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Matter, Manner
and Idea in Michelangelo and Deleuze Sjoerd van Tuinen According to the
last verse of his most famous quatrain, Michelangelo Buonarotti held
that “the best artist has no concept [concetto] which some
single marble does not potentially enclose within its mass, but only
the hand which obeys the intellect [intelletto] can accomplish
it.”1 This has often been interpreted in hylomorphic terms
as saying that the content lies waiting within the marble for its form
to be hewn out. Such an interpretation is idealist insofar as it would
be the task of the mind to recognize this content and of the hand to
merely free it from the surrounding mass. For Michelangelo, however,
it was not so simple. When his pupil Benedetto Varchi complimented him,
“Signor Buonarroti, you have the brain of a Jove,” he responded,
“But Vulcan’s hammer is required to make something come out of it.”
The passage from the intellectual concetto to the hand that realizes
it entails more than just a passage from the possible to the real, because
the idea of the whole composition must constantly be repeated or rehearsed
in a painstaking process of experimental construction. In the words
of de Tolnay: “In a very real way the primitive form of the block
had a decisive influence on Michelangelo’s imagination. As he became
absorbed in it, the inner image awoke in him; one can actually see how
in his sculptures and reliefs he always allowed himself to be guided
by the primitive form of the block, and in his frescoes by the dimension
and shape of the surfaces at his disposal.”2 If the material
work of art is neither simply conceived in the image of its concept
or idea nor coincides with it, couldn’t we say that for Michelangelo,
borrowing a quote from Marcel Proust made famous by Gilles Deleuze,
the idea is “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract”
(PS 57, 60)? Michelangelo and the mannerist aesthetics he inspired have
indeed found a very strong echo in Deleuze’s understanding of art
and of art’s interrelations with philosophy. Even if Deleuze never
systematically developed a concept of mannerism in the way he did for
expressionism and the baroque, his aesthetics is profoundly mannerist.3 Conversely, and this will be the aim of this essay, a rereading of Michelangelo
from a deleuzian perspective could shed new light on our understanding
of sixteenth century art practices and art theory. After a brief discussion
of Deleuze’s explicit references to Michelangelo, this rereading will
be carried out in terms of three central concepts first distinguished
as such by Vincenzo Danti: matter, idea, and manner. Each of these terms
is developed in discussion with Leibniz, whom in his last course at
Vincennes Deleuze repeatedly aligns with Michelangelo insofar as his
“entire philosophy is without doubt mannerist par excellence.” (CGD
07/04/1987) Finally, we conclude with a brief reflection on how the
contributions of mannerism to art and of Deleuzianism to philosophy
can be distinguished. Deleuze and Michelangelo: United
in Anti-Classicism In a lecture at
the FEMIS film school in 1987, Deleuze equates the question ‘What
is a creative act?’ with that of ‘What does it mean to have an idea?’.
“Ideas,” he argues, “have to be treated like potentials already engaged in one mode of expression or another and inseparable from
the mode of expression, such that I cannot say that I have an idea in
general.” (TRM 312) Artists are “seers” or “visionaries” who
have an intuition of the virtual dimension of things, yet their ideas
differ from Plato’s eternal ideas insofar as they have no existence
outside of the actual work of art and hence do not preside over life
but become coextensive with it. Hence already in Proust and Signs (1964), which appeared just before the hey-days of the so-called ‘dematerialization
of art’, Deleuze had written that the idea is “hewn out of our life”
and “delivered in a work”. (PS 129) One question I
would like to raise is to what extent this notion of idea, which is
central to all of Deleuze’s work, is indebted not only to modernist
expressionism, but also to the 16th-century doctrine of disegno interno, the drawing after an internal model or internal
design guiding the hand, which replaces the disegno esterno of
natural models that dominated Renaissance formalism. It seems hard to
oversee the importance in Deleuze’s work of this Florentine tradition
of revived Neoplatonism that deeply inspired Michelangelo, yet even
those who discover in Deleuze an “involuntary Platonist” have neglected
this mannerist heritage. The only occasion at which Deleuze explicitly refers to Michelangelo is in Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation (1981), in which his suggestion is that with mannerism there appears for the first time “a properly pictorial atheism”. (FB 9) In 15th century classicism the prevailing image of art prescribed that art’s task lies in the imitation of beauty found in nature as a divine product. In the 16th-century the principle of fantastica idea appogiata alla pratica e non all’imitazione (Bellori) came to serve a confrontation between nature and artistic creativity and a valuation of style or maniera over nature. Thus whereas Leone Battista Alberti warned the artist against placing too much trust in his genius, advising him to confine himself to the great model that is created nature, Michelangelo relied on his ingegno, the power of his artistic mind to improve nature instead of merely imitating it, for example to extract from a Carrara mountain top the colossus that is hermetically confined in it.4 What Deleuze appreciates
in Michelangelo’s anti-naturalism is the rupture it provokes with
classical figuration. Although in painting any “will to art” initially
expresses itself in the abstract line (Paul Klee) and “[f]iguration
and narration are only effects” (FB 136), it is with classicism that
painting becomes figurative. Following Wilhelm Worringer, Deleuze defines
classical representation by the rigid way in which it forces sensation
into the transcendental “molds” of aesthetic laws that serve the
perfection of optical contours in deep, linear perspectival space, which
in turn “first of all expresses the organic life of man as subject.”
