Werner Hamacher, “Afformative Strike: Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’,” Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy, eds. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne, Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000, p. 122.

IV SIBYL OF CUMAE, OR INDISCERNIBILITY

See her there? Our necks craned, rictus grin. Astonished. Our bodies aching. She is right there. [Pointing.] There touching other creation stories: him, her, the expulsion. Putti attend her, listen with rapt attention, hold the next book in anticipation. Her presence catches our eye. Her mass and muscular arms. She has the body of an athlete here, which so contrasts with our other legends of her. Legends are representations, retellings, “things to be read.” Others tell us that she wizened because she failed to be precise when asking Apollo to live for as many years as there were grains of sand held in her fist. It is said that she simply forgot to ask for youthful beauty as she survived centuries. (Who wants that?) But what of the force of even her diminished presence, her waning stature in a world bereft of visionary figures like her who possess a certain knowledge of time? Visions—maddening, verging, traversing, mediating tenses—it has been, it is, it will be, it will have been. A vision is a refrain that renders the forms of time plural, differentiated as lines of force-signs; mysteries sensed and experienced rather than meant. So many enter into these visionary refrains as they fall between verses. Visionary refrains populated by encounters, the very means by which discontinuity survives beneath and within representation. You may have already guessed some of these future anterior proper names: Michelangelo, Tarquin Superbus, T. S. Eliot. Proper names are statements without subjects, agents of verbs in the infinitive, openings, passages, channels; they are within the events that befall, deracinate, and create these lives.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003015666-4

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Legend has it that her real name, before she became the function of a place (the Sibyl of Cumae), was Amalthaea. Isidore of Seville thought so even though he read that Varro called her Demophile. Then again, Livy tells us earlier that there were nine books she offered to Tarquin, but his pride made him refuse her gift. In return, she burned six books of visions and refrains, leaving him and the Romans to come with only three. Perhaps this is why Plato’s scholiasts misogynistically called her Taraxandra, “she who alarms men”? Or perhaps her name was Demos, the one who has no speech to be heard, which is nothing other than the real itself as complication, as a multiplicity of names, as difference in advance. Her cave system in Cumae is close to the chaotic beauty of Naples. (Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis described that beauty as a “porosity” of space and time in 1925; Roberto Rossellini sent Ingrid Bergman there and to Cumae in Viaggio in Italia in 1954.) The cave system is said to have had one hundred mouths, each one having its own individuated voice. A multiplicity of voices for a multiplicity of names. As Virgil writes in the sixth book of The Aeneid: “Talibus ex adyto dictis Cumaea Sibylla horrendas canit ambages antroque remugit, obscuris uera inuoluens.” (Such that from the innermost chamber of the cave, the Sibyl of Cumae uttered fearful, resounding mysteries that wrap the truth in obscurity.) But have we listened within her speech to the hearsay and rumor? To that voice reduced to a piping. To faintest echoes. It is Ovid who makes us attentive to her barely audible octaves. Indirectly, freely, her words transmitted to us through Book XIV 151-3 of his The Metamorphoses, as translated into English by A. S. Kline. He tells us how she spoke of continuing to live but grew smaller and smaller because time will “render such a body as I have tiny.” She continues, via Ovid, acknowledging that “I will go as far as having to suffer transformation, and will be viewed as non-existent, but still known as a voice: the fates will bequeath me a voice.” As time passes this Sibyl finds herself in a small ampulla, but her voice remains and extends beyond the walls of her cage. Petronius has Enclopius tell us that Trimalchio saw her with his own eyes. A line we have heard most recently from Eliot, who emphasizes that she wishes to die. And still…her mysterious whispers in-audible for millennia and after that her voice echoes and multiplies, her tiny body trembling and raging as an animal against a restraint. But she must embody these refrains. Her stammers are jittery missives, a living and expressive material that she never helps us interpret. Nor should she. Visionary sounds from her tiny throat resound and vibrate without ever taking on interpretable form.

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Meanwhile we argue whether or not we hear them, whether or not it even matters if we do. Regardless, her pipes—these inhuman sounds within the tunnels of her domain—are sonorous passages, ways through, involutions, openings outside of ourselves—whether or not we know it. Intermezzi.

V FROM OCEANIC CHAOS… A LUMINOUS WAVE Transmissibility in the Aesthetic Thought of Deleuze and Guattari

After the death of Félix Guattari on 29 August 1992, Gilles Deleuze composed a short text entitled “For Félix.” In a few paragraphs Deleuze attests why we should study Guattari’s work, which had compelled him to experiment with his own concepts along Guattari’s unique cartographic axis “territories, flows, machines and universes.” Our attention is drawn to the concluding paragraph where Deleuze writes: Félix’s work is waiting to be discovered or rediscovered. That is one of the best ways to keep Félix alive. Perhaps the most painful aspects of remembering a dead friend are the gestures and glances that still reach us, that still come to us long after he is gone. Félix’s work gives new substance to these gestures and glances, like a new object capable of transmitting their power.1 In a moving passage, Deleuze explains that philosophical, artistic, and historiographic work involves a movement of “rediscovery,” a real movement of difference and repetition, wherein any return or rediscovery involves learning how to create new objects, images, sounds, and concepts. Let us also emphasize the phrase about past images that “still reach us,” “that still come to us,” like signals transmitted from a black hole. Deleuze and Guattari use this verb to transmit when discussing affects, signals, and forces. Generally, it indicates a creative, aleatory, heterogenetic line of escape or flight. Conceiving of transmissibility as a concept of aesthetic history—as a “power of the future” Deleuze notes—shuttles us between artistic labor (creation, research, performance) and cultural reception (exhibition, historiography, criticism). The

DOI: 10.4324/9781003015666-5

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aim being to conceive of art-work as a two-fold, simultaneous operation: it deframes the present, meaning it undoes the actual discourse, precedent, received opinions, clichéd feelings and expressions, as it composes new lines and temporal linkages, new ontological becomings.2 This movement of deframing-composing occurs because an artwork is not simply an object; it is critical-creative thought and labor, a sense-event, “continuous variation,” a futural material-force. Moreover, deframing-composing occurs within time, opening us to a multiplicity of temporal durations (the internal difference of time itself ). As such it opens us to unforeseen, affective sense-events—material encounters that force us to think and to become. In an October 1985 interview, Deleuze posits that “relations of mutual resonance and exchange” between entities, states of things, or fields take place in and through “mediators.” Mediators enable the very act of creation because they are the means—the relay transmission—in and through which forms of content and expression are possible and nonlinear. Without them, there would be no vital encounter between precedents, rivals, friends, or disciplines. Instead, there would only be “separate melodic lines in constant interplay with each other.”3 Deleuze is insistent, however, that this “interplay between different lines isn’t a matter of one monitoring or reflecting another” because “you have to make a move.” A “move” here is a critical-creative act, a betrayal of one’s own position (aesthetic mode, discipline, subject position, precursor) by “giving or taking” to and from another. A move between entities (states of things, subjects, domains) traces an outside and reconfigures one’s own position. It is along this medial-mutant abstract line that aesthetic history will move, change, and become otherwise because it is “constantly changing direction, a mutant line of this kind that is without outside or inside, form or background beginning or end and that is as alive as a continuous variation.”4 Deleuze insists that “mediators are fundamental” because “creation’s all about mediators” and “without them nothing happens.” He adds that “they can be people—for a philosopher, artists, or scientists; for a scientist, philosophers or artists—but things too, even plants or animals, as in Castaneda. Whether they’re real or imaginary, animate or inanimate, you have to form your mediators. It’s a series. If you’re not in some series, even a completely imaginary one, you’re lost.”5 Actual-virtual series allow one to form “mediators.” Without such series, we are lost, adrift at sea, confronting “oceanic chaos” alone. More prosaically, without such series, we become solipsistic and affectless. These actual-virtual series are the threads and patterns of the aesthetic and ontological reticulations that each of us create and undergo: a finely reticulated net is thus cast over and against “oceanic chaos” in order to not lose yourself to cliché, opinion, and the ineffable (the mute stillness of death or theology).6 A mediator in these terms suffers no pantomime or genuflection, but only abides becoming a contending force, an intercessor, an intimate exterior, a false witness, that which defies judgment.7

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We follow Deleuze closely here because he touches directly on how he and Guattari worked together, which, in turn, gives us a concrete example of transmissibility: I need my mediators to express myself, and they’d never express themselves without me: you are always working in a group, even when you seem to be on your own. And still more when it’s apparent: Félix Guattari and I are one another’s mediators…When I work with Guattari each of us falsifies the other, which is to say that each of us understands in his own way notions put forward by the other…These capacities of falsity to produce truth, that’s what mediators are about.8 Guattari mediates Deleuze, which means not only that “the power of the false” is at play, but also that “falsity” is aligned with creation, recomposition, decoherence, becoming. We can read Deleuze-Guattari, Guattari-Deleuze—the mediation of one for and by the other—in their lines here: “Nietzsche’s Dionysus is no more the mythical Dionysus than Plato’s Socrates is the historical Socrates. Becoming is not being, and Dionysus becomes philosopher at the same time that Nietzsche becomes Dionysus.”9 This doubling, intensive-durational becoming is the dangerous, violent ability of falsity to produce truth that lies at the heart of an aesthetic encounter. Both “mediator” and “mediated” become a one. Not a union or synthesis (One), but a disjunctive, baroque, masked one. Sua cuique personae. Depersonalized, composed only of pre-individual singularities (thisness) and impersonal individuations, that is, bodily affects, field percepts, unforeseen events. Here we perform a Chaplinesque sidestep around any question of “influence,” no matter how anxiety-riddled, beyond even “revisionary ratios.”10 There is nothing fluid, natural (psychogenetic), or organic about an encounter. There is only a principle of individuation: prehension, artifice, falsity, challenge, betrayal, because to render a “mediator” is to rend oneself anew. The manner in which Guattari as mediator created a different Deleuze is undeniable—“and then there was my meeting with Félix Guattari, the way we understood and complemented, depersonalized and singularized—in short, loved—one another.”11 Guattari as “mediator” motivated and accelerated Deleuze’s exit from a repressive history of philosophy. A repressive history because it was tied to an academic training that is all too familiar. One wherein the discourse of master–student from the tutorial and seminar environment is mapped onto the very history of one’s entire field. So when Deleuze talks about “mediators” he is not talking about learning and accepting a given tradition or history. Rather, he is devising a means to escape its uncreative, stolid, historicist existence, which has never meant foreclosing on historical understanding and writing as such. Instead, he devises aesthetic-historiographic means to escape it; he renders other archivediagrams for the love of history as untraditional, ranging, creative-clinical, and experimental. This is the opening of any aesthetic history.

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In the interview we have been reading together, Deleuze elaborates this creative escape as the opposite of a transcendent or negative theology of one’s given field or discipline: I’d like to explain how I see what I’ve written…The history of philosophy plays a patently repressive role in philosophy, it’s philosophy’s own version of the Oedipus complex: “You can’t seriously consider saying what you yourself think until you’ve read this and that, and that on this, and this on that”…I myself “did” history of philosophy for a long time, read books on this or that author… But I supposed the main way I coped with it at the time was to see the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery or (it comes to the same thing) immaculate conception. I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important for it to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions that I really enjoyed.12 This is an extraordinary passage. We focus on this adjective “monstrous.” Deleuze argues that the way he undertook the history of philosophy was to “return” to certain philosophers that he knew he had to confront, such as Bergson, Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche, Kant, and others. These encounters were shaped by his belief in a “long preparation,” but equally by his belief in aleatory, fortuitous creation.13 To render Bergson a “mediator” for his own thought, for example, Deleuze had to learn how to become other himself through his “mediator.” Thus, “A Return to Bergson” is the title of Deleuze’s famous afterword for the English translation of Bergsonism. Written more than twenty years after the initial publication of the book (1966), the afterword is itself a performance of Deleuze’s methodology of “return”: his history of philosophy as repetition and masquerade; a return neither recollects some putative origin nor shores up an author-function. Hence his singular “Bergsonism” is a method that prioritizes concepts inherent in Bergson’s own texts, such as multiplicity, the virtual, becoming, and immanence; yet they are transformed, betrayed even, in Deleuze’s reworking of them, which always involves a radical untimeliness. This is precisely what is “monstrous.” The creation of a mediator requires an escape from one’s own subjectivity as well as the fields within which it has already taken on some consistency. “It’s a strange business, speaking for yourself, in your own name, because it doesn’t at all come with seeing yourself as an ego or a person or a subject,” Deleuze admits.14 It is the “harshest exercise in depersonalization.” Why? Because a “mediator” is not a subject or an individual. A “mediator” is a configuration of singularities (affects, percepts, concepts) with a distinct semiotic (the infinitive verb). A “mediator” is an “intensive multiplicity” wherein these singularities and modes of expression depersonalize the artist “through love rather

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than subjection.”15 Whenever we create a “mediator” subjectivity is exposed to its constitutive elements. Elemental, molecular, genetic. Subjectivity then becomes “monstrous” in its encounter with the multiplicities that compose it, with the intensities that run through it. Against ourselves, against own time, “one becomes a set of liberated singularities, words, names, fingernails, things, animals, little events.”16 For Deleuze, “Spinoza” and “Guattari” are such transmissible “proper names,” that is, no longer distinct individuals or subjects as there is nothing there to imitate or interpret. Instead, there is only experimentation: “us in the middle of Spinoza,” Deleuze insists.17 This is no simple reference to the past (a given memory), but rather an experimental forgetting “not to suppress [the past] but because the constitution of a past and the present of which this past is the past are strictly contemporary.”18 Put another way, Deleuze transmits Bergson by reading Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Guattari through Bergson.19 Proper names are passages, fluxes, and intervals wherein intensities pass. “Guattari,” for example, zum beispiel (playing, performing beside himself ) is a field of singularities, “a set of nonobjectified affects,” “hidden emissions,” “dislocations,” false promises, and challenges expressed in infinite verbs: to affect, to escape, to survey, to render, to become. “We can only know what we are by experimenting, like something from the future.”20 Note this beautiful passage, which moves with such Spinozist joy: Climate, wind, season, hour are not of another nature than the things, animals, or people that populate them, follow them, sleep and awaken within them. This should be read without a pause: the-animal-stalks-at-five-o’clock. The becoming-evening, becoming-night of an animal, blood nuptials. Five o’clock is this animal! This animal is this place! “The thin dog is running in the road, this dog is the road,” cries Virginia Woolf. That is how we need to feel. Spatiotemporal relations, determinations, are not predicates of the thing but dimensions of multiplicities…The plane of consistency contains only haecceities [singularities], along intersecting lines. Forms and subjects are not of that world [because] a haecceity has neither beginning nor end, origin or destination; it is always in the middle. It is not made of points, only of lines.21 This reference to Woolf here shows us that art-work is certainly one means to trace and thread this plane of consistency. The aesthetic microhistories that Deleuze and Guattari undertake throughout their four co-written books demonstrate, time and again, that art-work has nothing to do with “rhetoric,” communication, opinion, or reflection, but everything to do with “sensations: percepts and affects, landscapes and faces, visions and becomings.”22 Artworks themselves are thus mediators that place us between planes, in a meanwhile that is the very material lineage of a discrete-continuous multiplicity: “the concrete richness of the sensible.”23 The “peculiarity of art is to pass through the finite in order to rediscover, to restore the infinite.”24 The infinite is defined neither in “the romantic sense of the sublime”

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nor is it “supersensible and transcendental Ideas.”25 It is defined “dimensions of multiplicities” that are the real. Finite artworks give us not chaos as such (“oceanic chaos”), but draw us as close as possible, maintaining a fragile, asymptotic tension with chaos in the force-form of a “chaosmos,” a “composition of chaos,” that creates “the finite sensation through which the infinite is restored, not as a ‘beyond’, but as the finite’s immanent and genetic infinity, not ‘Nature’ but this Nature, as it is being expressed and constructed right here and right now”—a luminous wave.26 One of the most memorable and demanding sections of A Thousand Plateaus comes under the heading: Memories of a Haecceity. Haecceity is another term for singularity in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy. It is a material precipitate of an event: a thisness, a distinct mode of individuation, that complicates the supposed discrete, autonomous, formal individuality of a person, thing, or substance. This individuation is the morphogenetic movement of life as such. It is the immanent movement of life within, throughout, underneath, and amidst the phenomenological, hylomorphic, molar, mode of subjectivity (individuals and persons). There are distinct properties and capacities of each mode of individuation. Each has a conception of materiality, individuation, and consistency. Each takes place as different cross-sections of an immanent plane. For Deleuze and Guattari, the “plane of consistency” composes only singularities; it “knows only speed and affects,” events, and becoming. It is “always variable” and “constantly being altered,” “composed and recomposed.”27 The other plane, the constitutive inherent verso of the “plane of consistency,” is one of “forms, substances subjects.” It is “structural or genetic.” But, Deleuze and Guattari are quick to interrupt any binary opposition between molar and molecular, subjects and haecceities, forms and events. “We must avoid an oversimplified conciliation,” they assert, “as though there were on one hand formed subjects, of the thing or person type, and on the other hand spatiotemporal coordinates of the haecceity type. For you will yield nothing to haecceities unless you realize that this is what you are, and that you are nothing but…longitude and latitude…a set of nonsubjectified affects.”28 You are an assemblage of singularities genetically independent of the contingencies that you take on subjectively, formally, linguistically: “You have the individuality of a day, a season, a year, a life (regardless of its duration)—a climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack…Or at least you can have it, you can reach it.”29 Our mediators reveal that we are in the midst of ourselves, between modes of individuation and temporality as we construct and express our section or milieu of the plane of consistency. It is through our mediators that we sense and touch other temporalities and semiotics within our habitual, modulated ones. The “plane of consistency” also has “its own particular semiotic to serve as expression.”30 Deleuze and Guattari explain that this semiotic is “composed above all of proper names, verbs in the infinitive and indefinite articles or pronouns” because “indefinite article + proper name + infinitive verb constitutes

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the basic chain of expression, correlative to the least formalized contents, from the standpoint of a semiotic that has freed itself from formal significances and personal subjectifications.”31 An indefinite article is neither indeterminate nor vague; rather, it is aligned with the infinite series itself. Infinite in terms of the relations and assemblages that it collects around itself. Indefinite articles “lack nothing when they introduce haecceities, events, the individuation of which does not pass into form and is not effected by a subject.”32 A child. Someone. A life. One dying. Such articles do not “take the place of a subject, but instead do away with any subject in favor of an assemblage of the haecceity type that carries or brings out the event.” This relates to a “proper name,” which is equally in no way “the indicator of a subject” and designates something “on the order of the event, of becoming, or of the haecceity.”33 The proper name is “the agent of the infinitive” because “it marks a longitude and a latitude…it is by virtue of the event that they are in themselves and in the assemblages.”34 The infinitive verb expresses another temporality, “the floating, nonpulsed time proper to Aion,” that is, “the time of the pure event or of becoming.”35 Aion is the temporality of the plane of consistency—the temporality of an event— wherein a “floating line that knows only speeds and continually divides that which transpires into an already-there that is at the same time not-yet-here, a simultaneous too-late and too-early, something that is both going to happen and has just happened.”36 To transmit, then, means to enter into a composition with the elements that you are becoming. Both the finite (discrete) and infinite (continuous) multiplicities that shape your divers, multiform dimensions. One becomes a “populous solitude” when writing, dancing, researching, archiving, performing, thinking, painting: When you work, you are necessarily in absolute solitude. You cannot have disciples, or be part of a school. The only work is moonlighting and is clandestine. But it is an extremely populous solitude. Populated not with dreams, phantasms or plans, but with encounters. An encounter is perhaps the same thing as a becoming…You encounter people (and sometimes without knowing them or ever having seen them) but also movements, ideas, events, entities. All these things have proper names, but the proper name does not designate a person or a subject. It designates an effect, a zigzag, something which passes or happens between the two as though under a potential difference: the ‘Compton’ effect, the ‘Kelvin’ effect. We said the same thing about becomings: it is not one term that becomes the other, but each encounters the other, a single becoming which is not common to the two, since they have nothing do to with one another, but which is between the two, which has its own direction, a bloc of becoming, an a-parallel evolution.37 Aesthetic history is populated by mediators, proper names, “a-parallel evolution.” If a proper name is an “effect” running between precedents and