(FB 125-6) By contrast, mannerism installs a “haptic” space in which
there is a “shallow depth” that simultaneously separates and intertwines
foreground and background such that contour ceases to be the primacy
of the foreground and becomes their common limit on a single compository
plane of indeterminate dimensions. Whereas in classical representation
the potential idea slumbering in a given material is therefore first
‘seen’ by the eye of the intellect and then realized in manual work,
mannerism – the Italian maniera deriving from mano (hand)
– proceeds through an ongoing communication from eye to hand and from
hand to eye, between possibility of fact and the fact itself. Once this
“frenetic zone in which the hand is no longer guided by the eye and
is forced upon sight like another will” (FB 137) is affirmed, the
classical cliché of the creator-genius is replaced by the properly
pictorial experience and craft of the artisan who becomes one with his
material. From this understanding of mannerism as “manual intrusion”
(FB 138) it follows, firstly, that the artistic vision of the idea is
itself transformed into a “haptic vision” (FB 152) or “third eye,
replacing the eyes of nature” (C2 265). As Michelangelo says, the
aim of art is to “make of my entire body one single eye”, such that
there is no “part of me not taking pleasure in thee!”5 Secondly, it explains why the complete execution of a work of art, materially
speaking, is not indispensable. Unfinished or “infinite” works of
art such as the San Matteo or the Prigioni reflect the
artist’s virtuosity insofar as they are inseparable from the creative
act.6 It is for these two reasons that Deleuze claims that
“[i]t was with Michelangelo, with mannerism, that the Figure or the
pictorial fact was born in its pure state”. (FB 161, TRM 182) Matter According to Deleuze,
both Michelangelo and Bacon can be qualified as mannerist insofar as
they escape from classical figuration not through Platonic abstraction
towards pure form without matter, as in Mondriaan or Kandinsky, or the
rejection of all form, as in Fautrier or Pollock, but through the “extraction
or isolation” of what Lyotard has called the “figural”: a process
of disrupting the link that relates sensation to an object (illustration)
or that relates it to other images in a composite whole which assigns
an objective place to each of them (narration). Whereas illustration
and narration are established by resemblance or by convention and thus
bear witness to the dominance of some other faculty over sensation,
“the violence of sensation” in itself consists not of signifying
relations but of “matters of fact” devoid of analogy or code. (FB
4) In Bacon’s paintings, especially the triptychs from the early 1970s
that are at the centre of Deleuze’s analysis, the “brutality of
fact” means that a figural “event” is “made” or “recorded”
in a deformed body of sensation – “the body insofar as it is flesh
or meat” (FB 22) – which cannot be reduced to either an object of
reference or the lived experience of a seeing subject. (FB 34-5) Similarly,
in the jarring juxtapositions or contraposto of bodies in Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo (The Holy Family, 1503) “[i]t is as if the organisms were caught up in a whirling or
serpentine movement that gives them a single ‘body’ or unites them
in a single ‘fact,’ apart from any figurative or narrative connection.”7 (FB 130-1, 160) What is this body of sensation, this matter of fact,
constitutive of a figure? In What is
Philosophy? (1991) Deleuze writes that, whereas philosophy puts
forward concepts, art makes blocs of sensations stand up on their own.
Their distinction coincides with the duality of form and matter: “Conceptual
becoming is heterogeneity grasped in an absolute form; sensory becoming
is otherness caught up in a matter of expression. The monument does
not actualize the virtual event but incorporates or embodies it: it
gives it a body, a life, a universe.” (WP 177) Elsewhere Deleuze says
that it was only with The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque (1988),
hence with Leibniz, that he was able to “see better” what this distinction
amounts to. (N 137) As he argues in this book, a form of expression
is produced in a process of actualization whereas a matter of expression
is a produced in a process of realization. The two processes are irreducible
to each other, insofar as actualization relates to the reality of the
virtual, whereas realization relates to the existence of a possible
world or universe, “the possible as aesthetic category” (WP 177).
This distinction can help us to get a better grasp on the nature of
matter. In terms of Leibniz,
the difference between the actualization of the world in the appetitions
and perceptions of individual souls and the realization of the world
in bodily interaction is not a difference between two kinds of substances,
but between two kinds of distributing the world, between the soul taken
as a monad in itself and the body taken as a composite of several monads.
A soul is an eternal individual unity whereas matter is a continuously
varying multiplicity, an aggregation of aggregations ad infinitum. Since
what is real must necessarily be one, it follows that matter or extension
does not exist. In this way Leibniz subscribes to the idealist conviction
that the extended world exists only in monadic perception. However,
Leibniz simultaneously says that no soul, except God’s, can exist
without a body, since the body that belongs to it is precisely what
connects it with the rest of the world. The external world is made up
of what the scholastics called “secondary matter (materia secunda)”.
From the perspective of monadology, it is an infinitely divisible masse brute, made up of an unformed flux of monads chaotically traversing
all kinds of interactions and compositions, its indistinct collectivities
corresponding to the variability of the unconscious flux of perception
included in every monad.8 If the soul is nonetheless capable
of extracting distinct perceptions from this insensible flux of perceptions,
in the case of humans even self-conscious apperceptions, this is because
it possesses a mediating body or “primary matter (prima materia)”
capable of selecting and organizing disparate individuals into the unity
corresponding to its “point of view”9. For Leibniz the
soul is the “foundation (fundamentum)” or “form” of this
organic composition, whilst the other monads that participate in it
are merely its “requisites” or “material”.10 In fact,
matter is present only through the organic body in which extensive phenomenona
are “realized” and otherwise remains fully abstract and ideal.11 In order for a phenomenon to be “well-founded”, by contrast, there
must correspond to each of the soul’s clear and distinct perceptions
a fully evolved organ, such that a perfect “resemblance” between
“private” perception and “public” bodies, between form and content,
is guaranteed.12 In Deleuze’s
reading, there is an “almost schizophrenic tension” (TF 33) between
the idealist Leibniz and the realist Leibniz. There is a tension, for
example, between the claim that God chose a certain world expressed
by the individual souls that populate it and the claim that each “windowless”
monad freely draws its perceptions from the folds of its own infinite,
obscure or “virtual”13 background. For it implies that,
if an actual soul is free to hallucinate about other possible worlds,
it must have access to other perceptions than those chosen by God which
also strive to existence. On the level of actualization, however, Leibniz
is necessitated to exclude the reality of the possible, since it is
precisely God’s choice for bringing into existence the actual world
such as it is expressed by the individual souls that must be defended.
Although individual monads are isolated and spontaneous insides, each
is nonetheless bound to actualize the same well-founded phenomenon as
do all others, such that only one possible world is actualized. It is
only on the level of realization, where de jure harmony depends on de
facto organic perspective or union of body and soul, that Leibniz allows,
either within the organic body or at least open to it, more reality
than the soul can express by itself. Here the infinitely divisible continuum
of secondary, or anorganic, matter is not restricted by God’s choice
for the actual world and encompasses all subsisting possible worlds.
Even if the law of pre-established harmony guarantees that the moral
order of souls and the natural order of bodies fuse on a shared continuum,
the actual does not constitute the real, which must itself be realized
in ‘accidental’, intermonadic relations. Again we see why the bodies
in which hallucinations can be realized are not necessarily individual
and hence do not necessarily exist.14 Since the process of
realization does not bear on the virtual but on the possible, a body
of sensation or matter of fact always being potentially a non-individual
“monument” for the presence of a possible world within the actual
world.15 Back to Deleuze’s
definition of art. Following Leibniz’s distinction between appetition
and perception, Deleuze says that a possible world is embodied in a
compound of affects and percepts. (WP 164) Affects and percepts, however,
are not the same as affections or perceptions, because they are not
reducible to an individual form whose lived organic experience they
are. Already for Leibniz, a body can possess a substantive consistency
without being individual, since although organs are the perceptual-affective
requirement of the development of the life of the individual monad to
which a body belongs, the reverse is not the case. Other material compositions
reflecting other, non-subjective or monstrous sensations are always
possible. Only reasonable monads have a so-called “substantializing
bond (vinculum substantiale)” attached to them by which, like
a “judgment of God”, the organic compositions are morally bound
to their unchanging foundations, whereas bodies belonging to animal
souls are subject to continuous metamorphoses, that is, they can always
be developed into different possible worlds and thus into new aggregates
of sensation.16 Each sensation thus “exists in its possible
universe without the concept necessarily existing in its absolute form.”