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contemporaries, histories and becomings, then, are “something new created in between two terms who keep their heterogeneity.”38 What is created is a virtual ensemble, microhistories of proper names, singularities, and events. This is our field: “involution,” modes of becoming, “multiplicity without the unity of an ancestor,” deframings, complications, and explications in the midst of deracinated narratives and images, an attentiveness to forces and signs: sense-events.39 When we work within aesthetic history, we “encounter people (and sometimes without knowing them or ever having seen them) but also movements, ideas, events, entities.” But, to encounter is itself an infinitive verb signifying “to find, to capture, to steal,” but, as Deleuze intimates, “there is no method for finding other than a long preparation.”40 Why does Deleuze claim that there is no method? He is hesitant to posit a method because of the aleatory and transgressive element of an encounter. He insists that an encounter is clandestine, subterranean, fortuitous. But this turns us back to the notion of “long preparation.” In fact, immediately after the lines we’ve just read Deleuze cites from Bob Dylan’s “11 Outlined Epitaphs,” which appeared on the back cover and insert of The Times They Are A-Changing (1964). As a way to explain their “conversation” and precisely how and why both Deleuze and Parnet mediate one another within it, there is a thirty-seven-line quotation from Dylan. Here is some of it, which resonates with Deleuze’s critique of Kantian judgment and tribunals as well as Kurt Weill’s “Pirate Jenny” from Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (1928), which was masterfully covered live by Nina Simone in 1964 at Carnegie Hall: Yes, I am a thief of thoughts not, I pray a stealer of souls… an’ not t’worry about the new rules for they ain’t been made yet an’ t’shout my singin’ mind knowin’ that it is me an’ my kind that will make those rules… if the people of tomorrow really need the rules of today rally ’round all you prosecuting attorneys the world is but a courtroom yes but I know the defendants better ’n you and while you’re bust prosecutin’ we’re bust whistlin’ cleanin’ up the courtroom sweepin’ sweepin’ listenin’ listenin’ winkin’ t’one another

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careful  careful your spot is comin’ up soon.41 Taking Dylan as a model of artistic production, Deleuze notes that here we encounter “a very lengthy preparation, yet no method, nor rules, nor recipes… [Only] having a bag into which I put everything I encounter, provided I am also in the bag. Finding, encountering, stealing instead of regulating, recognizing and judging.”42 To encounter means multiplying and complicating the content of your problematic to the point of saturation or perhaps what is unthinkable as such. Recall when Deleuze cites Francis Bacon’s statement that the canvas is never empty but always replete with the lines of all that has come before. These lines are the very materiality of the problematic. To encounter requires a material field of lines, the veritable presence of the virtual past in the present. This allows for creative involution, the simultaneous erasing and composing of lines, bending and folding lines to connect to other lines they always avoided or missed. It is this action—transmissibility—that allows becoming to unfold and refold. Becoming ensnares the work as much as the artist and the viewer/listener/reader. An act of erasing, simplifying, and involuting what one encounters motivates becoming, which is a paradoxical movement because as one involves—explicating and complicating the folds of a work and oneself—one becomes more “populated.” But “populated” not with people or more things, but with singularities and nonhistorical temporalities, that is, the material and sensational precipitates of an event. Transmissibility is the power of an artwork to deframe any cultural representation and to compose with other modes of culture. Transmissibility is minimally this double movement, which creates aesthetic and historical encounters with singularities rather than subjects. Therefore, what is transmitted is not a given past or even a represented state of things or subject(s); instead, what is created is only an opening, a pure means, a new temporal relation, a past-future (Aion) that “inheres” within the present (Chronos) and is comprised of “incorporeal effects” that make “pre-individual and nonpersonal singularities” sensible and intelligible.43 The past is an immanent terrain, a field, and “not just a reified version of the present” because it is “searchable, explorable, problematizable, penetrable, and livable.”44 For Deleuze, a sense-event is a movement of becoming that traverses time immanently, repeating and thus differentiating the succession of past, present, and future anew. Within this movement, the future “defines an event not in the time-frame that it is in, but in another time-frame” because it is “the forced communication of the present, past, and future of the same event.”45 Of course, this “forced communication” has ontological, ethical, and epistemic effects, if only because it reveals how and why varying temporalities are enfolded within each supposed discrete tense. However, the future is conceived as disjunctive, aleatory force: an outside that paradoxically exists at the most intimate exterior of time as such because it “forces cracks in the stable set of past events to exhibit

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not-yet determinate chance effects, and conversely forces the future to have shown itself, at least darkly, in its precursors.”46 This past-future relationship, what Deleuze and Guattari also term “reverse causalities,” finds its fuller articulation in their discussion of the diagram.47 For them, a diagram heterogenetically inheres within the archive of forms, which includes the cultural, political, and historical states of things that have already taken on consistency. Every archive of formal statements, arrangements, and cultural artifacts has a diagrammatic “informal dimension.”48 “The diagram,” as Deleuze explicates it in relation to Foucault’s work, “is no longer an auditory or visual archive, but a map, a cartography that is coextensive with the whole social field…every diagram is a spatio-temporal multiplicity.”49 There are as many diagrams as there are social fields. But, there is a crucial difference. Diagrams make “no distinction between content and expression, a discursive formation and a non-discursive formation.”50 Such a discursive/non-discursive distinction places language and images in a new relation, one that shifts us from forms-signs to forcessigns, representational strategies to signaletic onto-aesthetic ones. This is because within the diagrammatic, forces are exercised on other forces. For this reason, “every diagram is intersocial and constantly evolving” because “it never functions in order to represent a persisting world but produces a new kind of reality, a new model of truth. It is neither the subject of history, nor does it survey history. It makes history by unmaking preceding realities and significations, constituting hundreds of points of emergence or creativity, unexpected conjunctions or improbably continuums. It doubles history.”51 For Deleuze and Guattari, then, art-work is a diagrammatic power, an “abstract machine,” a Joycean chaosmos. It is a vital-materialism. A forceful yet concrete signaletic assemblage embodying an “informal” power. Aesthetic history, as we are conceiving it, is thus archival-diagrammatic. As such we must not simply oppose history and becoming because “history need not be homogenously measured or confined by teleology, but can be open, unpredictable and nomadic,” just as becoming “need not already reach its infinitive limits, but can proceed in a more cautious and incremental fashion,” with varying speeds and trajectories.52 For us, art-work creates a forced movement between archive and diagram, which accounts for the insights, illuminations, and past-future “meanwhiles” that it presents us. This is neither a retrograde formalism nor a cultural criticism that overwrites and turns its back on sense-events. Rather, it is a mode wherein the aesthetic and historiographic problematics are encountered both in their possible solutions (a specific assemblage of sensible material, the statements and visibilities it produces) and in their diagrammatic, virtual and real complications of the problematic itself. It is in this manner that the relation of archive and diagram comprises a heterogenous series between past and future. In fact, it reorients us, as aesthetic historians, toward the future rather than the past. “The diagram stems from the outside but the outside does not merge with a diagram, and continues instead

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to ‘draw’ new ones” and, in this way, “the outside is always an opening on to a future: nothing ends, since nothing has begun, but everything is transformed,” Deleuze posits while mediating Michel Foucault.53 He goes further to suggest that such a force-diagram presents us with actual, discursive, stratified modes of resistance, that is, “points, knots or focuses” that “act in turn on the strata, but in such a way as to make change possible” because “the thought of the outside is a thought of resistance.”54 To touch an outside, we must think through force-diagrams as well as cultural archives and historical, discursive narratives. We redirect re-search toward an open future wherein past-futures lie ahead of us, and behind. Such archivaldiagrammatic “reverse causalities” “do not so much suggest that we can go back in (chronological) time, as if yesterday was just around the corner,” but what they “refer to is how something that has not yet arrived can still have an impact upon what has by forming an effective limit.”55 Therefore, although an “abstract machine” is “not a force of historicism,” it is also not “outside history” because it a pre- or un-historical formation that “guides or pilots a history that will come.”56 Diagrammatic movements take on a consistency and are actualized within “concrete assemblages,” specific socio-historical contexts and discursive formations, which, in turn, reshape the entirety of the virtual plane of consistency itself. The complexity of this archival-diagrammatic movement is the centerpiece of Kamini Vellodi’s Tintoretto’s Difference: Deleuze, Diagrammatics, and Art History (2019). Here she presents Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the diagram as what allows the difference at work within art to take place and affect us. The diagram, Vellodi argues, is “at once a map of sensations, a generative sign, and an a priori of ‘new reality’.”57 Her brilliant historiographic rereading of Tintoretto focuses on identifying his “stage-method” as the diagrammatic function of his painting. This “stage-method” works to undermine and destabilize the communicative coherency of the historia within Tintoretto’s works, thereby functioning as a reimagining of architectural settings, spatial arrangements, gestural deixis, and the singular traits of color that “permits the detachment of relations of illumination, proportion, mass, and angle from the objects to which they refer, such that light and space become free elements unbound from the demands of the historia.”58 Tintoretto is one example. There are many others. This is precisely what Vellodi shows us: that a genealogy of the diagram in all its varied, iterative, temporal becomings is one task of an aesthetic history. Such an aesthetic history would force us to confront an art historical aporia, one that Vellodi makes starkly evident when she writes that “a philosophy of art without a history of art risks abstract generalities about the nature and condition of art” and “a history of art without a philosophy of art risks uncritical description tethered to the fact of empirical reality.”59 Aesthetic history is thus always already archival-diagrammatic experience, as an image-intensity complex, which is never “simply a question of inciting an experience of process rather than product, but of inviting an experience of discord made consistent.”60

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This is why we have shaped transmissibility as precisely the study of what happens “in between,” during a “meanwhile” between process and product, chaos and composition. It really has nothing to do with historicism, worldviews, or origins.61 It has only to do with mediated-divergent, archival-diagrammatic lines of practice becoming consistent. In other words, a “meanwhile” is an archival-diagrammatic threshold, a “postromantic turning point”—that gives us “signposts of a research programme” to come.62 As Éric Alliez has argued, this “research programme” to come must challenge the “aesthetic regime” and its phenomenology of the image.63 He outlines this in terms of the “diagrammatic” (the relation of force-signs, vitalism-materialism). Alliez writes: the dynamic/dialectic of forms-signs animating the “aesthetic regime” cannot in any way be equivalent to an energetics of forces because…it doesn’t aim at the negation of forms and the denegation of signs…rather, it aims at fusing and deterritorializing them as forces-signs…carried off in this semiotics of intensities, “information” fissures and is dissociated from the discursiveness in which it was caught (its intelligibility is suspended, scrambled, put into crisis).64 Such an argument reconceptualizes the notion of a “sign” in order to escape the phenomenology of the image and the mode of address that most art criticism, art history, and philosophy deploys to articulate that phenomenology of forms-signs— disinterested yet intentional, reflective, subjective, communicative, and at times ineffable. Discourse as the guarantor of intelligibility is “suspended, scrambled, put into crisis” by an aesthetic event of forces-signs. With Alliez, we wager that aesthetic history must become capable of “making insensible forces…sensible.”65 Let us remain with our mediator Alliez a bit longer here and wager that aesthetic history is “engaged in the study of the powers to affect and to be affected that characterize all things and their becoming, with the aim of extracting the possibility of something being produced afresh” because this “production is in turn related to that critical point when the stifled forces of the present appeal to…a new composition of forces,” that is, “a presentation of the infinite in the finitude of the here-and-now.”66 This affective capacity requires the noncoincidental yet “constitutive relationship of philosophy with non-philosophy,” of aesthetics with history, of diagram with archive, of discourse with event.67 For an event is ongoing, always already taking place even when it appears that nothing is happening, within the “meanwhile.” The intentionality of phenomenology is countered by the “multilinear complex” of an event. “Events always involve periods when nothing happens,” Deleuze states, “it is not even a matter of there being such periods before and after some event, they are part of the event itself… People miss the amazing wait in events they were least awaiting.”68 Discussing an event in these terms returns Deleuze to artworks as mediators because “it’s art, rather than the media, that can grasp events.” He adds: “you see, I don’t believe in things.”69

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Aesthetic history demands that we “struggle against opinion, which claims to protect us from chaos itself ”.70 We sense chaos—ontological becoming—because art-work as a composition of forces-signs can render it sensible. It transmits a senseevent, “a vision that illuminates” chaos for “an instant,” an instant that defies opinion, cliché, and given experience.71 A sense-event “confers on signs a new material power of decoding (deductions of fragments of heterogenous codes, a-signifying and post-signifying connections in continuous variation, intensive local recoding of the global expressiveness, movement of traits of expression) that destratifies the space (physical, symbolic, discursive, institutional) in which it is inscribed by rendering sensible the trans-semiotic presence of insensible/ anaesthetized forces.” 72 Aesthetic history orients itself along these vital semiotic lines of thoughtpractice that allow us to compose histories wherein becoming remains signaletic, forceful, immanent. Yet we need a strategy that refuses to let us escape the real lesson of transmissibility, namely that “it is the diagram’s job to come to fruition in the archive.” 73 It is this double movement of art-work that our “research programme” seeks to comprehend: “from virtuals we descend to actual states of affairs, and from states of affairs we ascend to virtuals, without being able to isolate one from the other.” 74 Mediated movement—archival-diagrammatic, “concrete assemblages” and “abstract machines,” “oceanic chaos” and a “luminous wave”—is effectuated by two lines that are “inseparable but independent, each complete in itself: it is like the envelopes of the two very different planes.” 75 The complication of the virtual within the actual and its counter-actualization—of becoming within history as well as the inverse, history within becoming, the actual reassembling the virtual— means that our becoming “empiricist, synthetic, and ethological” requires “an encounter, a conjunction” within and beyond our (un)timely histories.76 In an appendix to The Logic of Sense (1969), Deleuze shares a straightforward diagnosis of aesthetics as we inherit it: aesthetics suffers from a wrenching duality. On one hand, it designates the theory of sensibility as the form of possible experience; on the other hand, it designates the theory of art as the reflection of real experience. For these two meanings to be tied together, the conditions of experience in general must become the conditions of real experience; in this case, the work of art would really appear as experimentation.77 He continues by asserting that the “essential characteristic of the modern work of art,” “without doubt” he adds, is that several stories can be told at once. “It is not at all,” he explains, “a question of different points of view on one story supposedly the same; for points of view would still be submitted to a rule of convergence. It is rather a question of different and divergent stories, as if an absolutely distinct landscape corresponded to each point of view.” These divergent and different points of view are the predicates that we are, that we become. Art-work implies a

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movement beyond perceptions and affections to percepts and affects—singularities that “affirm all the heterogenous series” without a “rule of convergence,” without universals, without intentionality. Life as such complicates itself—immanently— within the aesthetic and historiographic series, differentiating itself in a manifold “texturology.” As Deleuze concludes, “the conditions of real experience and the structures of the work of art are reunited: divergence of series, decentering circles, constitution of chaos which envelops them.” 78 Although there is no given method of transmissibility, there is an ethic of a “long preparation,” with its infinitive verbs to deframe and to compose creating temporal passages, involutions, and thus becomings. Transmissibility works clandestinely to “cross thresholds of perception” in order to become “the art of inventing the key to the enveloped thing,” a phrase from Leibniz that Deleuze mediates for us. Or, in another refrain: “Waves are vibrations, shifting borderlines inscribed on the plane of consistency, as so many abstractions. The abstract machine of the waves. In The Waves, Virginia Woolf—who made all of her life and work a passage, a becoming, all kinds of becomings between ages, sexes, elements, and kingdoms—intermingles seven characters…each advances like a wave, but on the plane of consistency they are a single abstract wave whose vibration propagates following a line of flight…traversing the entire plane.” 79 Notes 1 Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007, p. 387. 2 On “deframing and composition,” see Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 187. 3 Deleuze, Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 125. 4 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 497. 5 Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 125. 6 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 205. 7 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pp. 126–135. 8 Deleuze, Negotiations, pp. 125–126. 9 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 65. 10 The phrase “revisionary ratios” is an allusion to Harold Bloom’s canonical The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973, pp. 14–15. He also uses the quite beautiful phrase “revisionary swerves,” p. 44. 11 Emphasis added; Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 7. 12 Deleuze, Negotiations, pp. 5–6. 13 Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London and New York: Continuum, 2006, p. 5; Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988, p. 129. 14 Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 6.

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1 5 Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 7. 16 Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 7. 17 Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, p. 122. 18 Deleuze, Letters and Other Texts, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2020, p. 220. 19 See Craig Lundy, Deleuze’s Bergsonism, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, p. 9. In a previously unpublished interview by Raymond Bellour with Deleuze and Guattari regarding Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze adds that “no reference to the past, not to suppress it but because the constitution of a past and the present of which this past is the past are strictly contemporary. I feel very Bergsonian again, it’s perfect.” See Letters and Other Texts, p. 220. 20 Deleuze, Letters and Other Texts, p. 221. 21 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 263. 22 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 177. 23 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987, p. 54. 24 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 197. 25 Stephen Zepke, Art as Abstract Machine: Ontology and Aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari, London and New York: Routledge, 2005, p. 173. 26 Zepke, Art as Abstract Machine, p. 173. 27 Deleuze Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, p. 128. 28 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 262. 29 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 262. 30 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 263. 31 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 263. 32 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 264. 33 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 265, 264. 34 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 264. They give examples such as “the becoming-horse of Little Hans, the becoming-wolf of the Were, the becoming-tick of the Stoic.” 35 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 263. 36 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 262. 37 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, p. 5. 38 Isabelle Stengers, “Gilles Deleuze’s Last Message,” p. 3: www.recalc​itra​nce.com/dele​ uzel​a st.htm. See also Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts, trans. Michael Chase, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. 39 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 266–267, 241. We should note that this mode of “creative involution” is the ultimate aim of our “apprenticeship to art.” “In becoming there is no past nor future–not even present, there is no history. In becoming it is, rather, a matter of involuting; it’s neither regression nor progression. To become is to become more and more restrained, more and more simple, more and more deserted and for that very reason populated. This is what’s so difficult to explain: to what extent one should involute…[because] experimentation is involutive,” Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, p. 22. Thus an act of simplifying and involuting what one encounters motivates becoming, which is a paradoxical movement because as one involves— explicating and complicating the folds of a work and oneself—one becomes more “populated.” But “populated” not with people or more things, but with singularities and nonhistorical temporalities, that is, with mediators, the material and sensational precipitates of an event. 40 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, p. 5. 41 Bob Dylan, Writings and Drawings, London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1973, pp. 106–107. 42 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, p. 7.