(WP 178) Spinoza’s observation is therefore valid for Leibniz as well
– we do not yet know what sensations a body is capable of: “Even
when they are nonliving, or rather inorganic, things have a lived experience
because they are percepts and affects.”17 (WP 154, translation
modified) Hence Michelangelo’s preference to speak of “alpine and
living stone” or of “the living figure in alpine and hard rock”18 that outlives its maker, or Deleuze’s claims that blocs of sensation
possess the autonomous and inorganic life of “nonhuman becomings”
and “nonhuman landscapes” (WP 169) and that the model of all art
is a sensory becoming-animal, in other words, an animation of matter
in non-human ways. If perception
is not subjective, then neither can it be reduced to an objective state
of affairs. Sensation refers only to the “immense agitation of matter”
(FB 137) of which it is composed and in which it is expressed – the
unity of eye and matter in the becoming of the pictorial fact. The body,
detached from the individual soul and dispersed in flux, becomes a “zone
of objective indiscernibility or indeterminability” (FB 157), and
with it the well-founded phenomenon gives way to deformation. Whereas
classical representation “takes the accident into an optical organization
that makes it something well founded (a phenomenon) or a ‘manifestation’
of essence” (FB 126), the mannered postures of Michelangelo’s deformed
bodies are not fixed individual forms of content, but deform the very
object form of human perception (object=x) governing over sensation,
such that forms become “accidental forms” (TF 137) or forms of expression
and thus sources of endless modifications. This is reflected by the
expressions of swooning, drunkenness and vertigo employed by Leibniz
to describe what occurs when secondary and primary or accidental and
essential aspects get confused. It is this objective indeterminability
Deleuze refers to both with the Michelangelesque ideal of the figura
serpentinata and Artaud’s concept of a body without organs –
that is, not bodies stripped of organs, but bodies upon which organic
figures are distributed in the form of multiplicities.19 (ATP 30) Leibniz says that although nature is not an organism and hence
not everything is organic, organs are everywhere clothed with or “folded”20 into the texture of secondary matter, such that “each part of matter
can be thought of as a garden full of plants or as a pond full of fish”21.
It follows that each organ is only a fold away from infinity, caught
up in an abstract flux of entwined bodies, each of which already contains
the germ of another possible world. Similarly, the serpentine figure
renders the pictorial fact in such a way that it constantly escapes
from itself and dissipates in multiple becomings: “In the history
of art, it was perhaps Michelangelo who made us grasp the existence
of such a fact most forcefully. What we call ‘fact’ is first of
all the fact that several forms may actually be included in one and
the same Figure, indissolubly, caught up in a kind of serpentine, like
so many necessary accidents continually mounting on top of one another.”
(FB 160) Finally, if matter
still resembles ‘something else’, it must be noted that other than
in “the idealism of transformation”, in which we move from one figuration
or abstract form to another whilst merely producing a sensational effect
without leaving the same optical level of sensation, the “realism
of deformation” (FB 130), typically through foreshortening and allongamento, implies that the serpentine figure folds from one
bloc of sensation into another within a single body without organs:
“it is not movement that explains the levels of sensation, it is the
levels of sensation that explain what remains of movement” (FB 41)
since “[e]very sensation, and every Figure, is already an ‘accumulated’
or ‘coagulated’ sensation, as in a limestone figure.”22 (FB 35-6) If there is still an optical resemblance between the contrived
postures and gestures, the functional displacements and the scalar imbalances
of Michelangelo’s figures on the one hand and ‘natural’ images
on the other, this is therefore no longer preformed by an optical mold,
but only the “effect” of a “variable and continuous mold”, that
is, a manual “modulation” of plastic material relations. (FB 134-41)
For, following Leibniz’s expressionist account of the correspondence
of body and soul in terms of resemblance, Deleuze argues that “[r]esemblance
is equated with what resembles, not with what is resembled” (TF 95).
Just as for Plotinus “never did the eye see the sun unless it had
first become sunlike”23, it is sensation-matter itself
that becomes what it resembles, replacing “the imitation of a primal
model with a mimesis that is itself primary and without a model.”