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43 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, p. 73. 4 4 Jay Lampert, Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History, London and New York, Continuum, 2011, p. 51. 45 Lampert, Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History, p. 66. 46 Lampert, Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy of History, p. 66. 47 On “reverse causalities,” see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 431. 48 Deleuze Foucault, trans, Seán Hand, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988, p. 34. 49 Emphasis in original; Deleuze, Foucault, p. 34. 50 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 34. 51 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 35. 52 Lundy, History and Becoming: Deleuze’s Philosophy of Creativity, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012, p. 112. 53 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 89. 54 Deleuze, Foucault, pp. 89, 90. 55 Lundy, History and Becoming, p. 111. 56 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 142; Lundy, History and Becoming, p. 112. 57 Kamini Vellodi Tintoretto’s Difference: Deleuze, Diagrammatics, and Art History, London: Bloomsbury, 2019, p. 165. 58 Vellodi, Tintoretto’s Difference, p. 91. 59 Vellodi, Tintoretto’s Difference, p. 164. 60 Vellodi, Tintoretto’s Difference, p. 102. She further explains: “A diagrammatic thought of art doubling as a constructivist historiography of art” is an “engagement with difference as it is posed by Tintoretto’s works. In this way this book could be read on multiple registers – as a critical study of the methods of art history and of the conceptions of time, experience, and aesthetics in the thought of art, and an account and practice of Deleuze’s philosophy of the diagram. It could also be read, simply, as a study of Tintoretto’s works not in his time, but for ours,” p. 166. 61 Éric Alliez, The Signature of the World: What Is Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy?, trans. Eliot Ross Albert and Alberto Toscano, London: Continuum, 2004, p. 22. 62 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 343. 63 Alliez, “Undoing the Image (Signposts of a Research Programme),” Aesthetics and Contemporary Art, eds. Armen Avanessian and Luke Skrebowski, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2001, p. 66; Alliez, “Body without Image: Ernesto Neto’s Anti-Leviathan,” Spheres of Action: Art and Politics, eds. Éric Alliez and Peter Osborne, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013, p. 47. 64 Alliez, “Body without Image: Ernesto Neto’s Anti-Leviathan,” p. 47. 65 Alliez, “Body without Image: Ernesto Neto’s Anti-Leviathan,” p. 47. 66 Alliez, The Signature of the World, p. 29. 67 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 105. 68 Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 160. 69 Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 160 70 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 203. 71 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 204. 72 Alliez, “Body without Image: Ernesto Neto’s Anti-Leviathan,” p. 48. 73 Emphasis added; Deleuze, Foucault, p. 121. 74 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 160. 75 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 161. 76 Alliez, The Signature of the World, p. 29. On “ethology,” see Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, p. 125; and Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 336.

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7 7 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 260. 78 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 261. 79 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 252. On Deleuze and Woolf, see Beatrice Monaco, Machinic Modernism: The Deleuzian Literary Machines of Woolf, Lawrence and Joyce, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

VI IMPERCEPTIBILITY, OR THE EAR OF THE FUTURE

There are innumerous legends about Kaf ka, a proper name. At times the facts outshine even the most fanciful ones. In a sanatorium outside Vienna, on what would become his deathbed, Kaf ka edited galley proofs of his last short story “Josephine, Die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse.” “Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse Folk” was written in the spring and published in the Easter edition of the Prager Presse in 1924. Kaf ka died on the third of June 1924 from starvation caused by his tuberculosis. At the end of his life he was unable to speak because his throat was swollen. Kaf ka was silent, but writing. Or, as he called his writing, “scribbling.” This short story is presented by an unnamed narrator, one of the “mouse folk,” who begins: “our singer is called Josephine. Anyone who has not heard her does not know the power of song.”1 Nearly every comment about Josephine is accompanied by one about the “folk” themselves. We are told that although they have “a tradition of singing” and have “an inkling of what singing is,” they are “quite unmusical.” Moreover, they “ignore historical research entirely.” Despite some apathy towards Josephine’s singing (“Among intimates we admit freely to one another that Josephine’s singing, as singing, is nothing out of the ordinary”), the narrator is reluctant to dismiss it altogether because: Whenever we get bad news—and on many days bad news comes thick and fast at once, lies and half-truths included—she rises up at once… True, she does not save us and she gives us no strength…And yet it is true that in emergencies we hearken better than at other times to Josephine’s voice…It is not so much a performance of songs as an DOI: 10.4324/9781003015666-6

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assembly of the people, and an assembly where except for the small piping voice in front there is complete stillness. The “mouse folk” need her “performance” as a focal point of their communality, their “assembly” (“we like to huddle close to each other”). However, they have no interest in her art as art. In fact, the narrator claims that “the mere fact of our listening to her is proof that she is no singer.” For, if she were a “really trained singer,” then “we should unanimously turn away from the senselessness of any such performance.” So what is Josephine’s “thin piping” if not exceptional singing? It is certain that Josephine’s ability—what she does before her audience, how she transforms them—falls outside of any clichéd definitions of art. The narrator gives us these clichés only to dismiss them. Her singing is neither “so great that even the most insensitive cannot be deaf to it” nor does it give them “a feeling that from her throat something is sounding which we have never heard before…something that Josephine alone and no one else can enable us to hear.” Josephine herself mistakes the nature of her art. She is “blinded her by self-conceit,” needing an entourage to cater to her at times diva-like attitude: “what she wants is public, unambiguous, permanent recognition of her art, going far beyond any precedent so far known.” This recognition proves elusive. Josephine’s “piping” (Pfeifen is the verb Kaf ka employs), her performance—both seeing and hearing her—allows her to embody something immanent to the entire audience. Her body transmits emotion, a sensation. It is elemental in the sense that her “piping” becomes an element of the “mouse folk” themselves, which is why the narrator cannot abide treating Josephine differently or as an exception because of her vocal skills or lack thereof. It is not the beauty of her singing that matters, but what it renders sensible: the way in which “this piping of hers is no piping” links them. The singularity of Josephine’s art does not exist outside of the relation to the audience; it links an aspect of her to everyone else and vice versa. Yet if you sit down before her, it is not merely a piping; to comprehend her art it is necessary not only to hear but to see her…opposition is only possible at a distance, when you sit before her, you know: this piping of hers is no piping [was sie hier pfeift, ist kein Pfeifen]. This “piping of hers that is no piping” transmits something that is neither the unique beauty of her voice nor her ability to express what is in the hearts of her audience (“she knows so little about these hearts of ours”). Her singularity—her anomalous existence amongst the “mouse

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folk” about which the narrator is trying to tell us—resides in how and why a “power of life” traverses her “frail body”: she is a “delicate creature, shaken by vibrations especially below the breastbone.” In this way her piping “irresistibly makes its way into us…almost like a message from the whole people to each individual.” Within this “pearl-like” sonorous refrain Josephine loses herself. She becomes a proper name rather than an individual mouse—Josephine: a collective affect of the “folk,” the plural that can never be represented but can be expressed. An affect is always a co-creation with and alongside life itself. This becoming turns on the “or” of Kaf ka’s title. Josephine is neither an individual subject nor the folk as such, but only the passage between them. The narrator is resolute that it is never about Josephine’s identity or feelings, which in fact puts off many of her kind (we learn little of her biography, nothing about how she came to occupy the position she does). Josephine is anomalous. Thus the narrator’s memoir. She exists at the edge of her people; passing between and through them, passing between the mouse folk and the chaotic outside world by embodying the shared terrain of all habitual piping. By becoming so she transmits the shared, immanent terrain of the “mouse folk,” that is, the pathways, exits, dummy tunnels, escape routes—which the narrator tells us are “the real artistic accomplishment of our people.” Nevertheless, the narrator remains ambivalent about what is lost upon her departure in the first and last paragraphs of the story: Josephine is the sole exception [eine Ausnahme]; she has a love for music and knows how to transmit [vermitteln] it; she is the only one; when she dies, music—who knows for how long—will vanish from our lives… The time will come when her last notes sound and die into silence…and the people will get over the loss of her. Not that it will be easy for us; how can our gatherings take place in utter silence? Still, were they not silent even when Josephine was present? Was her actual piping notably louder and more alive than the memory of it will be? Was it even in her lifetime more than a simple memory?… So perhaps we shall not miss her much after all…[she] will happily lose herself in the numberless throngs of the heroes of our people, and soon, since we are no historians, will rise to the heights of redemption and be forgotten [in gesteigerter Erlösung vergessen] like all her brothers. Even her “redemption” does not allow Josephine to transcend her people. Rather, it is a headlong rush (“her road…must go downhill”), a line of flight or descent, into imperceptibility, into immanence. Her

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redemption is oblivion, a specific mode of antimemory. What she transmitted will have to be embodied anew, under new conditions. Or else, it will be forgotten. Just as she was not the first Sängerin, it also remains to us to study voice (Gesang studieren)—an ethic of intensive listening that enables us to pass beyond ourselves and our ignorance of “historical research.” For Josephine “does not commemorate or celebrate something that happened but confides to the ear of the future the persistent sensations that embody the event.”2 Hear her sonorous, imperceptible line, trailing off, disappearing without a farewell. Notes 1 All quotations are from Franz Kaf ka, “Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse Folk,” trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, in The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, New York: Schocken Books, 1971, pp. 360–376. For the original German text, see Erzählungen und Kleine Prosa, New York: Schocken Books, 1946. 2 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 177.

VII TO TRANSMIT AND RECEIVE VIBRATIONS AND WAVES Italo Calvino as Aesthetic History

It is part of the legend. In 1985 the Italian writer Italo Calvino was to present the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University. He framed the lectures as a contemplation on the precarious future of literature in the twenty-first century, “the so-called postindustrial era of technology” he calls it. Calvino was nonetheless cautiously confident because he believed that “the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it.” He devoted the “memos” to six “values” in order to transmit them to the new millennium (our past-future). Each memo locates a singularity of literature; singularities that have nothing to do with formalist characteristics. They are lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. The sixth, unwritten memo/mémoire was to be called “Consistency.” Sadly, Calvino never presented these six lectures at Harvard because he died unexpectedly from a cerebral hemorrhage in the garden of his house in Roccamare, Italy, where he wrote the five memos. His sudden death gives these memos an added pathos, but it also makes their message all the more urgent as it resonates as a mémoire d’outre tombe: persistent, joyful, serious, and original. All the more so as we realize Calvino’s desire to become himself an opening, a channel, an “art of memory” he sometimes called it, that could construct and express a relation between past and future. Consistency is a metamorphic end because it signifies an emergence from an unwritten plane and a dissolving into this very ground (the sheet of paper). Because when we become a singularity-event—a smile without a cat, as it were, or answering “tu sei la tartaruga” when your daughter asks you after a cerebral hemorrhage “who am I?”—we become consistent without losing anything of the infinite.1 Consistency. Such a trait is always a risk. One Calvino remained keenly aware of throughout his life. Moving between genres and tropes admits as much. But he DOI: 10.4324/9781003015666-7

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also remained with something throughout each of his writing experiments. For example, the literary tropes and narratives generated by his tarot deck experiments in The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973) are reiterated, albeit with maximal difference, in If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979). To remain with something, a line of thought, practice, or research so that it is difficult to tell if this fidelity has stopped generating work that matters or if it repeats with such nuance and difference that it becomes “original” is part of the method Calvino embodied. To wait. To persist. He possessed the patience to weave “a vast net” so as to catch the contours of a consistent, infinite event within the structures and orders of history and culture. Alongside Gilles Deleuze, Calvino also posits a plane of consistency beneath representation wherein a certain collective, anonymous, and onto-aesthetic becoming takes place. This plane is the source of the diagrammatic events (the active forces) that resonate through our archives and histories, but the diagram differs from history and culture. History and culture (archives, collections, discursive formations, and traditions) give the plane of consistency “a stability that it does not itself possess, for in itself it is unstable, agitated, and shuffled around,” much like Calvino’s infinite tarot card open work.2 As Calvino explains, “for me the main thing in a narrative is not the explanation of an extraordinary event, but the order of things that this extraordinary event produces in itself and around it; the pattern, the symmetry, the network of images deposited around it, as in the formation of a crystal.”3 Becoming visible, for Calvino, signifies a relation of forces and forms, both aleatory and codependent: the rhythms and resonances between delimit a threshold wherein consistency becomes an opening to the future. Only here does literature become an aesthetic and ethical “network of invisible relationships,” “a vast net,” capable of drawing together “the sensations that things transmit” by combining “a scientist’s ability to produce general rules with a poet’s attention for what is singular and unique.”4 Such an aesthetic philosophy is what Calvino’s work transmits. A verb he uses throughout his creative and critical writing. Transmissibility is the very “difficult love” of Calvino’s entire aesthetic philosophy.5 It is precisely what he desires to “project…into the future.”6 From Eugenio Montale’s subtle involutions of “style and tradition,” Calvino embraced an attentiveness to the most “tenuous traces.” Put another way, via Lucretius this time, an attentiveness to “waves that gently cast up on the bibula harena, the ‘imbibing sand’.” 7 This “working method” requires us, Calvino explains, to make “diverse experiments” wherein words are “a perpetual pursuit of things as a perpetual adjustment of their infinite variety.”8 More than Mr. Palomar, Calvino casts himself as Perseus, whose “refusal to look directly” into the face of the actual, the topical or contemporary, is certainly “not in a refusal of the reality in which [we are] fated to live,” but rather we must recognize “the sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he has the secret of lightness.”9 Far from an escape into fantasy, the irrational, or political apathy,

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Calvino offers us a consistent attentiveness to “tenuous traces,” that is, a “way of looking at the world based on philosophy and science” that arises from our own “linguistic power.”10 Such an attentiveness is capable of “transmitting the sense” of the multiplicity of things and temporalities—of tenuous survivals, reorderings, and aleatory events—with “precision and determination, not with vagueness and the haphazard,” in order to escape our “anthropocentric parochialism.”11 Imagination motivates Calvino’s aesthetic philosophy as a “difficult love.” Imagination as the capacity to evoke; imagination as an “instrument of knowledge” rather than sentimentalism marks this difficulty. For Calvino, imagination “cannot be anything but anthropomorphic.”12 But, at the same time, he insists that his work has always sought “in the imagination a means to attain a knowledge that is outside the individual, outside the subjective.”13 Moreover, this is attuned not toward the actual (the here-now) alone, but is oriented along the verge between actual and virtual, past and present. Calvino avers that the imagination is “a repertory of what is potential, what is hypothetical, of what does not exist and has never existed, and perhaps will never exist but might have existed.”14 Literature and art draw on “this gulf of potential multiplicity” and thus become “indispensable to any form of knowledge.” To evoke an image is difficult, particularly in the face of our twenty-firstcentury “inundation” of digital-mediatic images, which Calvino presciently foresaw. “Will the power of evoking images of things that are not there,” he asks, “continue to develop in a human race increasingly inundated by a flood of prefabricated images?”15 If he posits that cultural and historical visibility is one of the “values” of literature as well as one of our “basic human faculties,” then we must continue to learn new arts of memory (to allude to the essential work by Calvino’s friend the great scholar Frances Yates), new modes of transmissibility, new means of evocation.16 For without them “the power of bringing visions into focus with our eyes shut, of bringing forth forms and colors from the lines of black letters on a white page, and in fact of thinking in terms of images” will atrophy.17 Far removed from “ephemeral daydreams,” Calvino challenges us to face the virtual, to trace its subterranean and protean lines within the actual, so as “to enable the images to crystallize into a well-defined, memorable, and self-sufficient form.”18 As with all “difficult loves” this would be an encounter with an artwork “conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic…”19 This statement of aesthetic philosophy is also an “ethical seeking, forever problematical and forever risky.”20 For only as a mode of “ethical seeking” do philosophy, science, and art traverse one another to produce “vastly diverse visionary and linguistic worlds,” which is the only chance we have of imagining and inventing “a new way of being,” of “becoming different.” 21

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Such visionary and linguistic worlds embody pre-individual singularities and impersonal individuations that shape an aspect of the plane of consistency. Calvino refers to these singularities as “preconscious subject matter.” He writes that literature can become “charged with preconscious subject matter” and, moreover, it can “find a voice for these” singularities and individuations.22 This “power to transmit an unmistakable message and a special distortion of the human figure and of situations,” allows us, in turn, “to escape from the limitations and one-sidedness of every representation and every judgment,” a kind of “detachment from the particular, that sense of the vastness of the whole.”23 To reach this immanent life and to let such events speak justifies the autonomy and criticality (“critical spirit”) that all art demands. We struggle to inherit and create alongside these demands and the memories emanating from them. Memories that have been “transmitted to collective thought and culture.”24 Transmitted neither as an autotelic history nor as a representational one. A thought experiment at the center of If on a winter’s night a traveler: If I were only a hand, a severed hand that grasps a pen and writes…Who would move this hand? The anonymous throng? The spirit of the times? The collective unconscious? I do not know. It is not in order to be the spokesman for something definable that I would like to erase myself. Only to transmit the writable that waits to be written, the tellable that nobody tells.25 Such onto-aesthetic material-vitalism is the vocation of a writer (or a traveler) who embodies our three virtues—imperceptibility, impersonality, and indiscernibility. This vocation requires becoming capable of capturing and working with the immanence of life. Becoming a channel wherein organic-inorganic, past-future, human-inhuman are caught up in ontological and aesthetic becomings with varied temporalities, signals, and horizons. A literary event is the labor undergone to deframe and to compose within historical contents, to sense the “vastness of the whole” as an open-work of actual-virtual circuits rewired via aleatory, unforeseen becomings. Therefore, as noted above, it is “not the explanation of an extraordinary event,” but rather the “order of things that this extraordinary event produces in itself and around it.” Calvino’s focus here is the intensified attentiveness that occurs within a “discontinuous and immanent” event.26 An attentiveness to “the pattern, the symmetry, the network of images deposited around it, as in the formation of a crystal.”27 Second only to Deleuze’s famous concept of the “crystal-image,” Calvino develops his image of thought—word crystals as a literary event. For “words, like crystals, have facets and axes of rotation with different properties, and light is refracted differently according to how these word crystals are places, and how these polarizing surfaces are cut and superimposed.”28 Calvino never shies away from the linkages between literature and philosophy because “events are like crystals, they become and grow only out of edges, or on the edge.”29 In fact, he

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emphasizes that although the linkages and encounters between them may remain unresolved, we must learn to think of them as “permanent but ever new.”30 Whom Do You Write For?

If we turn to an exchange between Pier Paolo Pasolini and Calvino from 1973, it is possible to see Calvino’s distance from both a postmodern demand for all cultural work to present a socio-political critique of a given state of affairs as well as any simulacral abstraction of the world because his “visual poetics…challenge and revise a postmodern…idea of the image as pure surface and simulacrum with no referent in the material world.”31 On 29 January 1973 Pasolini published a review of Invisible Cities (1972) in the Italian weekly Tempo. Calvino responded to it by writing Pasolini a letter from Paris dated 7 February 1973 that characterizes Pasolini’s review as “full of a direct approach to the text and lively intelligence, far removed from any of the predictable mechanism of critical discourse.”32 Pasolini’s critique of the text begins by recounting his own personal relationship with Calvino and then proceeds to foreground a certain Platonism at work in it, which he submits to a fairly predictable neo-Marxist judgment. A judgment that may very well have been within “the predictable mechanism of critical discourse,” despite Calvino’s comments otherwise. After recounting their relationship from an initial encounter in the 1950s and their shared commitment to Italian Neorealism, Pasolini writes that at the beginning of the 1970s Calvino “stopped feeling close to me [ha cessato di sentirsi vicino a me].”33 They found themselves on opposite sides of a “split” (la spaccatura) regarding socio-political engagement and how to deal with the contemporary world. Pasolini, for his part, chose not to work “to reestablish the truth” but rather to say “at the time what must be said.”34 Simply put, Pasolini asserts that Calvino absconds with the truth by turning to fantasy and surrealism, while he remained engaged with the contemporary world and history. This is not to say that he could not appreciate the value of Invisible Cities. Far from it. He speaks of Calvino’s “radiant, almost crystalline” sense of humor and his attunement to “make things beautiful” in a such a “resistant,” “brightening,” and “patient” manner.35 Nevertheless, Pasolini calls the text the work of an “old man-boy [vecchio-ragazzo]” for whom his “desires are memories.” Not only his desires, but “his notions, information, news, experiences, ideologies, logics: all are memories.”36 Calvino constructs culture as a “marvelous fossil [un meraviglioso fossile],” Pasolini argues. This is the primary target of the critique: that Calvino denies the historical process and with it all utopic teleology (Pasolini calls it “the idea of a Best City” that is in fact entirely absent from Calvino’s text). Rather than Marxist class struggle and history, Calvino gives us “a diverse idea of time.”37 Thus Pasolini concludes his clichéd Marxist anti-aesthetic: “despite dispelling every cultural illusion, Calvino’s culture, I repeat, remains intact, if as pure Illusion…in this way, it reaches the perfect form of an object, a marvelous fossil. Calvino’s specific culture,

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then, which is a literary one, freed from its function, from its duties, becomes an abandoned mine, from which Calvino extracts whichever treasures he wants.”38 Pasolini enumerates these “treasures” as (1) a “metallic, almost crystalline, but light, incredibly light” mode of writing that Calvino presents with an “elegant, disinterested care”; (2) a technics of “ambiguity” that allows Calvino to express a “visionary” relativism “confronted with endless different possibilities”; and (3) a surrealism that he claims is a form of Platonism. All three “treasures” are the means by which Calvino deals with the “irreconcilable clash of two opposites: reality and the world of ideas.”39 Due to his own political-philosophical position, Pasolini accepts these as “opposites” and that the “reality” he presupposes is different in kind from the imaginary, aesthetic world of ideas Calvino presents. Calvino’s “archaeological literature,” therefore, posits a “collision” between ideal and real cities that only works to render the real city “surrealistically” without “historically resolving anything.”40 He goes so far as to add that “the two opposites are not sublated in a dialectical relationship,” as if this dialectical resolution is at play anywhere in this or any other of Calvino’s texts. In other words, rather than resolving this confrontation or battle between the real and the ideal, Calvino dissolves each term in an illogical, ambiguous infinity (time rather than history), thereby “turning them into surrealist debris.”41 He gives us only an aporia between the world of idea and the world of reality whereas Pasolini demands directness, resolution, progress. In sum, Calvino gives us only a “vertical poetics” that refashions a Platonic aesthetics of transcendence and idealism. Let us address Pasolini’s use of ambiguity here. Ambiguity, as Marc Auge has written, is the very “armature of a dialectical conception of reality and history which lays heavy emphasis on contradiction.”42 This underlies Pasolini’s use of the term to judge both Calvino’s successes and failures in Invisible Cities. By this I mean that Pasolini deploys ambiguity not only to distinguish history as real and ideal, but also to emphasize Calvino’s equivalence of desire and memory. Pasolini’s dialectical position demands the past orient and direct (author) the future. A future discernible and produced, however darkly, in the past. Such a position is certainly “responsible for the importance we ascribe to the role of the past in every domain,” but Pasolini’s belief in a autotelic historicism is reductive and foreign to Calvino’s aesthetic philosophy.43 In fact, to use the past, which Pasolini terms as “history” and “real” in crude Marxist terms, as “the explanation for everything, to make it the sole actor, is to risk ignoring in our relation to time all that falls outside history, or more exactly evades historical determination: intuition, creation, commencement, volition, encounters.”44 It is precisely on such singularities that Calvino’s work, including Invisible Cities, is premised. Before explicating this claim, we turn to Calvino’s own response to Pasolini’s review. Throughout his response, Calvino expresses his admiration for Pasolini’s insights, referring to them as “new, ingenious, and focused.”45 He even admires the “Platonic component” in his work that Pasolini was the “first critic to point

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out.”46 However, in order to respond to Pasolini’s comment that they had “stopped being close to one another,” Calvino focuses on his desire to remain relevant, topical, and present, a desire Calvino did not share, as evidenced by his move from Italy to Paris in 1966. Calvino’s take on the matter is that Pasolini veered “very far away” from the positions and ideals they shared throughout the 1950s to the early 60s by grasping “a mode of rapid intervention on the present that I ruled out from the start”: it was thus “your ‘way of having chosen topicality’ which has divided us, not mine.”47 He notes Pasolini’s shift from poetry and criticism to films as symptomatic of this desire. For Calvino, Pasolini excels at “extremely minute judgements that are precisely argued, based on a meticulous micro-analysis of words and people.” This “talent” is centerstage in Pasolini’s review, which Calvino acknowledges. However, this form of critical writing can only have “indirect influences” over the socio-political state of affairs.48 (Calvino will construct his aesthetic philosophy around this notion of “indirect influence” in essays written before and after this exchange; we will return to these below.) He implies that this indirect, “modest” influence ran counter to Pasolini’s desire to have his public say on current affairs, “using the newspapers’ measure of what is topical, engaging directly with public opinion.”49 While this certainly “gives one a great sensation of being alive,” any contemporary state of affairs is limited as it reacts and occludes “the world of slow reasoning.” Calvino admits that he “has no place in actuality” and that he “stayed on the sidelines, maybe champing at the bit, but still remaining silent.”50 He even dismisses Pasolini’s assertion that Calvino supported the student cause and the Italian Neo-avant-garde. “My reservations and allergies toward the new [neo-Marxist cultural critique that becomes postmodernism] politics are stronger than the urge to oppose the old politics,” Calvino confesses. Adding that he does not possess “any competence or qualifications to express [his] judgments.”51 In fact, Calvino’s work disavows judgment as a viable cultural mode. His work, instead, is a sustained attempt to “distrust” both politics and traditional literature in favor of inventing modes of writing that give us “the only chance we have of becoming different from the way we are—that is, the only way of starting to invent a new way of being.”52 Furthermore, there is no simple opposition of reality and idea here, but only an refusal to conflate artistic invention with judgment, which is a move to reverse Platonism rather than advance it.53 Writing as a mode of ontological-aesthetic invention traverses all of Calvino’s work. Both his own and the work of writers he loves. In the essay published in 1967 entitled “Whom Do You Write For? or The Hypothetical Bookshelf,” Calvino presents his position in these terms. Terms which are not without possible socio-political value because there is “another possibility inherent in literature: that of questioning the established scale of values and code of meanings.”54 Here Calvino reflects on his own experience, beginning with the overtly political work with which Pasolini began his review. Calvino’s experience in the Italian Communist Party (PCI) resistance during the Second

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World War, his foray into neo-realist writing (The Path of the Spiders’ Nest, 1947), and his ultimate dissatisfaction with its politics, historicism, and metaphysics (he left the PCI in 1957 after the Soviets suppressed the Hungarian Revolution in 1956), gave him the following insight, one that evinces a real distance from Pasolini’s oversimplified distinction between history and ideal. “Political culture was not a ‘given’ thing,” he writes, “on the contrary, it is something that needs to be continuously constructed and evaluated in light of the entire body of work the rest of culture is producing, which must be evaluated along with it.”55 With the impossibility of linking up to a given cultural tradition, Calvino explains the radical shift that motivates much of the work we see throughout the 1960s. Namely, that rather than “trying to link up with a tradition,” artists, in all fields, pose “open questions.” This includes the transformations wrought by theory in literary studies and throughout the humanities. Calvino adds, however, that these new areas of “analysis and dissection” such as linguistics (Roland Barthes, A. J. Greimas), information theory (Marshall McLuhan), analytical philosophy, sociology, a new use of psychoanalysis ( Jacques Lacan), and a new use of Marxism (Michel Foucault) questioned the very “right” of literature to exist at all.56 This critical, theoretical questioning was redoubled within various disciplines. Calvino mentions antiliterature and anti-art/aesthetics in contemporary art. His criticism of this line of questioning was not a conservative desire to preserve literature or its cultural tradition. Instead, he challenges the emphasis on the present—on the actual, the topical, and the contemporary—in the absence of an understanding of the temporality of an artwork, its taking place as a pastfuture event. “The weakness of this position does not, as many claim, lie in the nonliterary influences that preside over it, but, on the contrary, in the fact that the nonliterary library posited by the new writers is still too limited. Antiliterature is too exclusively literary a passion to meet our present culture needs. The reader we have to foresee for our books will have epistemological, semantic, practical, and methodological requirements which he will constantly want to compare,” Calvino argues.57 Rather than forward yet another meek end of art thesis (e.g., antiliterature), he rethinks the very mode of writing that delimits literature as an event. He insists that writers forfeit the possibilities of writing by giving it the impossible, immodest task of redeeming all the ills of the world, including “cultural inequality” and “social disparities” (85). Writers can “make only an indirect contribution: for example, by firmly rejecting any paternalistic solutions,” but “any attempt to sweeten the [socio-political] situation with palliatives such as literature of the people is a step backward, not a step ahead. Literature is not school.”58 Calvino rejects the either/or of engagement or apolitical solipsism. He sides with James Joyce in that “silence, cunning, exile” constitute a productive, inventive line of flight or escape. But one that “must be conscious of the risks it is running,” especially “the risk that in order to create an initially egalitarian program the revolution [whether right or left] will outlaw literature (along with philosophy, pure science, etc.)—an illusory and devastatingly self-injurious solution, but one

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that has a logic of its own and therefore crops up in this and subsequent centuries.”59 A “logic” already present in Plato’s Republic, with its infamous prohibition on the representative arts (poetry) in a putative utopia, let alone Stalinist Russia in the twentieth century or neoliberal American Christian exceptionalism in our own. Calvino proposes a better solution than antiliterature, anti-aesthetics, or foreclosing on any vital role for art. First, he demands that artists, writers, directors, et al. admit and realize how “modest” their impact is on politics. “A book,” he wagers, “in the context of national or geopolitics is ‘a grain of sand’.”60 This is not defeatist, but only an acceptance of our socio-political and economic structures. (Calvino will later, cunningly, entitle a volume of his essays Collection of Sand in 1984.) Second, despite this “modest” impact, he adds that [art, poetics] can “raise the [socio-political, economic] struggle to a higher level of awareness, to add to it instruments of knowledge, of foresight, of imagination, of concentration.”61 To such instruments Calvino will add a complex poetics of memory that Pasolini disavows in his review of Invisible Cities, an art of memory that examines the “traces of happiness still to be glimpsed.”62 These are the “indirect effects” that art offers us. For example, how we use a book to make connections within and beyond ourselves. Third, Calvino admits that this “higher level” may be “more favorable to either revolution or to reaction, depending on how the revolution learns to act, and on how the others act.”63 And, fourth, “it does not depend except to a minimal degree on the intentions of whoever wrote the book.” Calvino supplements these “very indirect, undeliberate, and fortuitous” uses of literature by insisting upon a more willful and medial aspect of aesthetic invention, one that inheres within his own work. “There is also,” he writes, “another sort of influence that literature can exert, perhaps not more direct but certainly more intentional on the part of the writer. This is the ability to impose patterns of language, of vision, of imagination, of mental effort, of the correlation of facts, and in short the creation (and by creation I mean selection and organization) of a model of values that is at the same time aesthetic and ethical, essential to any plan of action, especially in political life.”64 This aesthetic and ethical imposition avows the actual-virtual circuits and past-future events of transmissibility itself. In perhaps his truest artist’s statement, Calvino tells us that “a book is written so that it can be put beside other books and take its place on a hypothetical bookshelf. Once it is there, in some way or other, it alters the shelf, expelling certain other volumes, from their places or forcing them back into the second row, while demanding that certain others be brought up to the front…the juxtaposition of which can produce electric shocks, short circuits.”65 Value consists neither in fidelity nor in obsequy to a preceding event, precedent, or political discourse; rather, it “consists in what is woven and rewoven into it”: “I too have thought of myself as a link in the anonymous chain within end” but knowing that “links are never merely instruments or passive transmitters, but…its real ‘author’.”66 Perhaps this is the “obverse of the sublime.” Meaning it is re-search, a recommencement

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that seeks “a different space and time, a proof that the total domination of sound and fury can be challenged.”67 Art as Difficult Love

This is the “difficult love” that art offers. It is non-negotiable. We love art and the problems it poses. Love its force-signs and its contents (topical, actual sociopolitical happenings). Because within aesthetic invention we encounter something in conformity with time, but also something untimely. To separate the one from the other is “the task of those who know how to love.”68 This is certainly difficult, but it is also moving. To love what goes beyond persons and individuals means opening yourself to untimely encounters and then laboring to “find a language in the singularities that exceed individuals, a language in the individuations that exceed persons.”69 This is “the process through which a force enriches itself by seizing hold of other forces and joining itself to them in a new ensemble, a becoming.” 70 Such a process posits writing as a mode opposed to judgment. In his discussions of literature and film Deleuze is adamant that “it is not a matter of judging life in the name of a higher authority which would be the good, the true; it is a matter, on the contrary, of evaluating every being, every action and passion, even every value, in relation to the Life which they involve.” 71 Deleuze extends an insight already voiced by Nietzsche, who had substituted judgment for affect (non-human becomings). “Affect is immanent evaluation, instead of judgment as transcendent value.” 72 Following Nietzsche, Deleuze distinguishes artistic production or “artistic will” as a “virtue which gives, the creation of new possibilities, in the outpouring of becoming.” This is because the ethics aesthetic labor enacts is an “outpouring, ascending life, the kind which knows how to transform itself, to metamorphose itself according to the forces it encounters, and which forms a constantly larger force with them, always increasing the power to live, always opening new ‘possibilities’.” 73 Writing, as we encounter it in Calvino’s work, is thus a “question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience.” 74 It is a “proof ” in Calvino’s terms, that is, “a passage of Life traverses the livable and the lived.” 75 This problematic of writing is inseparable from those of seeing (visibility) and hearing (auditory). “It is through words, between words,” Deleuze tells us, “that one sees and hears.” 76 These “visions and auditions” are therefore not “a private matter but form the figures of a history and a geography that are ceaselessly reinvented.” They are “events at the edge of language.” 77 Recall Calvino’s “word crystals” above. Moreover, Deleuze consistently argues that to become neither means anything like attaining “a form (identification, imitation, Mimesis)” nor is it fantasy in the simple sense of irreality. Instead, inventive writing is experimentation “to find a zone of proximity, indiscernibility, or indifferentiation where one can no longer

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be distinguished from a woman, an animal, or a molecule—neither imprecise nor general, but unforeseen and nonpreexistent, singularized out of population rather than determined in a form.” 78 In these terms Calvino’s writing is a sustained experimentation with this “power of the impersonal” that “strips us of the power to say ‘I’.” 79 For this reason we read at the end of his “apologia” for literature as “a vast net,” in the lecture “Multiplicity,” that the past-future “value”—the ethics of becoming—that “stands closest to my heart” is to “think what it would be to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego.”80 Calvino’s love of literature is a sustained desire “to bring into existence and not to judge.”81 It defies judgment in order to be decisive and thus ethical. This “power of the impersonal” affirms writing as “an affective, intensive… body that consists solely of poles, zones, thresholds, and gradients” and it is “traversed by a powerful inorganic vitality.”82 This is a “reverse Platonism” that we encounter in Deleuze, Calvino, Virginia Woolf, Eugenio Montale, and many others. All of which prove that writing is a difficult love precisely because it renounces judgment and therefore is “not subjectivism,” but rather a problematic posed iteratively, stoically, in terms of forces and forms—optical, sonorous, or linguistic effects—which “already surpass all subjectivity.”83 We become with our “visions and auditions.” They remain an “unseen part of us.” We thus become “like the spray of an exhausted wave.”84 A Little Testament

Perhaps Calvino’s finest expression of “transmitting the sense” of the “spray of this exhausted wave” is found in his readings of Eugenio Montale’s poetry, where we encounter “time made water.”85 Calvino focuses our attention on the poetic “minute, luminous tracings” that Montale poses “in contrast to dark catastrophe” as a means of surviving “the precariousness of the world.”86 A central theme for Montale is “the way in which the dead are present in us, the uniqueness of every person who we cannot resign ourselves to losing.” Here we sense “the destruction and re-creation that imbue every form of biological and historical continuity.”87 In his poems there is no “impetus toward solidarity” in any political sense, but “we always find a feeling of the interdependence of each of us with other people’s lives” because, as Montale’s line goes, “too many lives are needed to make just one.”88 In his “Piccolo testamento” (1953), Montale focuses on the slightest of traces that will have survived an apocalyptic vision. But “everyone makes out his own” traces, which do not quite form an “inheritance,” but only signal “tenuous traces” remaining within our “spider’s thread of memory.” This, which flickers at night in the skullcap of my thought, mother-of-pearl snail’s track

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or mica of crushed glass, isn’t light from church or factory fed by red cleric or black. All I can leave you is this rainbow as testimony [lasciatri di testimonianza] of a faith that was contested, a hope that burned more slowly than hardwood on the hearth. Keep its powder in your compact until, when every light is out.89 As a way to open his “memos for the next millennium,” Calvino asks: “how can we hope to save ourselves, in that which is most fragile?” 90 He deeply admires this “profession of faith” from the atheist Montale. A faith expressed in the threads of writing that transmit “the moral values invested in the most tenuous traces”: “the thin glimmer striking down there | wasn’t that of a match.” 91 Montale’s line (“wasn’t that of a match”) ends with a period and not a question mark because there is no guarantee of survival or even an easily given hope. There is only a transmission, an opening sent neither by a red or black (Marxist or Catholic) cleric, but via thought and writing, sent with its own speed (“more slowly”), “a passage of Life that traverses the livable and the lived.” This “mica of crushed glass,” or “the finest dust or, better still, a field of magnetic impulses,” is not escapism or siding with the irrational.92 Quite the contrary. What Calvino transmits to us is Montale’s stoicism. Optimistic in that encountering a problematic means that we must change our approach, “look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification.” 93 Moreover, Montale works between “style and tradition” in order to create a possible solution to the specific Italian problematic of “how to write verse after (and against) D’Annuzio (and after Carducci and after Pascoli, or at least a certain image of Pascoli).”94 Just as Montale must betray Giacomo Leopardi to create a possible solution, Calvino himself will transmit Alexandre Dumas by writing a short story entitled “The Count of Monte Cristo.” In this intensive retelling Calvino gives his own version of Montale’s stoic optimism, his own “little testament.” But it only works if we recall that “value consists in what is woven and rewoven.” I quote the concluding passages of “The Count of Monte Cristo” in full as they articulate a “little testament”—a riposte to Pasolini’s criticism and as an expression of the values of literature laid out above. They also intimate the genius of Calvino’s masterpiece If on a winter’s night a traveler, written twelve years after this short story appeared in T zero (1967), for “if outside there is the past, perhaps

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the future is concentrated at the innermost point…in other words, the avenue of escape is an avenue towards the inside.”95 Here are the passages: Arranging one after the other all the continuations which allow the story to be extended, probable or improbable as they may be, you obtain the zigzag line of the Monte Cristo of Dumas…The decisive difference between the two books— sufficient to cause one to be defined as true and the other as false, even if they are identical—lies entirely in the method…And so we go on dealing with the fortress, Faris sounding out the weak points of the wall and coming up against new obstacles, I reflecting on his unsuccessful attempts in order to conjecture new outlines of walls to add to the plan of my fortress-conjecture. If I succeed in mentally constructing a fortress from which it is impossible to escape, this conceived fortress either will be the same as the real one—and in this case it is certain we shall never escape from here, but at least we will achieve the serenity of one who knows he is here because he could be nowhere else—or it will be a fortress from which escape is even more impossible than from here—and this, then, is a sign that here an opportunity of escape exists; we have only to identify the point where the imagined fortress does not coincide with the real one and then find it.96 Memories of a Wave Reader