(ATP 237) Just as becoming is never an imitation, resemblance thus has
no exterior reference or essence. Rather, it is always “a resemblance
produced with accidental and non-resembling means” (FB 98, 115, 158),
such as “the smile of oil, the gesture of fired clay, the thrust of
metal, the crouch of Romanesque stone, and the ascent of Gothic stone”
(WP 166, 173). Idea Now that we have
gained a deleuzian understanding of the Michelangelesque figure, we
can return to the question of how the idea is different from, yet already
present in the texture of sensation-matter – in the words of Michelangelo, della carne ancor vestita. It is again Leibniz who offers the means
for an answer, when he invokes the image of veins in marble both to
describe how pleats of matter surround living beings held in mass and
how innate ideas are present in the soul. Leibniz sought to substitute
the latter analogy for the perfectly homogeneous and even surface of
blank tablet (tabula rasa) of Locke, who held that all truths
originate in the senses. But this analogy can also be read as a direct
commentary on artistic practice:
Again, we must
be wary of idealist interpretations. The ‘likeness’ between veins
in marble and ideas in the soul expresses more than just a metaphor.
To each little glimmering in the background of the soul there ‘corresponds’
some bodily action, such that soul and body are only different functions
– functions of “form” and functions of “matter” – immanent
to a single and same psychophysical continuum. In itself, this continuum
is a strange intermediary zone diversified by ideas but purified from
both the subjects that actualize them and the objects in which they
are realized. For Leibniz, this zone of immanence is the ideal continuum
of the world in its impersonal and pre-individual state, a virtual structure
of disharmonious possibility; Deleuze discovers in it the “diagram”
or “abstract machine” that is the world’s immanent cause. The
question of art, then, is: how do we go from virtual dispositions, inclinations
or tendencies of unformed matter to their actualization and realization
in a figure, from the veins in marble to the shape of Hercules, without
submitting to the transcending illusions of subjectivity and objectivity? A key text for
answering this question is Proust and Signs (1964/1970), which
also happens to be Deleuze’s first appropriation of Leibniz.25 Although it does not explicitly refer to it, the chapter on “Essences
and the Signs of Art” (PS 39-50) could well pass as a treatise of
mannerist art theory. The main thesis of the book is the account of
Marcel’s apprenticeship in the understanding of the differential nature
of signs as opposed to signifiers. Just as in the sixteenth century
there appeared a particular fascination for the “explication” of
hermetic problems, Deleuze defines signs, drawing on Plotinus and Ficino,
as diagrammatic “hieroglyphs” which, like veins in marble, complicate
“possible worlds” and which, in the Neoplatonic semantic of folding
found in Proust, must be “developed” into “real worlds” according
to some “manner” or “style”.26 Not all signs
and not all styles are, however, artistic. Outside of art, Deleuze distinguishes
“signs of worldliness”, “signs of love” and “sensuous signs”.
Here signification is sooner or later appealed to as either subjective
or objective compensation for the impossibility of completely explicating
or identifying all the possible implicated worlds. (PS 34-6) Objectivism
or naturalism can be defined by the tendency to equate what a sign designates
(its object) with what it signifies, as if the object itself possesses
the secret that the sign emits. (PS 26-33) Subjectivism then appears
once we learn that the object does not give us the secret we were expecting
and the signification becomes constituted by the associations of the
subject instead. Although the sign is now understood to be more profound
than the object emitting it, it is still attached to that object, “it
is still half sheathed in it.” (PS 33-6) In either case, the rule
of the signifier confines the interpretation of the sign to a dialectics
development caught between “the trap of the object” and “the snare
of the subject” (PS 36), a logic of interpretation set in movement
by the gap that separates the inexhaustible sign from its development
in a finite world that is always already to some extent naturally determined.