Let us now read together the opening of Calvino’s last novel Mr. Palomar (1983). The eponymous character is on the beach looking at the waves. He desires to read a wave (lettura di un’onda). “Mr. Palomar is standing on the shore, looking at a wave. Not that he is lost in contemplation of the waves. He is not lost, because he is quite aware of what he is doing: he wants to look at a wave and he is looking at it.”97 The narration is more specific. It is not “the waves” that Palomar means to look at, but “just one individual wave: in his desire to avoid vague sensations, he establishes for his every action a limited and precise object.” This is only Palomar’s first venture to ground himself and what he knows of himself and this world. Calvino presents this entire opening as a presentation of Palomar’s desire and the narrator’s explanation of this desire and its frustrations. (We should resist hearing the narrator’s voice as Calvino’s own.) The narrative itself gives us some hints as to why Palomar’s desire dissatisfies his given aims. Furthermore, Mr. Palomar’s experience changes as his experiences move between the visual, the cultural, and the speculative. Significantly, the threading of these experiences begs us not to read them in isolation and thus repeat Mr. Palomar’s error before the sea. Calvino organizes his book into “three thematic areas, three kinds of experience”: (1) visual descriptions of natural phenomena like waves, (2) anthropological or cultural elements wherein our experience involves visual data with preexisting meaning, symbols, and narrative, and (3) speculative experience where description and narrative become meditation.98 Within these

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thematic areas certain points overlap and extend one another, which Calvino notates as 1.1.3, for example. Simply put, Mr. Palomar’s desire to understand the relationship between himself and the world cannot be located only within one area. This is precisely what occurs in 1.1.1 Reading a wave. To compensate for being a “nervous man who lives in a frenzied and congested world, Mr. Palomar tends to reduce his relations with the outside world; and, to defend himself against the general neurasthenia, he tries to keep his sensations under control insofar as possible.”99 But his given task rends his desire to isolate and accurately experience and describe a single wave. Not only because “isolating one wave is not easy, separating it from the wave immediately following, which seems to push it and at times overtakes it and sweeps it away; and it is no easier separate one wave from the preceding one, which seems to drag it toward the shore.”100 A single wave becomes inseparable from the sea itself. Not only the appearance of the waves as forms, but the complex of forces and invisible quasi-causes that render the wave visible. “So, to understand the composition of a wave, you have to consider these opposing thrusts, which are to some extent counterbalanced and to some extent added together” in the multiplicity that comprises the sea itself. This is not, however, pleasing knowledge to Mr. Palomar. What he desires is the thing itself: a Platonic, phenomenological experience. Nonetheless, his “attempt to limit his experience to an isolated, simple, and precise phenomenon” results in “an abortive, frustrating experience.”101 A primary limitation for Mr. Palomar is his impatience. It is referred to twice in the opening section. “If it were not for his impatience to reach a complete, definitive conclusion of his visual operation” and “it would suffice not to lose patience, as he soon does.”102 This is because he must patiently learn “to bear all the aspects in mind at once” if he wishes to extend his “knowledge to the entire universe.”103 Even the event of his own death (section 3.3.3 Learning to be dead) is missed due to his impatience and desire to translate experience into precise language rather than becoming with the event in silence and open to unforeseen experience. We must not comprehend this ending as pessimistic, but as stoic and optimistic in the challenging sense Montale embodied. In her essay “Loss of Self in Calvino’s ‘Palomar’,” Luisa Guj concludes that “Calvino’s profoundly pessimistic conclusions in Palomar not only underline the chaotic nature of contemporary man’s universe but also contradict and deny his former humanistic faith in man’s creativity and capability to see the world afresh.”104 She adds that “Palomar, Calvino’s last creation and, according to some, the most autobiographical of his characters, in spite of the foresight which his name implies, ends his journey in a dark forest of distrust and despair, where even being dead provides no ultimate solution.” Again, the character Palomar is not Calvino, but the counternarrative voiced in the book may well be closer. So let us avoid the intentional fallacy. Moreover, as our reading of Calvino–Montale or Dumas–Calvino above shows, the conclusion of Mr. Palomar does not “contradict and deny his former humanistic faith in man’s

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creativity and capability to see the world afresh” because Mr. Palomar becomes a wave. Although they will not offer “an ultimate solution,” as that seems anathema to Calvino’s sensibility, these issues of singularities, rays of light, and a pastfuture relation as embodied within artistic practice culminate not in “distrust and despair,” but in “memos for the next millennium” (written after Mr. Palomar). Before turning to some affirmative, patient ways forward in these lectures, we should add that even this character’s namesake, most probably the telescope at Palomar Observatory in California, suggests a misstep since the telescope does not view and read the present (as Mr. Palomar desires), but it receives messages, aporias, clues, and traces transmitted by past-future cosmic events. To view the stars in the present is to contemplate the past as futural signals. This is the very fabric of our chaosmos, meaning both the very real material fabric of our universe and our composed (humanistic, limited but necessary) and recomposed knowledge of its consistency. Thus “Mr. Palomar, who does not love himself, has always taken care not to encounter himself face to face; this is why he preferred to take refuge among the galaxies; now he understands that he should have begun by finding…self-knowledge.”105 Calvino underscores this point in Memos for the Next Millennium when he avers that “the universe disintegrates into a cloud of heat, it falls inevitably into a vortex of entropy, but within this irreversible process there may be areas of order, portions of the existent that tend toward a form, privileged points in which we seem to discern a design or perspective. A work of literature is one of these minimal portions in which the existent crystallizes into a form, acquires a meaning—not fixed, not definitive…but alive.”106 This consistency, tending toward an indefinite yet infinite form, is precisely what Calvino learns from Ovid, Lucretius, Jorge Luis Borges, Leopardi, and the other writers he cites throughout these lectures. For instance, to compose a new De Rerum Natura, as Calvino characterizes Francis Ponge’s desire, requires refusing to accept that everything appears and that to render visible has little to do with physiological sight and more to do with the framing conditions (visual, cultural, linguistic, speculative) that allows the multiplicity of all things to take on a consistency. I think we are always searching for something hidden or merely potential or hypothetical, following its traces whenever they appear on the surface…The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss. For this reason, the proper use of language, for me personally, is one that enables us to approach things (present or absent) with discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things (present or absent) communicate without words.107 This quotation evinces Calvino’s position on anthropomorphism as a passage, a consistency, through which we are able to touch an outside of language. In the

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Memos for the Next Millennium he is compelled to explain his use of science even in Cosmicomics. He elucidates that “although science interests me just because of its efforts to escape anthropomorphic knowledge, I am nonetheless convinced that our imagination cannot be anything but anthropomorphic.”108 This conviction is inseparable from the necessity of imagining the real communication between different things, imperceptible series, and subterranean becomings. It is a matter of “sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language” until it attenuates and stammers at the edge of events which complicates words and things in a network of lines that intersect. Only then will we distinguish the immanent waves of becoming “gently cast up on the bibula harena” of history.109 If we return for a moment to Mr. Palomar’s “desire to avoid vague sensations,” then we can discuss how Calvino uses Leopardi’s poem “L’infinito” (1819) in the Memos for the Next Millennium. In the lecture “Exactitude,” Calvino relates Leopardi’s praise of the Italian term il vago in his Zibaldone (published 1898–1900).110 In Italian, Leopardi notes that vague (vago) does not mean simply imprecise or inexact, as Palomar believes. Instead, it also means “lovely, attractive.” Calvino adds that “starting out from the original meaning of ‘wandering’, the word vago still carries an idea of movement and mutability, which in Italian is associated both with uncertainty and indefiniteness and with gracefulness and pleasure.”111 Vagueness is freed from its negative connotations and now signifies movement, nearly imperceptible, graceful becoming. Leopardi, “the poet of vagueness can only be the poet of exactitude, who is able to grasp the subtlest sensations with eyes and ears.”112 Recall how Montale transmitted Leopardi. Here Calvino transmits both writers through a reading of “L’infinito,” one of the “nerve centers of Leopardi’s poetics.”113 Leopardi wends the concept of imagination between the notions of “indefinite” and “infinite.” Deciding vaguely, in Calvino’s words, that “hope and imagination are the only consolations for the disappointments and sorrows of experience. Man therefore projects his desire into infinity and feels pleasure only when he is able to imagine that this pleasure has no end. But since the human mind cannot conceive the infinite, and in fact falls back aghast at the very idea of it, it has to make do with what is indefinite, with sensations as they mingle together and create an impression of infinite space, illusory but pleasurable at the same time.”114 Leopardi concludes his “speculative and metaphysical” problem by beginning with the scientific (mathematical) notion of space and time only to end with a “gentleness” expressed even in the face of whatever “anguish” the mathematical sublime may cause us. Calvino emphasizes the famous ending of Leopardi’s poem, which resounds with our discussion here: “And sweet to me is foundering in this sea [E il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare].” Project for a Review

Between 1974 and 1976 Giorgio Agamben met regularly with Calvino and Claudio Rugafiori in Paris to plan a journal. Although the review was never

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actualized, “echoes” of these discussions are found in Agamben’s The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics (1996) and Calvino’s Memos for the Next Millennium.115 Agamben published what he called “the physiognomy of the project” as “Project for a Review” in Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience (1978).116 In this text, he discusses “transmissibility” in ways that extend his conversations with Calvino and Rugafiori, but he also couches it in the Heidegger-Benjamin theoretical armature that marks all of his work. It is this iteration of transmissibility that we also confront in the last chapter of The Man without Content (1994) on Walter Benjamin entitled “The Melancholy Angel.” Agamben’s understanding of transmissibility and how to deal with it as a messianic-historicist “interruption” is diametrically opposed to what we encounter in Calvino’s work. In his “Project for a Review,” Agamben states that the review, as he conceived it, would have constructed a “site” that is neither “a continuity nor a new beginning, but an interruption and a margin.”117 He continues to explain this “margin.” It is “produced early in modern Western culture between cultural patrimony and its transmission, between truth and its modes of transmission, between writing and authority.”118 As he regularly does, Agamben alludes to the Talmudic categories of Halacha (the Law in itself, the truth separated from any mythical consistency) and Aggada (the Law in its emotional consistency, in its translatability) as well as to the Arabic categories of sharī’at and haqīqat, which designate respectively the Law in its literalness and in its spiritual sense. To these categories we must add Benjamin’s essays on Kaf ka, where he defines “transmissibility” as the problematic Kaf ka addressed in his writing as a rift between subject matter and truth content.119 In language reiterated later in The Man without Content, Agamben posits that modernity itself is this “margin” or “cleavage”: “there is a truth, without possibility of transmitting it; there are modes of transmission, without anything being either transmitted or taught.”120 Significantly, this does not lead to presentism, let alone any “obliviousness” or “skepticism” of the past. Agamben insists this is because “the essential disjunction that recurs time and again in our [Western] culture” is the “contrast between old and new, past and present, anciens and modernes.” This “disjunction” is what prevents us “seeing that old and new alike have become obdurately inaccessible.”121 (One recalls the formula Classique = Moderne written on the blackboard in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 film Bande à part.) Here is the key passage from Agamben: Perhaps no other epoch [modernity] has been so obsessed by its own past and so unable to create a vital relationship with it, so mindful of Halacha and so unfit to give it an aggadic consistency. In our [twentieth] century, estrangement and the ready-made, appropriation and quotation, have represented the last attempts to reconstruct this relationship (at its moments of commitment, the avant-garde has never turned to the future, but represents an extreme effort to relate to the past). Their decline marks the start of a time in which the present,

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petrified in an archaic facies, remains always a wasteland, while the past, in its estranged mask of modernity, can be only a monument to the present. We must question this characterization of the present as a “wasteland” and an “estranged mask” serving only as an inverted monument to the destruction of tradition. Here “tradition” is defined as the consistent, linked, organic transmission between truth and its modes of emotional and spiritual continuity. For Agamben, only a “form of philology,” more specifically, an “Aufhebung” [sublation] of philology, as a critical mythology, coupled with poetry, can become an “interdisciplinary discipline,” an “as yet unnamed science,” that would be capable of exposing this “margin” between truth and its transmission.122 But even this is only a first step. The definitive gesture of this “critical-poetic act par excellence” is not merely the “destruction of tradition,” which is assumed as an already accomplished “historical event,” but the “destruction of destruction” that “marks our culture fundamentally.”123 It is the absolute interruption (the eschatological end of art as such) of every mode of transmission—any mode that wagers a possible means to reconstruct the relationship between past and future—that must take place. The focus of Agamben’s conclusion in The Man without Content, perhaps his most sustained engagement with aesthetics and history, is this eschatological end of history and art, which he terms a messianic event of interruption-culmination, that comes about by restoring the “status and violence” of art criticism itself.124 Here Agamben defines aesthetics, and its attendant privileged site the modern museum, as indicative of the fact that “what is transmitted in [them] is precisely the impossibility of transmission.” Aesthetics is thus “the very destiny of art in the era in which, with tradition now severed, man is no longer able to find, between past and future, the space of the present, and gets lost in the linear time of history.”125 Agamben constructs this argument by creating a “dialectical image” between two aesthetic figures central to Benjamin’s philosophy: Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920) and Dürer’s well-known engraving Melancholia I (1514). Klee’s monoprint is the centerpiece of Benjamin’s famous ninth thesis on the philosophy of history and Agamben accepts without reservation Benjamin’s characterization of it as an “angel” who sees “a single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet” and desires to “awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed.”126 Agamben’s “Melancholy Angel” is a sublation of Benjamin’s “angel of history” and Dürer’s angel, which is presented as the angel of art, who sits inactive in melancholic twilight unable or disinterested in using the tools before her. This dialectical image subtends Agamben’s discussion of transmissibility, rendering it an allegory. “For it is the transmissibility of culture,” he writes, “that, by endowing culture with an immediately perceptible meaning and value, allows man to move freely toward the future without being hindered by the burden of the past.” He continues: But when a culture loses its means of transmission, man is deprived of reference points and finds himself wedged between, on the one hand, a past

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that accumulates behind him and oppresses him with the multiplicity of its now-indecipherable contents, and on the other hand a future that he does not yet possess and that does not throw any light on his struggle with the past. The interruption of tradition, which is for us now a fait accompli, opens an era in which no link is possible between old and new, if not the infinite accumulation of the old in a sort of monstrous archive or the alienation effected by the very means that is supposed to help with the transmission of the old…the accumulated culture has lost its living meaning and hangs over man like a threat in which he can no longer recognize himself.127 The task of the “melancholy angel” is therefore one of absolute interruption. Akin to Benjamin’s line “une citation à l’ordre du jour” (“a quotation on the order of the day”), on the day of the Last Judgment, Agamben posits that art can expose the past for us in a fixed image that “appears once and for all in the instant of its alienation…in a moment of danger.”128 He is more unambiguous when he says that “asking about art’s task is the equivalent of asking what could be its task on the day of the Last Judgment, that is, in a condition (which for Kaf ka is man’s very historical status) in which the angel of history has stopped and, in the interval [or margin] between past and future, man has to face his responsibility.”129 There is a tension in Agamben’s argument. While he does admit that Kaf ka’s artistic response to this alienated condition was to imagine whether art could “take as its content the task of transmission itself, independently of the thing to be transmitted” (the move that Benjamin characterized as Kaf ka’s genius/ failure), Agamben understands this “genius” as a “message” without content.130 Or, rather, as one whose content is “nothing other than the task of transmission.” This “perennially late stubbornness” (admittedly a great phrase) “abolishes the gap between the thing to be transmitted and the act of transmission” but only negatively because it allows art to transcend the aesthetic dimension and its fate as kitsch. Art then becomes myth. Agamben concludes that even Kaf ka’s writing could only reconstruct art on the same mythical-traditional diagram that founded it in the first place. It might fulfill its historicist destiny, but only to reveal that its “originary project” was an ontological, perhaps theological, project from the start. As such he writes that “if man could appropriate his historical condition, and if, seeing through the illusion of the storm that perennially pushes him along the infinite rail of linear time, he could exit his paradoxical situation, he would at the same time gain access to the total knowledge capable of giving life to a new cosmogony and to turn history into myth.”131 Here his language and thinking reiterate Hannah Arendt’s preface to Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (1954) where she reads Kaf ka’s parable “He” as a desire to found a present and thus grasp man’s historical situation. Even so, for Agamben, art cannot accomplish such a task because in order to “reconcile the historical conflict between past and future” it “emancipated itself from myth and linked itself to history.”132 For him, art is caught in an infinite regression between myth and history. He sketches its Janus-face countenance as a messianic angel with “staring

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eyes, open mouth, and spread wings” who wants to stay in Paradise (the origin) but cannot because “the storm of progress” propels it beyond its control (“it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them”) “into the future to which his back is turned.” For him, both the angel of history and the angel of art are melancholic, defeatist. The cunning “dialectical turn” in this extended parable is that even Kaf ka’s “Kunstgriff ” transforms the absence or deferral of truth into “a poetic process” and renounces any “guarantee” of truth for “love of transmissibility.”133 Thus Kaf ka’s “genius” only “succeeds once again in transforming man’s inability to exit his historical status,” leaving us “perennially suspended in the inter-world between old and new, past and future.”134 In Agamben’s philosophy, however, it is only from this paradoxical vantage point that we can discern the magnitude of our alienation and begin to “take the original measure of his dwelling in the present and recover each time the meaning of his action.” This dissatisfying conclusion is certainly premised on Heidegger’s concept of dwelling and art, but it is redoubled with Agamben’s own desire for messianic history. This theologico-political art history presupposes that “historical experience is obtained by the image, and the images themselves are charged with history…. but what is the history involved?” Agamben’s answer is always: “here it must be stressed that it is not a matter of chronological history in the strict sense, but of a messianic history.”135 It is this concept of messianic time that Agamben appropriates from Benjamin’s philosophy of history via a reading of St. Paul that defines the experience of the “margin” he places us in.136 The art history he gives us is unimaginable apart from this messianic perspective. Agamben insists that the “original structure of the work of art” is empty without this messianic endgame wherein “something must be completed, judged” because “it must happen here, but in another time; it must leave chronology behind, but without entering some other world.”137 It is here that his attempt to reconcile Benjamin and Heidegger becomes insupportable. As the art historian Georges Didi-Huberman astutely explains in Survival of the Fireflies (2009): “as a reader of Heidegger, Agamben seeks the horizon behind every image … and that horizon inevitably shapes the metaphysical cosmos, the philosophical system, the juridical corpus or theological dogma.”138 Hence the “kingdom’s glory” that Agamben discusses in his recent texts on Judeo-Christian themes. Didi-Huberman is correct in his claim that Agamben’s reliance on the Heideggerean concept of the “limit,” the very messianic, eschatological, limit that Jacques Derrida never hesitated to remind us to avoid, induces him to present a conservative, “hopeless,” despite his protestations to the contrary, vision of contemporary aesthetic and thereby historico-political experience.139 Agamben thus forecloses on the possibility of finding, inventing, or creating new “reference points” or “means of transmission.” Why? Because he claims that such means would lead only to further, though perhaps insightful, “alienation,” or, worse, a sublimation or foreclosure of it. But why would this possibility of

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creating new “reference points” within our epochal situation be precluded to artists, writers, and historians other than those Agamben privileges, for instance Guy Debord, Glenn Gould, Martin Walser, or Bill Viola? It must be noted that Calvino’s fiction is barely discussed by Agamben. Instead, Agamben’s emphasis shifts the focus away from artistic creation and entirely to a theologico-political endgame, a specifically messianic form of redemption. Moreover, he admits that he is “rather uneasy about the use of the term ‘creation’ with respect to artistic practices, which is unfortunately very common today,” preferring instead “poetic act,” but only as a “potentiality” that is never a “simple transit from potential to act.”140 It is always with the genealogy of this endgame that Agamben lays his emphasis. An endgame wherein the incomplete past becomes a completed act rather than being in a dynamic, morphogenetic relation to each of its actualizations in the present. For him, the past is “wreckage upon wreckage,” that, despite its “potentiality” to not have been so, remains beyond our reach. Thus our inability to render it otherwise, anew, or in a direction other than lineal and interstitial. The only move left to us is a dialectical interruption. In stark contrast to this eschatological horizon, Calvino’s work, as one privileged example, experiments with other secular modes of transmissibility, without any desire for redemption or messianic history. Here we encounter only with a desire for artworks that resonate, complicate and explicate the fate of art not as a historical teleology or artifact—neither as an accumulation of wealth nor a mytheme—but as past-future sense-events that render our “monstrous archive” vital and intensive—a dynamis that comes from an enduring, differentiating past. What compels our interest is the “obverse of the sublime,” or what Antonio Negri calls “the ontological sublime” in a letter to Agamben, defining it as “a monstrous being, state and flux, figure and explosion of creation itself.”141 For “the singularity of the work of art,” Negri continues, “is neither mediation nor interchangeability,” but a revelation of an artwork’s “universality under the form of enjoyment on the part of a multitude of individuals and of singular experiences” because “art is formally as open as a true and radical democracy.”142 Calvino is always found to be “working on new ways to enter into a relation” with transmissibility, which involves an “indirect contribution” to “true and radical” politics. His undying emphasis on experimenting with past-future aesthetic-ethical events resonates throughout his admiration for other writers and artists as well as within his own writing. Here are Agamben’s final words on transmissibility. “If Klee’s Angelus Novus is the angel of history, nothing could represent the angel of art better than the winged creature in Dürer’s engraving… [where] the angel of art appears immersed in an atemporal dimension, as though something, interrupting the continuum of history, had frozen the surrounding reality in a kind of messianic arrest.” He concludes: “the past that the angel of history is no longer able to comprehend reconstitutes its form in front of the angel of art; but this form is the alienated image in which the past finds its truth, again only on condition of negating it, and

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knowledge of the new is possible only in the nontruth of the old. The redemption that the angel of art offers to the past, summoning it to appear outside its real context on the day of aesthetic Last Judgment, is, then, nothing other than its death (or rather, its inability to die) in the museum of aesthetics.”143 To these words we counterpose Calvino’s conclusion to The Castle of Crossed Destinies, where we are offered the narrator’s attempt to read betwixt, across, and diagonally amid a set of dealt tarot cards. This finale is entitled “I Also Try to Tell My Tale.” “I open my mouth, I try to articulate words,” we read, “I grunt, this would be the moment for me to tell my tale, it is obvious that the cards of these other two are also the cards of my story, the story that has brought me here, a series of nasty encounters that is perhaps only a series of missed encounters.”144 But, instead, of reading the tarot, the narrator decides to “perform” a reading of “paintings in museums.”145 The idea is to create with and alongside a series of paintings encountered in various museums to demonstrate a certain vitality between images, words, and temporality. We are far from any atemporal “museum of aesthetics here.” Rather, the series of paintings and the conceptual becomings (Saint Jerome “could easily be mistaken for Saint Augustine”) present us with a hyphenated “Saint George-Saint Jerome story” that embodies a new creation, one that takes place along the “high-tension current” that passes along and between the relay of the hyphen (becoming itself as a line of creation, as a line of flight from the melancholy that marks Agamben’s angel of art) between the “Saint Jeromes,” that is, the plurality of representations the narrator encounters in various museums, with disparate and at times repeated iconography and staging, and the Saint Georges.146 However, even within a given painting of Saint Jerome, for example the one by Antonello da Messina now in the National Gallery in London, there are further complications between “figures, objects, landscape.” For Saint Jerome, the hermit, “the solitary writer,” is often paired with a lion, “taking as genuine the old tale of the thorn in the paw, thanks to the usual mistake of a copyist,” or else he is represented in ways uncannily reminiscent of Saint Augustine. The narrator admits that these ensembles give him “satisfaction and security” for he tries to “recognize” himself there, “not particularly in the saint or even in the lion (though, for that matter, the two often resemble each other), but in the pair together, in the whole, in the picture, figures, objects, landscape.”147 He notes that the iconography of Saint Jerome includes a skull, figures of the society (town) that the saint has turned his back on (in engravings and drypoints by Dürer and Rembrandt for example), as well as other animals such as a peacock (Messina), a Maltese spaniel (in a Carpaccio in Venice). These signifiers emphasize the tense relation between the solitary writer and the events of the world at-large, which always breach the “the catalogue of objects, and the space of the room” which “reproduces the space of the mind, the encyclopedic ideal of the intellect, its order, its categories, its calm.”148 Even the skull, the narrator shares, does not signify death as much as “the erasure of the person who has written or the one who will read.”149 The narrator admits that he himself has been “shut up in here.

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brooding over a thousand reasons for not putting my nose outside.”150 To counter this melancholic “brooding” he turns to paintings of the active, heroic Saint Georges, even if only to foreground his “impersonal face.”151 For Saint George “performs his feat before our eyes” but reveals “nothing of himself.” It is along this hyphenated Saint Jerome-Saint George portrait that the narrator expresses the power of painting and writing, “painting and repainting, writing and rewriting.”152 This is another origin regarding the work of the work of art. Here it is a mode of iterative, transversal experience wherein interior-exterior, past-future, constraint-freedom, are retold, remarked, and proffered to another’s psychology, body, intellect, and history. There is another mode of experience at work here that takes place within time, before our eyes, and as such renders us active aesthetic historians, who question and perhaps even doubt our capacities, but nevertheless persist in order to prove them useful, transformative, and compelling yet again as we encounter the multiplicity-consistency that is art and life. Between art and life means an attentiveness to both their points of connection as well as their differences in kind. Let us stop and think…So I have succeeded in coming to a conclusion, I can consider myself satisfied…I reread. Shall I tear it all up? Let us see. The first thing to be said is that the Saint George-Saint Jerome story is not one with a before and an after: we are in the center of a room with figures who present themselves to our view all together. The character in question either succeeds in being warrior and sage in everything he does and thinks, or he will be no one, and the same beast is at once dragon-enemy in the daily massacre of the city and the lion-guard in the space of thoughts: and he does not allow himself to be confronted except in the two forms together. Thus I have set everything to rights. On the page, at least. Inside me, all remains as before.153 We imagine Agamben would characterize this ending as a symptom of transmissibility rather than a “new way to enter into a relation to it,” but his curious hope, which forecloses on new modes of aesthetic and historical experience, remains unpersuasive in the face of Calvino’s art-work.154 Calvino shows us that our epochal situation, the one wherein Agamben insists that “we can in no way recognize” ourselves, is not only a fatalistic detriment (death as limit), but a contraînte as spur or challenge to create new secular aesthetic-historiographic modes that experiment with experience. Agamben’s emphasis on messianic interruption runs counter to Calvino’s emphasis on becoming, multiplicity (“word crystals”), and trace-threads. Perhaps Agamben would also characterize these emphases as symptoms of transmissibility itself? So to Benjamin’s “melancholic angel” of history and art we will counterpose any of Calvino’s aesthetic figures who embody “a liminal experience, now visionary and now realistic, now both together—always apparently drawn by the forces of nature,” even though the artist is also “always very much aware of what [they] are doing.”155

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This expresses neither an understanding of literature as “a voice of truth” or a “sum of political values”—which would present literature as “ornamental and superfluous” and, inversely, politics as “fixed ad self-confident”—nor literature as “an assortment of human sentiments, as the truth of a human language that politics tends to overlook.” We are uninterested in this “classical and immobile idea of literature as the depository” or as “consolation, preservation, and regression.”156 On the contrary, literature demands that “we can never forget that what books communicate often remains unknown even to the author…that books often say something different from what they set out to say, that in any book there is a part that is the author’s and a part that is a collective and anonymous work.”157 In other words, as Calvino argues in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, we must “show that in our own times literature is attempting to realize this ancient desire to represent the multiplicity of relationships, both in effect and in potentiality” because “around each image others come into being, forming a field of analogies, symmetries, confrontations.”158 Because within vital art-work “various elements concur in forming the visual part of the literary imagination: direct observation of the real world, phantasmic and oneiric transfiguration, the figurative world as it is transmitted by culture at various levels, and a process of abstraction, condensation, an interiorization of sense experience.”159 Or, as Mr. Palomar concludes, “the dead weight of an intolerant tradition prevents anyone’s properly understanding the most enlightened intentions.”160 A conclusion that only takes on consistency as he swims, as “an intrusive wave troubles the smooth sea”: “The swimming ego of Mr. Palomar is immersed in a disembodied world, intersections of force fields, vectorial diagrams, bands of position lines that converge, diverge, break up. But inside him there remains one point in which everything exists in another way, like a lump, a clot, like a blockage: the sensation that you are here and could not be here, in a world that could not be but is.”161 Mr. Palomar thus becomes a visionary-realist only when he accepts that he is observing “an infinite whole that contains other infinite wholes” and that, perhaps (one of Calvino’s favorite words, one shared by Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Paul Celan), “perhaps being dead is passing into the ocean of waves that remain waves forever, so it is futile to wait for the sea to become calm.”162 To Write at the Frontiers of Our Knowledge

In a lecture delivered in New York in the spring of 1983, Calvino remarked that “most of the books I have written and those I intend to write originate from the thought that it will be impossible for me to write a book of that kind: when I have convinced myself that such a book is completely beyond my capacities of temperament or skill, I sit down and start writing it.”163 He adds elsewhere that “rather than speak to you of what I have written, perhaps it would be more interesting to tell you about the problems that I have not yet resolved, that I don’t know how to resolve, and what these will cause me to write.”164 This is precisely

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a limit-experience, a questioning of one’s properties and capacities, that affected Calvino as he tried to complete The Castle of Crossed Destinies. In 1976 he included a “Note” at the end of the novel confessing his inability to make the constraint work, but also his equal inability to give up on the experiment: “A month went by, perhaps a whole year, and I thought no more about it. Then all of a sudden, it occurred to me that I could try again in a different way, more simple and rapid…Again I was trapped.” Even at the end of this process, “with the book in galleys,” Calvino questions whether or not he will be able to “be outside it once and for all.” “But will this actually happen,” he asks himself? He then conceived other ways forward, but “went no further than the formulation of the idea” as his “theoretical and expressive interests” went in “other directions.”165 Intensely creative actual-virtual new directions and affective modes of writing because, as Calvino writes in the final sentence of his “Note,” “I always feel the need to alternate one type of writing with another, completely different, to begin writing again as if I have never written anything before.” This “completely different” mode of writing becomes If on a winter’s night a traveler. It is not without real interest that Gilles Deleuze shared Calvino’s desire to be at the threshold of one’s capabilities. Deleuze admits that “how else can one write but of those things which one doesn’t know, or knows badly? It is precisely here that we imagine having something to say. We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other.”166 To say something about transmissibility one must write at the threshold of knowledge, along a shoreline apprehending wave swells, always recounting “a real book of past philosophy as if it were an imaginary and feigned book.”167 Envois

My son is named Calvino to betray familial tradition. An event that reveals how and why tradition itself presupposes the infinitive verbs to betray (in Italian tradire) and to translate (tradurre) because survival is futural, always reassembled, recommenced. Transmissibility betrays any and all tradition as well as any preconceived, determined future. It is experimentation. Contemporary experimentation. To betray is therefore an infinitive verb that remains untimely, never quite aligned with sequential, linear time, but always partaking of series of becomings that have their own oblique, immanent past-future temporality.168 Infinitive verbs (for instance, to parent, from the Latin parō to prepare, provide, contrive, design, to bring forth) are the true semiotic of an event. Notes 1 The title of this chapter is from Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, trans. William Weaver, New York: Harcourt, 1981, p. 154. The biographical information regarding Calvino’s writing the lectures as well as his answer to his daughter’s question (“Chi sono io?”) in the hospital after surgery following his cerebral hemorrhage are from

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Domenico Scarpa’s excellent Italo Calvino, Milan: Edizioni Bruno Mondadori, 1999, pp. 46–51. Calvino’s answer “tu sei la tartaruga” was related by Natalia Ginzburg; see Scarpa, p. 51. We all have benefited as well from Esther Calvino’s remembrances of his preparing and writing the lectures; see her “Presentazione” to the Italian edition Lezioni americane: Sei proposte per il prossimo millennio, Milan: Mondadori, 2015. In addition, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari discuss the complexities of “consistency” throughout their work together. In their final collaboration, they are adamant that “the problem of philosophy is to acquire a consistency without losing the infinite into which thought plunges (in this respect chaos has as much a mental as a physical existence). To give consistency without losing anything of the infinite.” Later in the same work, they add that “philosophical concepts have events for consistency” because “through concepts, philosophy continually extracts a consistent event from the state of affairs—a smile without a cat, as it were.” Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, pp. 42, emphasis in original, 126. 2 Deleuze, Foucault, trans, Seán Hand, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988, p. 85. 3 Calvino, The Uses of Literature: Essays, trans. Patrick Creagh, New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1986, p. 73. 4 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium: The Charles Norton Eliot Lectures 1985– 86, trans. Patrick Creagh, New York: Vintage Books, 1993, pp. 33, 124; Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler, p. 34; Calvino, Collection of Sand: Essays, trans. Martin McLaughlin, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002, p. 75. 5 I am playing on the title of Calvino’s 1970 collection of stories Gli Amori Difficili, Turin: Einaudi. See Calvino, Difficult Loves, trans. William Weaver, et al., New York: Harcourt, 1983. 6 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 3. 7 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 9. 8 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 26. 9 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, pp. 5, 12. 10 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 10. 11 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, pp. 16, 22. 12 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 90. 13 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 91. He means “that extraordinary and indefinable area of the human imagination that produced the works of Lewis Carroll, [Raymond] Queneau, and [ Jorge Luis] Borges,” The Uses of Literature, p. 46. To this genealogy he adds Samuel Beckett, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Witold Gombrowicz, and Alfred Jarry; see pp. 48, 63. 14 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 91. 15 Emphasis in original; Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 91. 16 See Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001; originally published in 1966. 17 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 92. 18 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 92. 19 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 124. 20 Calvino, The Uses of Literature, p. 36. 21 Calvino, The Uses of Literature, pp. 47, 100. On the relation between literature and philosophy, Calvino is clear that we must avoid any philosophy or form of criticism wherein the “philosophers” “dash back to demonstrate that [what the writers have created] can be reduced to the terms of one of their [the philosopher’s] own operations, and that the particular castles and bishops were nothing but general ideas in disguise.” So although philosophy and literature are “embattled adversaries,” as twentieth-century critical theory and literary studies have affirmed, Calvino offers us

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a definition of philosophy that can work with writing: “the real revolutionary value of a philosophy, which consists in its being all snags and thorns, in its power to upset common sense and sentiments and to outrage every ‘natural manner of thinking.” See “Philosophy and Literature,” originally published in the Times Literary Supplement on 28 September 1967, in The Uses of Literature, pp. 40, 43. 22 Calvino, The Uses of Literature, p. 24. 23 Calvino, The Uses of Literature, pp. 42, 63. 24 Emphasis added; Calvino, The Uses of Literature, p. 25. 25 Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler, p. 171. 26 Calvino, Letters, p. 423. 27 Calvino, The Uses of Literature, p. 73. 28 Calvino, The Uses of Literature, p. 40. 29 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 9. Deleuze develops his concept of the “crystal-image” most fully in “The Crystals of Time” chapter of Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, pp. 68–97. 30 Calvino, The Uses of Literature, p. 40. 31 Birgitte Grundtvig, Martin McLaughlin, and Lene Waage Petersen, “Introduction,” Image, Eye and Art in Calvino, London and New York: Routledge, 2007, p. 3. This collection of essays includes a short preface by Esther Calvino that shares Calvino’s admission that he had “been writing about visibility” his entire life. My thinking on Mr. Palomar and issues of art and visibility has benefited from wrestling with Petersen’s “The Significance of Visibility: Interpreting the Image in Calvino,” pp. 89–105. It has also been enriched by the entirety of Marco Belpoliti’s invaluable L’occhio di Calvino: Nuova edizione ampliata, Turin: Einaudi, 2006. My starting point is Belpoliti’s excellent summation that “the name Calvino” represents “a form of culture founded on interdisciplinarity, on the communication of knowledge, on the rich exchanges between literature and art,” that is, a “form of culture that does never renounces its rapport with politics, but draws more nourishment from its continual confrontation with reality and tries, whenever possible, to imagine solutions to the problems that extend beyond the immediate present,” p. ix, translation mine. 32 Calvino, Letters 1941–1985, ed. Michael Wood, trans. Martin McLaughlin, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013, p. 427. 33 Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Italo Calvino, Le città invisibili,” Descrizioni di descrizioni, ed. Grazilla Chiarcossi, Turin: Einaudi, 1979, pp. 34–39. All translations of Pasolini’s review are mine. 34 Pasolini, Descrizioni di descrizioni, p. 35. 35 Pasolini, Descrizioni di descrizioni, p. 35. 36 Pasolini, Descrizioni di descrizioni, p. 36. 37 Pasolini, Descrizioni di descrizioni, p. 36. 38 Pasolini, Descrizioni di descrizioni, p. 37. 39 Pasolini, Descrizioni di descrizioni, p. 37. 40 Pasolini, Descrizioni di descrizioni, p. 38. 41 Pasolini, Descrizioni di descrizioni, p. 38. 42 Marc Auge, The Future, London and New York: Verso, 2014, p. 13. 43 Auge, The Future, p. 13. 4 4 Auge, The Future, p. 13. 45 Calvino, Letters, p. 427. 46 Calvino, Letters, p. 427. 47 Calvino, Letters, pp. 427–428. 48 Calvino, Letters, p. 427. 49 Calvino, Letters, p. 428.

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50 Calvino, Letters, p. 428. 51 Calvino, Letters, p. 428. 52 Calvino, The Uses of Literature, p. 100. 53 See Deleuze, “To Have Done with Judgment,” Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pp. 126–135. This short essay, which refers to writers like D. H. Lawrence and Antonin Artaud, as well as Nietzsche and Spinoza, is remarkable. In relation to Calvino and to points we will make later in relation to Giorgio Agamben, I bring our attention to the closing remarks: “Judgment prevents the emergence of any new mode of existence. For the latter creates itself through its own forces, that is, through the forces that it is able to harness, and is valid in and of itself inasmuch as it brings the new combination into existence. Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge,” p. 135. 54 Calvino, The Uses of Literature, p. 82. 55 Calvino, The Uses of Literature, p. 83. 56 Calvino, The Uses of Literature, p. 84. 57 Emphasis added; Calvino, The Uses of Literature, p. 84. 58 Emphasis added; Calvino, The Uses of Literature, p. 85. 59 Calvino, The Uses of Literature, p. 86. 60 Calvino, The Uses of Literature, p. 89. 61 Calvino, The Uses of Literature, p. 87. 62 Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver, New York: Harcourt, 1974, p. 59. 63 Calvino, The Uses of Literature, p. 87. 64 Calvino, The Uses of Literature, pp. 98, 99. 65 Calvino, The Uses of Literature, pp. 81–82. 66 Calvino, Italian Folktales, New York: Harcourt, 1980, p. xxi. 67 Calvino, Collection of Sand, p. 165. 68 Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina, New York: Semiotext(e), 2004, p. 139. 69 Deleuze, Desert Islands, pp. 139–40. 70 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 132. 71 Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 141. 72 Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 141. 73 Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 141. As Daniel W. Smith explains in his introduction to Deleuze’s Essays Critical and Clinical: “But the concept of Life also functions as an ethical principle in Deleuze’s thought. Throughout his works, Deleuze has drawn a sharp distinction between morality and ethics. He uses the term ‘morality’ to define, in general terms, any set of ‘constraining’ rules, such as a moral code, that consists in judging actions and intentions by relating them to transcendent or universal values (‘this is good, that is evil’). What he calls ‘ethics’ is, on the contrary, a set of ‘facilitative’ rules that evaluates what we do, say, think, and feel according to the immanent mode of existence it implies,” p. xiv. 74 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 1. 75 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 1. 76 Deleuze, “Preface to the French Edition,” Essays Critical and Clinical, p. lv. 77 Deleuze, “Preface to the French Edition,” Essays Critical and Clinical, p. lv. 78 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 1. 79 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 3. 80 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 124. 81 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 135. 82 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, pp. 131, 135. 83 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 135. On “reverse Platonism,” see Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 53. 84 Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, New York: Knopf, 1993, pp. 145, 171.