It is through art that Proust and Deleuze seek to take a flight from
this world: “[t]he whole Search implies a certain argument between
art and life” (PS 137, 41), insofar as “art appears for what it
is, the ultimate goal of life, which life cannot realize by itself”
and “[n]ature or life, still too heavy, have found in art their spiritual
equivalent” (PS 137-8). According to Proust, the signs of art are “ideas” or “essences” that make us “‘emerge from ourselves’” with the result that we gain access to other regions of Being enveloping other worlds: “‘Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply, and as many original artists as there are, so many worlds will we have at our disposal, more different from each other than those which spin through infinity …’” (cit PS 42, 38, 41) Art is able to include an infinity of possible worlds within the real world because its signs are incorporeal or spiritual. Matter subsists as long as we discover, by way of analogy, a sign’s meaning in something else. Even though two subjectively associated sense impressions or sensuous signs such as the Madeleine and Combray, or the cobblestones and Venice, may have the same quality, they are nonetheless materially two and differ from each other in extension. It follows then that the sign still possesses a minimum of general signification. (PS 40) Only in art, Deleuze argues, do sign and meaning coincide, because ideas, prior to any “natural differentiation”, “differential” essences or primordial qualities form both the “birth of the world” (PS 47, 44, 98) and “the finality of the world” (PS 49, 137), without ever being reducible to the subjects or materials in which they are expressed.27 Art’s sole aim, then, is to propagate a singular viewpoint through the world without invoking the recognition of anything that is already subjectively or objectively given. In this sense, as Charles de Tolnay writes, Michelangelo “did not intend to represent things as the human eye sees them but as they are in essence; not as they appear but as they are according to their Idea.”28 Or as Proust says, an artistic sign is the mark of “‘a qualitative difference that there is in the way the world looks to us, a difference which, if there were no such thing as art, would remain the eternal secret of each man.’”29 (cit PS 41, 148) In his classic Idea (1924), Erwin Panofsky argues that Michelangelo is a precursor
of modern expressionism, insofar as he derives his creativity not from
a subjective but from an involuntary, cosmic principle that functions
as the divine or eternal condition of possibility of all creativity.30 Similarly, Deleuze insists that an artistic sign is an involuntary idée-force animating all creativity: “the generative force from
which issue the multiple compossible worlds that make up the real”
(PS 99). In art neither the spectator nor the artist is the foundation
of the way the world looks to us, but neither is it the material of
the work of art in which it is expressed. Rather it is “an absolute
and ultimate Difference” or “difference in itself” that constitutes
an impersonal perspective simultaneously upon a realized world, whilst
remaining of all possible worlds. (PS 41-4) However, in order for this
ideal difference to be varied in the spatio-temporal becoming of a world,
it must be repeated in a “continuous and refracted birth”, such
that some material becomes expressive of it – what Deleuze calls “clothed”
or “complex” repetition.31 Such is the functioning of
an artistic manner or style. Through the materials
they’re working with, artists bring together different objects in
order to confer upon them a common quality or consistency without ever
confusing these objects with the quality itself, which stays forever
indeterminate.32 Art is thus intrinsically related to an
art of combinations, an art of composition, which has “an essentially
expressive universe” (PS 45) or “limitless corporeality” become
expressive of an “incorporeal power” (ATP 109). The yellow in Vermeer’s View of Delft, for example, can be said to be one of these “necessary
lenses of a beautiful style” (TRM 369) that determines in their mutual
relations the objects by soaking them in a singular point of view, as
if some contrast liquid were “reinjected into the visual whole”
(FB 138, PS 46). Art renders a material “ductile” or “spiritualizes”
it by turning it into a “refracting medium” in which the idea can
be communicated. (PS 46-8) Similarly, the signature of Michelangelo
refers neither to the objective material used nor to a self-expressing
artist-genius, but to an original quality or viewpoint – a stylistic
“effect” – that comes to life in the singularizing modulation
of some material texture – when “[t]he signature becomes style”
(ATP 317, 329) in the haptic subjectivity that belongs to the labor
of a “hand” (TRM 315). Whatever the technical means involved,
some percepts can be constructed only in art, since they belong to an
inhuman eye that traverses multiple possible worlds. The consistency
of this accidental eye derives entirely from the manner in which it
is developed, such that instead of possessing any transcending signification,
it is only style, “the formal structure of the work of art, insofar
as it does not refer to anything else, which can serve as unity –
afterwards”.33 (PS 149, 99, 101, 116) Or as Deleuze confirms,
almost thirty years after Proust and Signs, it is style or manner
as unity of composition that raises “lived perceptions to the percept
and lived affections to the affect.” (WP 170) Manner Deleuze’s Proustian
concept of style or manner as the material development of the idea brings
us back to the question of the relation between the eye or intellect
as faculty of ideas and the hand as the faculty of construction. If
artistic ideas are incorporeal, this does not mean that they transcend
the corporeal process of their realization. Artistic signs are neither
Platonic ideas nor Aristotelian essences, but immanent causes coextensive
and undergoing qualitative transformations with everything that is.
It is precisely non-artistic signs that transcend their development
insofar as they possess a subjective or objective signification. In
art, the signs stay fully immanent to the style of their technical development.