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85 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 16; the line “time made water” is from Montale’s poem “News from Mount Amiata,” Eugenio Montale Poems, ed. and trans. Jonathan Galassi, New York: Knopf, p. 137. 86 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 6; The Uses of Literature, p. 286. 87 Calvino, The Uses of Literature, p. 288. 88 Calvino, The Uses of Literature, p. 288. 89 Montale, “Little Testament,” Eugenio Montale Poems, pp. 180–181. 90 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 6. 91 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 6; Montale, “Little Testament,” Eugenio Montale Poems, p. 181. 92 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 15. 93 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 7. 94 Calvino, The Uses of Literature, p. 288. Montale, “Style and Tradition,” The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Galassi, New York: Ecco Press, 1982, pp. 3–8. 95 Calvino, “The Count of Monte Cristo,” The Complete Cosmicomics, trans. Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks, and William Weaver, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002, p. 288. 96 Calvino, “The Count of Monte Cristo,” pp. 291–292; Belpoliti, L’occhio di Calvino, pp. 7–8. 97 Calvino, Mr. Palomar, trans. William Weaver, New York: Harcourt, 1985, p. 3. 98 See Calvino’s index for Mr. Palomar, p. 128. 99 Calvino, Mr. Palomar, p. 4. 100 Calvino, Mr. Palomar, pp. 3–4. 101 Luisa Guj, “The Loss of the Self: ‘La selva oscura’ of Mr. Palomar,” The Modern Language Review 82.4 (October 1987): 862–868. The line cited here is from p. 863. 102 Calvino, Mr. Palomar, pp. 6, 8. 103 Calvino, Mr. Palomar, p. 8. 104 Guj, “The Loss of the Self,” p. 868. 105 Calvino, Mr. Palomar, p. 119. 106 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, pp. 69–70. 107 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 77. 108 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 90. 109 As Deleuze insists: “This isn’t to oppose eternal or historical, or contemplation and action…[we are] talking about events themselves or becoming. What history grasps in an event is the way it’s actualized in particular circumstances; the event’s becoming is beyond the scope of history. History isn’t experimental, it’s just the set of more or less negative preconditions that make it possible to experiment with something beyond history. Without history the experimentation would remain indeterminate, lacking any initial conditions, but experimentation isn’t historical…Becoming isn’t part of history; history amounts only to the set of preconditions, however recent, that one leaves behind in order to ‘become’, that is, to create something new,” Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, pp. 170–171. See also Dennis Duncan, “Calvino, Llull, Lucretius – Two Models of Literary Combinatorics,” Comparative Literature 64.1 ( January 2012): 94–109, especially 104. 110 Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone, eds. Michael Caesar and Franco D’Intino, trans. Kathleen Baldwin, et al., New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. It goes without saying that Leopardi’s “casual thoughts” are anything but. 111 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 57. 112 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 60. 113 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 63. 114 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 63.

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115 In the preface to The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, Agamben writes that “for reasons that need not be clarified here, the project was never realized” but “I attempted to establish the physiognomy of the project,” pp. xi–xii. In a letter to Guido Neri, dated 31 January 1978 from Paris, Calvino mentions the same “project” and his reasoning in regard to it; see Letters, pp. 482–487, especially 484. 116 Agamben, The End of the Poem, p. xii. 117 Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron, London and New York: Verso, 2007, p. 143. This book was published in 1978 by Einaudi, where Calvino long worked as an editor, on his recommendation. As such, it contains Agamben’s first articulation of the ideas he discussed with Calvino and Rugafiori. 118 Agamben, Infancy and History, p. 143. 119 As Agamben mentions, these terms are from Walter Benjamin’s essay “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” (1924–25) and his introduction to The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, London and New York: Verso, 1999. In the former we read: “Commentary seeks the material content (Sachgehalt) of a work of art; critique seeks the truth content (Wahrheitsgehalt).” He writes that “the material content and the truth content, united at the beginning of a work’s history, set themselves apart from each other in the course of its duration, because truth content always remains to the same extent hidden as the material content comes to the fore.” See Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996, p. 297. 120 Agamben, Infancy and History, p. 144. 121 Agamben, Infancy and History, p. 144. 122 Agamben, Infancy and History, pp. 146–147. For those interested in a fuller understanding of this philology, see pp. 148–150. Also note Agamben’s use of the same phrase as a title for “Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, pp. 89–103. Agamben sketches a genealogy of his “unnamed science”: Giambattista Vico, Benjamin, Callimachus, Paul Valéry, Dante, author of the Zohar, Friedrich Hölderlin, Kaf ka, Warburg. 123 Agamben, Infancy and History, p. 147. 124 Agamben, Infancy and History, p. 147. 125 Agamben, The Man without Content, trans. Georgia Albert, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, pp. 110, 111. 126 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1969, pp. 257–258. 127 Agamben, The Man without Content, p. 110. 128 Agamben, The Man without Content, p. 105. 129 Agamben, The Man without Content, pp. 113–114. 130 Agamben, The Man without Content, p. 114. 131 Agamben, The Man without Content, p. 114. 132 Agamben, The Man without Content, p. 114. 133 Agamben, The Man without Content, p. 114. 134 Agamben, The Man without Content, p. 114. 135 Agamben, “Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films,” Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, p. 314. 136 See Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. 137 Agamben, “Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films,” p. 314.

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138 Georges Didi-Huberman, Survival of the Fireflies, trans. Lia Swope Mitchell, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018, pp. 44, 103 note 9. I have the highest respect for Didi-Huberman’s work. My work on transmissibility builds on his insights regarding art and history. His critique of Agamben here is productive for his own reading of Benjamin, Pasolini, and Jacques Derrida, which I admire very much: “Survivals, though, concern only the immanence of historical time: they have no redemptive value. And as to their revelatory value, it is always spotty, in flickers: symptomatic, to be honest. Survivals promise no resurrection (what meaning could one expect from raising a ghost?). They are nothing but glimmers, flashes passing the shadows, never the advent of a great ‘light of lights’. Because they teach us that destruction—even ongoing destruction—is never absolute, survivals spares us from believing that a ‘last’ revelation or a ‘final’ salvation is necessary for our freedom,” p. 42. 139 Derrida addresses this concept throughout his work; see the “Exergue” and the top of p. 72 in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Note Agamben’s 2012 interview with Juliette Cerf entitled “Thought Is the Courage of Hopelessness”: www.ver​sobo​oks.com/blogs/1612thou​g ht-is-the-cour​a ge-of-hopel​e ssn​e ss-an-interv ​iew-with-phil​o sop​her-gior​g ioagam​ben. 140 Agamben, Creation and Anarchy: The Work of Art and the Religion of Capitalism, trans. Adam Kotsko, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019, pp. 15, 18. Drawing on Aristotle’s distinction between potentiality and actuality, dynamis and energeia, Agamben defines potentiality as “not simply the potential to do this or that but potential to not-do, potentiality not to pass into actuality.” See especially the essay “On Potentiality” in Potentialities, pp. 177–184. In The Man without Content, he titles a chapter “Privation Is Like a Face,” a phrase from Aristotle’s discussion of potentiality. He explains that “what Aristotle wants to posit is the existence of potentiality: that there is a presence and a face of potentiality. He literally states as much in the Physics: ‘privation [sterēsis] is like a face, a form [eidos]’,” Potentialities, p. 180. What Agamben proposes here is that potentiality “creates its own ontology” by “emancipating itself from Being and non-Being alike”; potentiality is not merely a matter of will or necessity, it is an experience of the “hiatus” or “threshold between Being and non-Being, between sensible and intelligible, between word and thing,” which is “not the colorless abyss of the Nothing but the luminous spiral of the possible,” Potentialities, pp. 259, 257. See my “A Contemporary Agamben?” Radical Philosophy 2.04 (February 2019): 93–97. 141 Antonio Negri, “Letter to Giorgio on the Sublime” dated 7 December 1988 in Art and Multitude: Nine Letters on Art, followed by Metamorphoses: Art and Immaterial Labour, trans. Ed Emery, Cambridge: Polity, 2011, p. 26. 142 Negri, Art and Multitude, p. 31. 143 Agamben, The Man without Content, pp. 109–110. 144 Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, trans. William Weaver, New York: Harcourt, 1977, p. 99. 145 Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, p. 105. 146 Calvino returns to this “George-Jerome” figure in Six Memos for the Next Millennium where he writes that he can identify his “own life with that of this George-Jerome” because “this fantastic iconology has become my habitual way of expressing my love of painting” and “I have adopted the method of telling my own stories, starting from pictures famous in the history of art or at any rate pictures that have made an impact on me,” p. 94. 147 Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, p. 105. 148 Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, p. 107. 149 Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, p. 106.

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150 Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, pp. 107–108. 151 Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, p. 108. 152 Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, pp. 109, 108. 153 Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, p. 111. 154 This is precisely the attitude that Negri foregrounded for us in his comments on the real difference between Agamben and Deleuze’s essays on Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener.” In conversation with Cesare Casarino, Negri says that “I found his essay on Bartleby, for example, absolutely infuriating. This essay was published originally as a little book that contained also Deleuze’s essay on Bartleby: well, it turns out that what Deleuze says in this essay is exactly the contrary of what Giorgio says in his!…The point is that, inasmuch as it is death, the limit is not creative.” Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri, In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, p. 155. Agamben, “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” Potentialities, pp. 243–271; Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, The Formula,” Essays Critical and Clinical, pp. 68–90. 155 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 96. 156 Calvino, The Uses of Literature, pp. 97–98. 157 Calvino, The Uses of Literature, p. 99. 158 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, pp. 112, 89. 159 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 95. 160 Calvino, Mr. Palomar, p. 12. 161 Calvino, Mr. Palomar, p. 17. 162 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, pp. 97, 122. 163 The lines from this lecture are cited in Chris Powers’ “A Brief Survey of the Short Story: Italo Calvino,” The Guardian, 13 August 2014: www.theg​uard​ian.com/books/ booksb​log/2014/aug/13/short-story-sur ​vey-italo-calv ​i no. 164 Emphasis in original; Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 68. 165 Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, pp. 128, 129. 166 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. xxi. 167 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pp. xxi–xxii. 168 On betrayal, see Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. High Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London and New York: Continuum, 1987, pp. 31–33. Deleuze and Guattari explain infinitive verbs as part of the “particular semiotic” of the plane of consistency in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, pp. 263–265.

VIII IMPERSONALITY, OR BOB DYLAN AS A COLUMN OF AIR

He told us himself: “I’m not there.” Not he. Himself. He dissolved himself in order to gift us a collection of lines and images—a gnomologium or sayings collection regarding a manner of being, an ethics of becoming— that were never entirely his. Some think that they are perhaps more like monostichoi, oneliners, or pithy aphorisms. Not us. He was there before but then…he became a “column of air,” a “single breath” of focused physical and mental attention as Allen Ginsberg witnessed in 1965. Without an origin, let alone a direction home, Dylan found himself as lost, as others have done and will still, crossing a threshold between the pure past and its futures. “You always have to realize that you are constantly in a state of becoming and as long as you stay in that realm you’ll sort of be alright,” he confessed to a well-known Italian-American filmmaker. Sort of alright. But you become more and more impersonal and absent as you betray yourself and others, allowing one’s mediators to lay claim to an open future, albeit one unrecognizable to them. Another past-future becoming will have unmade you. Only within such “a state of becoming” could Dylan have experienced such a prolix, inspired, “tremendous speed” as we witness between 1964 and 1966, when he heard the “sound that I hear in my mind,” a foreign, sibylline, “thin wild mercury sound,” as he described it. A sound never entirely his own or ours. In the eighth of eleven Outlined Epitaphs, Dylan gives us: “Yes, I am a thief of thoughts | not, I pray, a stealer of souls” for “I have built an’ rebuilt | upon what is waitin’.” “Endless, endless | it’s all endless | an’ it’s all songs | it’s just one big world of songs | an’ they’re all on loan | if they’re only turned loose t’ sing.” This is precisely what a cover DOI: 10.4324/9781003015666-8

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song is—a rendition, a rehearsal, a repetition of difference, a mediation of what is not ours within a meanwhile. “One big world of songs,” he writes in the eleventh. “Influences?” the young Dylan asks himself again in the eighth, before answering: “hundreds of thousands | perhaps millions | for all songs lead back t’ the sea.”

INDEX

Note: Endnotes are indicated by the page number followed by “n” and the note number e.g., 14n27 refers to note 27 on page 14. Abramović, Marina 73–5 abstract lines 14n27, 37, 82, 95 abstract machines 25, 30, 52n29, 57n97, 80–1, 103–4, 106 Acconci, Vito 75 the actual, and the virtual 3, 25, 29, 34, 37 actuality 17n53, 57n90, 57, 121, 145n140 actualization 4; and art-work 11, 40, 70; of the past 8–9, 27; of sense-events 36–7, 39–40; and transmissibility 22; of the virtual 17n53 actual-virtual relations 2–3, 75, 77, 95, 118, 123 aesthetic encounters 5–6, 80, 96 aesthetic experience, transhistorical 89n76 aesthetic figures 11–12, 34, 67, 132, 137 aesthetic history 3–11, 23; abstract line of 94–5; as co-creation 31; and diagrams 80, 103–4; and disquiet of the past 33; and history of aesthetics 53n36; and insensible forces 105–6; and the intensive 35; mediators in 100–1; memory and forgetting 85; and the past 26; problematics in 21–2; and sense 24–5; as topos study 29; and transmitted forces 41 aesthetic invention 123–4 aesthetic labor 2–4, 21–4, 30–1, 45–6, 85, 124

aesthetic microhistories 34, 98 aesthetic philosophy 11–12, 116–17, 120–1 aesthetic regime 105 aesthetics 23–4; Agamben on 132; in postcritical moment 11, 15n29; and transmissibility 2, 23 African-American culture 43 Agamben, Giorgio 19–20, 33; on art 130–7; and Calvino 144nn115, 117; on the colon 70; and decreation 57n98; Negri on 146n154; on potentiality 145n140; unnamed science 132, 144n122 aggadah 49n2, 131 Aion 38, 100, 102 Alliez, Éric 105 alterity 5, 20, 24, 34, 45, 70, 76 Ammons, A. R. 10 amor fati 33, 36 André Malraux 57n90 anorganic plane 34 anthropomorphism 117, 129–30 anti-aesthetics 22, 122–3 antiliterature 122–3 antimemory 114 Antonello da Messina 136 aporias 11, 68, 104, 120, 129 archival-diagrammatic lines 103–6 Arendt, Hannah 133

150 Index

Arensberg, Walter 77 ars-technē 4, 10, 23, 33 art: aesthetic regime of 52n34; angel of 132, 134–6; as difficult love 124–5; end of 122, 132; indirect contribution to politics 122–3, 135; as metonymic messenger 19; as mode of history 53n45; return of 68; and temporality 81 The Artist Is Present (Abramović) 73, 75 artistic production 102, 124 art-work 3–6, 9–11, 16n46, 23; as abstract machine 25; and affective experience 28; and breaks 40–1; of Calvino 137–8; and collection 43; deframing and composing 95; and diagrams 103; as disjunctive 46–7; double movement of 77–8, 106–7; icons and indexes compared to 81, 85; and individuation 42; passageway within 70; problematic of 32–6; rhythm as 45; and sensation 98; of Twombly 79–82 artworks: Deleuze and Guattari on 20–1; and transmissibility 19–20 “as of a now” 12, 30, 37 athleticism 34 attentiveness: to aesthetic labor 30; Benjamin on 42–3, 85; Celan and 71–2; experiments with 46; intensified 118; and memory-work 44; and ontological-aesthetic tropism 11; and transmissibility 2, 7 Auge, Marc 5, 120 Augustine, Saint 136 autonomy 5, 16, 22, 25, 51n25, 55n64, 118 avant-garde, paranoiac 19, 22 awakening, constellation of 85 Bacon, Francis 102 Badiou, Alain 16n46, 60n142 Bal, Mieke 3, 31 Ballour, Raymond 52n33 Baraka, Amiri 43–4 barbarism 42, 62n159 Barthes, Roland 10, 16n44, 83, 89n73, 122 Basinski, William 31 Baudelaire, Charles 3, 33 Beckett, Samuel 55n63, 75, 138 becoming, a bit of 9, 11 Belting, Hans 26 Benjamin, Walter 18–19, 49nn2–3; on attention 85; and collecting 42–3, 144n119; and Cy Twombly 79; Didi-Huberman on 145n138; and

Naples 83, 92; philosophy of history 62n157, 131–4, 137; and pure means 51n27 Berenson, Bernard 31 Bergson, Henri 7–9, 28, 36, 56n68, 84; as mediator 97–8 Berlant, Lauren 61n150, 86n2 betrayal 4–5, 51n24, 72, 95–6, 139; see also tradire-tradurre Beuys, Joseph 75 bibula harena 116, 130 Black Thought 31, 39 Bloom, Harold 107n10 Borges, Jorge Luis 31, 129 Bottura, Massimo 31 Bourriaud, Nicolas 16n46 Brecht, Bertolt 101 Buchloh, Benjamin 89n76 caesura 69, 71, 84 Calvino, Esther 140n1, 141n31 Calvino, Italo: and Agamben 130–1, 135–7; biographical information 139n1; and consistency 115–18; and Eugenio Montale 125–6; on Homer 32; limitexperience of 138–9; on literature and philosophy 140n21; and Pasolini 119–21; on plane of immanence 34; political experience of 121–3; and transmissibility 11, 19; and waves 127–30; and writing 124–5 Camus, Albert 2 Carroll, Lewis 59n136, 140n13 Castaneda, Carlos 95 The Castle of Crossed Destinies (Calvino) 116, 136, 139 causal chains 55n63 Celan, Paul 3, 10, 56n82, 61n149, 86, 138; and dates 70–2; and passageways 47, 68–70; and Wallace Stevens 78 chance effects 46, 103 chaos 34, 37; composition of 99; oceanic 36, 82, 95, 99, 106 chaosmos 36, 99, 103, 129 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 115 Chopin, Frédéric 30–1 chronology 3, 134 citation 43, 61n155, 62n159, 62 Clark, T. J. 30, 65n197 clinch of forces 11, 84, 90n83 coexistence 4, 7, 28, 30, 84–5 collecting, Benjamin’s theory of 42–3, 61n155