Everything therefore revolves around the great identity of idea and
style – or difference and repetition – that makes art superior to
nature, as is reflected also by Bellori’s famous mannerist formula
of la maniera, o vogliamo dire fantastica idea, and by Deleuze’s
statement against Buffon that “[s]tyle is not the man, style is essence
itself.” (PS 48, 148, TRM 369) The identity of
essence and style over and against their classical opposition – in
which the singularity of the latter has almost always been subordinated
to the first – takes us to a third Leibnizian theme in Deleuze’s
understanding of Michelangelo: monadic individuation. In Proust and
Signs Deleuze argues that artistic “essences are veritable monads”,
since each essence refers to an ultimate difference inseparable from
its “manner” of expressing the world.34 Then, in The
Fold, he contrasts Leibniz to Descartes insofar as the first replaces
the latter’s classical essentialism with a “mannerism of substances”
(TF 57): “Classicism needs a solid and constant attribute for substance,
but mannerism is fluid, and the spontaneity of manners replaces the
essentiality of the attribute.” (TF 56) Descartes keeps
to “the ‘classical’ conception of the concept” (TF 42) which
holds that between the subject and the attribute there is reciprocal
inclusion. In the proposition ‘I think’, I is inseparable from the
clear and distinct attribute of thinking and inversely thinking is what
determines the substance of I. However, since reciprocal inclusion only
functions in nominal definitions, it subordinates individual being (‘therefore
I am’) to the generality of its logical identity. What Descartes fails
to prove is that the notion ‘cogito’ forms an immanent expression
of the real world, in other words, that the essence of a ‘thinking
I’ also involves individual existence. By contrast, Leibniz defines
an individual substance by all its “essential requisites”: “the
omnipresence of the dark depths which is opposed to the clarity of form,
and without which manners would have no place to surge forth from”
(TF 56, 32). The Dionysian fluidity of mannerism consists of the fact
that, due to the principle of sufficient reason (Grund), an essence
cannot be separated from its perspective, constituted by the infinity
of pre-individual or accidental relations to the existing world that
it integrates according to its individuating habitudines or singularizing
‘mannerisms’.35 As Leibniz says: “Various things are
thought by me (Varia a me cogitantur)”36, each thought
or perception being a singular and pre-individual “modality, or manner
of being”37. And these manners are spontaneous in the sense
that, through the diagram of innate ideas, each constitutes a finality
or intermediary self-inclusion by which it unilaterally reorganizes
or recombines its part of the world. Each monad thus envelops the same
ideal continuum “‘under a certain potential’” (cit TF 52), but
it is individuated by the singular manner in which it gives expression
to this potential.38 Together the fluidity
of depth and the spontaneity of manners are the two components of Leibniz’s
mannerism and of his definition of the monadic envelope as infinite
source of modifications.39 Although surprisingly neither
Bacon or Proust nor Michelangelo feature in The Fold, in his
courses Deleuze therefore repeatedly suggests a strong analogy between
Michelangelo’s figures and Leibnizian monads:
With this strange
‘resemblance’ between art and philosophy we return, finally, to
Deleuze’s Leibnizian distinction between form of expression and matter
of expression, or between concepts and blocs of sensation. Now we know
not only what Michelangelo’s figures are, but also what in each case
determines how it is ‘conceived’. In the explication of the idea
we go from an abstract matter-flow to a concrete “manual aggregate”
(FB 130) without the latter transcending the former through subjectivity
or objectivity, such that the consistency or formal structure of this
composition is entirely constituted by the manner in which the disparate
elements are combined. Art therefore not only makes up philosophy’s
non-philosophical extension, but we can also discover in Michelangelesque
figures the formal structure of monadic essences or Leibnizian concepts:
“One shall call mannerist a philosophical conception or pictorial
vision which characterizes a being by its manners.” (CGD 20/01/1987)
This is indeed the great theme of The Fold, namely that the monad’s
perceptions resemble matter as a form of producing it “in extension”
(TF 96): “Material matter makes up the bottom, but folded forms are
styles or manners. We go from matter to manner”, or with Dubuffet,
“from the Texturologie to the Logologie” (TF 35). Beyond Concettism:
Concluding Note on the Distinction between Art and Philosophy Concluding we
can claim that for Michelangelo as well as for Leibniz and Deleuze the
idea is the animus of all creativity. It is not a voluntary force, but
rather something that is – to speak with Artaud – “genitally innate”
(DR 148), such that to invent is to find, erfinden, even if perfecting
nature means to find in it what has never been found.40 The
idea is repeated according to a singularizing manner in a material aggregate
such that it undergoes a continuous and infinite variation. As such
it is, to risk an oxymoron, the ‘content of expression’: a multiplicity
of possible worlds, hence something that can be developed in many ways,
but always divided over two orders of expression – matter of expression
and manner or form of expression – each of which always already presupposing
the other. A matter of expression is a matter-flow, a constant tendency
towards abstraction capable of including various possible worlds within
the world. But the unity of a possible world or point of view derives
from the singularizing manner in which an abstract idea is expressed
and concretized in matter. The pursuit of the idea is thus completely
involved in the manner in which it is developed, in other words, in
the intensive reality of its processual unfolding in extension, without
the material otherwise being in any way opposed to, or even separable
from, the ideal. In proposing the
Leibnizian concept of mannerism, Deleuze brings about a radical overhaul
of the Kantian distinction of sensibility and intelligibility. Art and
philosophy share a single and same ground teeming with “vital ideas”
(WP 209) or combinatory schemata that allows for the affective continuity
and transition between percepts and concepts, “such that”, as Deleuze
says in The Fold, “we can no longer tell where one ends and
the other begins, or where the sensible ends and the intelligible begins.”