Index  151

colon 70 Coltrane, John 39, 44 communication, forced 46, 102 composition: as definition of art 34; plane of 22, 35, 45 concentration 71, 123 conceptual personae 11–12, 19, 67 concrete assemblages 16, 57n97, 80, 103–4, 106 consistency: Calvino’s lecture on 115; Deleuze and Guattari on 140n1; plane of 36, 44, 98–100, 107, 116, 118, 146n168; recomposed knowledge of 129 contextualism 22, 27, 41 contraînte 6, 137 convergence 53n36, 106–7 cosmic evolutionism, ridiculous 28 “The Count of Monte Cristo” (Calvino) 126–7 counter-actualization 36–7, 40, 74, 78, 106 cracks 37, 39–41, 46, 81, 102 creative acts 11, 20, 27, 41, 51n24, 95 critical language, of Deleuze and Guattari 20 crystal-image 118, 141n29 Daive, Jean 69 Dante Alighieri 46, 67, 84 dated events 47, 68, 70–2, 79 datum 60n146 Davis, Miles 44 De Chirico, Giorgio 31 Dean, Tacita 46 Debord, Guy 135 decreation 3, 57n98, 76–7 Defoe, Daniel 1 deframing-composing 95 Delanda, Manuel 28, 35, 51n25, 59nn123.129 Deleuze, Gilles 2, 14n14, 60n139; and aesthetic history 9; aesthetic philosophy of 11, 20–1, 106–7; on Bob Dylan 101–2; and Calvino 139; concept of life in 142n73; on diagrams 103–4; on exhaustion 76; on Guattari 94; on historical recapitulation 32; on history 143n109; on judgment 124, 142n53; and logic of sense 36–40; on mediators 51n24, 95–8, 105; on multiplicity 50n22; Negri on 146n154; ontology of 25, 35–6; on the past 108n19; on the problematic 50n14; and reverse Platonism 125; on temporal relations 81;

three virtues of 6, 14n27; on time 7–8; on two halves of sign 13n9 Deleuzian events 28 depersonalization 97 Derrida, Jacques 5–6, 33, 73, 87n29, 145nn138–9; on Celan 70–2; on eschatology 134 diagrams 80–2, 103–5, 109n60, 116 dialectical conception of reality and history 5, 120 Dickinson, Emily 11 Didi-Huberman, Georges 57n93, 134, 145n138 difference, and repetition 74–5 discourse 26 discursive formations 103–4, 116 DJs 11, 16n46 double movements 10, 31, 77–8, 102, 106 Duchamp, Marcel 77 Dumas, Alexandre 126–8 Dumas, Marlene 31 Dürer, Albrecht 132, 135–6 Dylan, Bob 23, 101–2, 147–8 dynamis 135, 145n140 Eco, Umberto 55n63, 60n136 ecstasy 6, 15, 79 effacement 71, 80 ego 97, 117, 125, 138 Eliot, T. S. 30–1, 44, 57n90, 91–2 epistemic labor 3 ethical seeking 117 ethics 2, 6–7, 10, 107; of aesthetic labor 124; Deleuze on 142n73; and logic of sense 39 Eunoë 84 events, however small 31–2 exhausting the possible 63n168 exhaustion 74, 76 experience: aesthetic 89n76; asubjective 83; space of 26–8, 54n54 experimentation 28–9, 98, 106; inventive writing as 124; involutive 82, 108n39; ontological-historiographic 3; sustained 125; transmissibility as 139 Export, Valie 31, 75 extimacy 9, 15n38, 44 Felski, Ruth 15n29 Felstiner, John 61, 69, 86, 87n42 fidelity 40–1, 72, 116, 123 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 37 flashes 11–12, 25, 145n138

152 Index

fogs 32, 58n113, 81–2, 99 force-diagrams 12, 104 force-form 4, 11, 99 force-signs 78, 91, 103, 105–6, 124 form, materialist conception of 10 formalism 2, 12, 79 form-as-force 30, 56n85 Foucault, Michel 20, 53n36, 66–7, 103–4, 122 Fusini, Nadia 58n102 the future, power of 94 Gehlen, Arnold 26 George, Saint 136–7 Ginsberg, Allen 147 Ginzburg, Carlo 26, 41, 54n54 giving or taking 51n24, 95 Godard, Jean-Luc 22, 73, 131 grace 76–7 graffiti 79–80 The Great Wall Walk (Abramović) 74 Greco-Roman antiquity 2, 31 Greenberg, Clement 77 ground, power of a 34, 56n84 Guattari, Félix 2; and aesthetic history 9–10; aesthetic philosophy of 11, 20, 24; death of 94; as mediator of Deleuze 96, 98; ontology of 25; three virtues of 6, 14n27 Guggenheim Museum 75 Guj, Luisa 128, 143 haecceities 14n27, 98–100 halakhah 49n2, 69, 131 happiness: Camus on 1–2; a promise of 85 Hasidim 79 Hazlitt, William 6, 15n28 Hegel, G. W. F. 32, 34 Hegelian dialectics 8 Heidegger, Martin 34, 131, 134 Herd, David 56n89 heterogenous series 36–7, 52n30, 103, 107 Hill, Geoffrey 31 historia 104 historical creativity 54nn47–8 historical events 27–8, 68, 132 historical materialism 42 historical past 27, 55n59, 84 historical processes 25, 36, 54n47, 119 historicism 3, 6–7, 16n47, 25, 47, 54n47; autotelic 120; diagrams within 82; wissenschaftliche premises of 29 histories, actual and virtual 25

historiography, creative 4, 7 history: of aesthetics 7, 53n36; angel of 132–5; autotelic 26, 30, 118; and becoming 28–9; end of 132; space of 42–3 Höfer, Candida 31, 82–4, 89n79, 90n83 Hölderlin, Friedrich 39 Homer 32 horizon mergers 47, 63n182 Hume, David 97 Hutcheon, Linda 53n45 hypomnēmata 66–7 Idea, transcendental 81, 99 ideal order 31, 44 ideas, world of 120 If on a winter’s night a traveler (Calvino) 12, 58n118, 116, 118, 126, 139n1 image-intensity complex 23 images, digital-mediatic 117 imagination 85; Benjamin on 79; Calvino on 117; Spinoza on 7; in Twombly 82 immanence 4, 12; dislocation of 70; fabric of 47; of history 29, 57n97; line of flight into 113; plane of 15n27, 17n53, 34, 38, 58n113, 99 immanent cause, non-unifying 57, 80–2 immanent fields 9–10, 27 immanent histories 25 immanent presence 76 impartability 42–3 impatience 128 imperceptibility 6, 14n27, 111–14, 118 the impersonal, power of 45, 125 impersonality 6, 14n27, 118, 147–8 incorporeal effects 37–9, 46, 102 indefinite articles 99–100 indexes 81, 84–5 indiscernibility 6, 14n27, 35, 91–3, 118, 124 individuation 21, 28; art-work as mode of 42; intensive zone of 33, 35–6; modes of 42, 99; without interruption 43 infinite series 36, 75, 100 infinitive verbs 107, 139, 146n168; “to cast” 52n30; Deleuze on 38, 98–101; “to render” 34; “to transmit” 2, 22, 39, 71, 94, 100 infinity, Calvino on 130 influence 96, 148; indirect 121 information channels 36, 59n132 instinct, tactical 43, 61, 61n155 intelligibility 52n34, 83, 105

Index  153

intensities 5, 10, 20, 23, 25; aesthetic of 11, 34; difference in 35; semiotics of 105 interdisciplinarity 132, 141n31 intermezzi 23, 35, 41, 93 interplay 51n24, 83, 89n79, 95 intuition 5, 120; durational 84 Invisible Cities (Calvino) 41, 119–20, 123, 142 involution 15n29, 22, 82, 93, 101–2, 107, 108n39, 116 Italian Communist Party 121–2 J Dilla 11, 31 Jacobs, Jane 33 Jagodzinski, Jan 16n46 Jay-Z 31 jazz 44 Jerome, Saint 136–7 Jewish theology 49n2, 69 Jones, Gayl 11, 86 “Josephine the Singer” (Kaf ka) 23, 111–14 Joyce, James 55n63, 82, 122, 138 Judeo-Christian themes 76, 134 judgment: Calvino disavowing 121; Deleuze against 142n53; writing opposed to 124–5 Kaf ka, Franz 12, 17, 74, 88, 111–14; Agamben on 133–4; Benjamin on 18–19, 49n2, 131 Kahn, Louis 11–12, 31 Kant, Immanuel 97 Kaufman, Bob 44 Kelly, Michael 53n45 Klee, Paul 77, 132, 135 knots 9, 12 Kubler, George 57n90 Kunstgriff 18, 49n3, 134 La Peste (Camus) 1–2 Lacan, Jacques 15n38, 122 Lacis, Asja 92 language, patterns of 123 Last Judgment 133, 136 Le gai savoir 73 Leeman, Richard 89n76 leer/lehr 3, 47 Leertext 64n184, 69 Leibniz, Gottfried 107 Leopardi, Giacomo 31, 126, 130 Levi, Primo 2, 29, 31 life: immanence of 118; movement of 99; time of 8–9

limit-experience 6–7, 139 line of flight 33, 94, 107, 113, 122, 136 listening 66–7, 112; great 68, 72; intensive 114 literature, Calvino on 138 logos, fragmentary 66–7 logos bioethikos 66–7 long preparation 97, 101, 107 Lorde, Audre 48 love: difficult 48, 116–17, 124–5; and mediation 96, 98 Lucretius 116, 129 luminous waves 42, 82, 99 Lundy, Craig 14, 28–9, 54n47 McLuhan, Marshall 49n6, 122 Manet, Édouard 30 Tamm, Marek 64n187 marvelous fossil 119 Marxism 10, 19, 119–20, 122, 126 Masaccio 31 material content 49, 49n2, 49, 144n119 materiality 23, 99; art complicating its own 46, 80; Benjamin and 42 material-vitalism 35, 118 meanwhiles 34, 103, 105 mediated movement 106 mediators 12, 51n24, 67, 95–100, 105 Melville, Herman 146n154 memory: art of 115, 117; Deleuze and Guattari on 14n26; sense of 33, 58n102, 85; transmitted by 2 memory-effects 46 memory-perception 7–9 memory-work 44, 84–5 messianic perspective 62, 131, 133–5, 137 metahistory 26 Michaux, Henri 33 mnemonic turn 64n187 mnemotechny 3, 47, 67 modern art 73, 77 modernism 27, 30, 44, 55n64, 77 modernity 5, 18–19, 131 Monk, Thelonious 31, 44, 62n163 monstrousness 11, 33, 97–8, 133, 135 Montale, Eugenio 31, 116, 125–6, 128, 130 Moretti, Franco 10, 50n13, 52n29 Morrison, Toni 2 Mr. Palomar (Calvino) 23, 41, 127–30, 138, 141n31 multiplicity 3–4, 10, 20–1, 50n22; art-work as 40; Calvino on 125,

154 Index

128–9, 137; discrete-continuous 98; encountering 42; of fragments 83; gathered 71–2; intensive 97; potential 117; reshaping ideas as 77; spatiotemporal 80, 103; the virtual as 37 multiplicity-consistency 137 Museum of Modern Art, New York City 73–4 Naples 82–3, 92 Nauman, Bruce 75 negative capability 47, 63n180 Negri, Antonio 4, 18, 64n191, 135, 146n154 Neoclassicism 30–1 nets: reticulated 95; vast 12, 116, 125 Nietzsche, Friedrich 59n136, 64n195, 73, 96–8, 124 nihilism 5, 76; subjective 78–9 nominalism, pictorial 79 non-places 47, 81–2 nostalgia 32, 46 Oakeshott, Michael 54n56 oceanic lines 12, 48 ontological duration 9 ontological-historiographic mode of production 3, 6, 81 ontology, leap into 28 ontology-aesthetics 9, 11, 20, 35, 121 ontology-aesthetics-history 3 opaque zones 47 open work 27, 55n63, 116 opinion, struggle against 34, 106 order of things 116, 118 originality 21 Otolith Group 12, 31 Oulipo writers 6 Outlined Epitaphs (Dylan) 101, 147 Ovid (P. Ovidius Naso) 92, 129 Paik, Nam June 21 Pane, Gina 75 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 19, 119–22, 126, 145n138 passageways 68–70, 72 the past: to come 87n29; disquiet of 32–3; ontological status of 7–8; and the present 42, 81; unredeemed 85; virtual 11, 28–31, 102 the past-in-itself 29 pastology 46

perception: psychic mechanism of 41; rhythm of 86; thresholds of 47, 107 Perec, Georges 41 performance work, history of 74 period eye 48, 64n192 Pessoa, Fernando 34–5, 58n105 phase transitions 59n123, 60n139 phenomenology 34, 105 philology 43, 132 philosophy, history of 97 photographic thinking 83 Piero della Francesa 30 “Pirate Jenny” 101 plague year 1 Plato 46, 63n174, 96, 123 Platonism 20, 119–20, 128; reverse 121, 125 pluripotency 1, 30 poetry: modern 30; as passageways 68 Ponge, Francis 129 posthistory 26 postmodernism 16n46, 22, 31, 53n45, 121 potentiality 62n159; and actuality 145n140; in literature 138; produced by art 20, 34, 75–6, 135; transmissibility as 46 Pound, Ezra 30 practical past 7, 27–8, 45, 47, 54n56 Praz, Mario 15n28 presentism 3, 5, 29–30, 55n64, 131 problematics 20–1, 25, 32, 50n14; aesthetic and historiographic 103; virtual 36 proper names 98–101, 111, 113; of artists 31, 82, 91 psychoanalysis 22, 24, 122 quasi-causality 36–8, 51n25, 59 quotation 12; and transmissibility 30 Rancière, Jacques 23, 52n34 reading, intensive way of 13 real spaces 46, 63n177, 63 realism 11, 27, 78 recapitulation, historical 32 recollection 61n155; and hypomnēmata 66; pure 8, 56n68; a turn of 42–3, 85 recollection-images 9, 80 recursivity 9, 24 reference points 15n28, 132, 134–5 relay transmission 22, 51n24, 95 Renaissance 31 repetition 74–5, 83; philosophy as 97 re-search 33, 56n82, 57n94, 104, 123

Index  155

research programs 105–6 resistance 81, 104, 121 reverse causalities 103–4, 109n47 revisionary ratios 96, 107n10 rhythm, momentum 44–5 Rich, Adrienne 33 rituals 3, 74 Rousseau, Emile 73 Rugafiori, Claudio 19, 130–1, 144 Rukeyser, Muriel 30 Ruskin, John 6–7 Sanders, Pharoah 31 Sarraute, Nathalie 11, 17n48 Schiller, Friedrich 29 Scholem, Gershom 18 schwellen 42, 61n153, 70 self-formation 66 sens 9, 69 sensation: compounds of 11; and intelligibility 83; the work of 34 sense: logic of 24–5, 37–8; transmitting the 117, 125; work of 39 sense-events 7, 21–2; and aesthetics 24–5, 31, 35; art-works as 46, 95, 106; Badiou on 60n142; and “cracks” 40–1; Deleuze on 101–2; duration of 44; and logic of sense 36–40; of love 80; oceanic lines of 48; photographs as 83; piloting role of 82; rendering 34; repeated performance as 75; traces and threads of 3, 26, 30; and transmissibility 9 sense-movement 69–70 sensibility, theory of 106 sensible material 24, 103 Sibyl of Cumae 23, 67, 91–3 signal-forces 30, 36, 40–1, 45, 47 Simone, Nina 101 Singbarer Rest 47, 64n186, 72 singularities 6, 10, 12, 16n46, 17n53, 23, 60n139; in art 20–1; Calvino and 118, 124, 129; and dates 71–2; encounters with 102; historical-material 25; hypomnēmata as 67; intensive 34–5; in Kaf ka 112–13; movement between 38; and sense-events 40; see also haecceities singularity-events 60n139, 71, 115 Sisyphean labor 10, 16n44 Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Calvino) 19, 126, 129–31, 138 Smith, Marquard 57n94 Soane, John 31 social fields 57n97, 80, 103

socio-political interpretation 12 Socrates 96 solitude, populous 100 sonorous line 37–8, 43, 76, 79 space, portraits of 83 speech, subjective 6–7 Spinoza, Baruch 7, 42, 59n136, 97–8 stammering 12, 33, 74; language itself 62n163; and the Sibyl 92 stammering answers 6–7 stanza 54n53 Stevens, Wallace 27, 31, 33, 77–8 stoicism 126 stuttering, in musical language 44, 63n163 subject matter, preconscious 118 subjectivity 19, 89n76; and mediation 97–8 the sublime, obverse of 123, 135 Suger, Abbot 2 surrealism 89n76, 119–20 syncretism 26 Tamm, Marek 64n187 tarot 116, 136 Taylor, A. J. P. 7 Taylor, Cecil 6, 12, 30–1, 44–5, 56n85, 62n163 temporal relations 81 temporality 2; as becoming 21; coexisting 40; enfolded 102; and the intensive 36; in museums 136; of the plane of consistency 99–100 texturology 34, 64n191, 107 The Logic of Sense (Deleuze) 20, 36, 59n136, 106 Thompson, D’Arcy 10, 56n85 thought, objectivity of 12 threshold anxieties 46 thresholds 61n146; actual-virtual 34, 83; aesthetic history as 24–5; archivaldiagrammatic 105; asymptotic-affective 35; Calvino on 125; in Celan’s poetry 68, 70–2; of concentration 71; of consistency and the future 116; formalismcommitment 2; habit-attentiveness 85; of human thought 9; of knowledge 139; in lines of writing 26; memory-oblivion 44; of perception 15n27, 47, 107; poetry-painting 77–8; in sense-events 7; transmitting intensive affects 12 Thyrsis of Etna 79 Tieck, Ludwig 49n3 time: Bergson and Deleuze on 7–8; deframing-composing within 95; a

156 Index

diverse idea of 119; linear 132–3, 139; as openness 83–4 timehole 69–70 Tintoretto 104, 109n60 topos study 29, 56n82, 70 traces 5, 12; tenuous 116–17, 125–6 traces and threads 3, 9; hypomnēmata as 67; movement between 26, 30, 47; weaving together 41–2 tradire-tradurre 31, 139 tradition: betrayal of 139; dissolution of 18–19, 32, 132–3; as ideal order 30–1; of the oppressed 43 transdisciplinarity 50n23 transmissibility 1–4, 6–7, 9–12, 13n1; as abstract machine 30–1; and aesthetic history 26, 41, 94; Agamben on 131–2; Benjamin on 19, 43; in Calvino 116, 123; as conceptual net 52n29; Deleuze and Guattari on 20, 22; and disquiet 32–3; as double movement 102, 106; Gayl Jones and 86; and in-betweens 105; and limit-experience 139; and long preparation 107; love of 134; and making events 32; mediators and 96; new modes of 117; pure means of 37, 48; and rhythm 44; secular modes of 45–6, 135; symptoms of 137; through other persona 67; without interruption 47 transmission: impossibility of 132; means of 134 transverse waves 24, 36, 41 truth content 49n2, 131, 144n119 Twombly, Cy 12, 31, 57n98, 78–82, 89n76 Twombly-effect 82 Ulay 73–4 universals 24, 60n139, 107

univocity 25, 36–9, 78 untimeliness, radical 46, 97 vagueness 117, 130 Vasari, Giorgio 31 vatic lines 46 Vellodi, Kamini 51n23, 104, 109n60, 109 Virgil (P. Vergilius Maro) 31, 67, 79, 84, 92 the virtual: actualization of 17n53; Calvino on 117; concept of 4, 8; in history 25, 29, 34; as a multiplicity 37; reassembling and transforming 78 virtualities 3–4, 17n53, 24, 83–4 Visel, Dan 75 visibilities 7, 32, 47, 58n102, 103; of art 52n34; Calvino on 115; Petersen on 141n31; problematic of 124 visions and auditions 9, 12, 124–5 vital ideas 33, 58n107 vitality, structural 45, 55n63, 63n171 volition 5, 120 Warburg, Aby 50n9 waves 12–13, 21, 42, 47, 107, 138–9; artworks as 52n29; Calvino on 127–9; Twombly working in 82 Weil, Simone 47, 57n98, 76–7 Weill, Kurt 101 White, Hayden 26–8, 50n7, 55n64, 56n84 Whitehead, Alfred North 60n146 Wilde, Oscar 6 Woolf, Virginia 5, 25, 47, 58n102, 98, 107, 125 word crystals 118, 124, 137 writing, problematic of 124–5 Yates, Frances 117