(TF 119, 66, 97) However, if Deleuze adopts the Leibnizian account of
the presence of possible worlds in matter, his concept of manner nevertheless
diverges from that of Leibniz insofar as the latter is bound to uphold
perfectly individuated essences as distributive unities comprising all
the possible manners of being within a single and same actual world.
After all, what remains of the difference between actualization and
realization, between concept and bloc of sensations, when the concept
of manner as ‘form of content’41, as the formal foundation
of a composite substance, is still based on monadic substance? Ultimately it
is not in his account of art but in his account of philosophy that Deleuze
breaks with both Michelangelo and Leibniz, and that a difference between
mannerism and modernism can be made. Deleuze’s early critique of Leibniz
still pertains, namely that the latter’s “hesitation between the
possible and the virtual”, binding the latter to the first, is “disastrous”
for the project of freeing the event from being caught up in a matter
of expression (“counter-actualization”). (DR 212-3) Hence in Proust and Signs, Deleuze argues that mannerism is still too much indebted to “the Platonism of the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance” insofar as the notion of idea remains “caught
up in an order of the world, in a network of significant contents and
ideal significations which still testify to a Logos at the very moment
that they break it.” (PS 100-1, 44-6) In What is Philosophy?,
this criticism is rendered even more precise. Although Leibniz’s mannerist
conception of the concept is inspired by Michelangelo’s concetto (TF 126) as a challenge of formal composition in relation to given materials,
“from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century … the concetto has
not yet acquired consistency and depends upon the way in which it is
figured or even dissimulated” (WP 92), which means that concettism
must be regarded a “Catholic compromise of concept and figure which
had great aesthetic value but which masked philosophy” (WP 103) insofar
as it still mystified the plane of immanence of philosophy by false
identifying it with that of art. (WP 103) Just like matter
is no longer merely a content but a material capable of realizing possible
worlds beyond natural preformation, Deleuze holds that form is a form
of expression virtually including all possible worlds. In art, the act
of invention is inseparably caught up within the medium in which it
propagates or diffuses its point of view. If philosophy possesses its
own abstract ‘material’ and can be distinguished from the bodily
aggregate of affects and perceptions in “a ‘modern’ fashion”
(PS 98), it must therefore break with the figural and find a way of
giving consistency to “finite forms” (WP 75) whilst upholding the
movement of the infinite without any misplaced concreteness. The concept
is certainly grounded in existence and hence in affects and percepts
– for as Leibniz knew well, “the most abstract thoughts are in need
of some sense perception”42 –, but if a sensory becoming-other
has to be realized in a material state of affairs, the concept gives
consistency to an otherness of an incorporeal nature. Deleuze calls
the consistency of this “heterogeneity grasped in an absolute form”
“event”: an entirely incorporeal entity which surveys its components
at infinite speed and in a perfectly pre-individual state, a manner
abstracted from the slow concreteness of an always already to some extent
individuated or organized matter.43 If philosophy is truly
different from art yet capable of sharing with it the same mannerist
diagram or idea, this is therefore because art records the event in
a generic and dynamic bodily extension that selects and imitates possible
worlds, whereas the event itself is a virtual “intension” extracted
from the immanent structure of the idea not through selection and imitation,
but immediately, as a direct and unmediated intuition of pure immanent
becoming.44 Notes Bibliography Arasse, Daniel & Tönnesmann,
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>> Table of Contents edited by B. Mancini, J. Weirsman Healing Series Brian Knep 276-278 R.U.N.: A Short Statement on the Work Paul Gazzola 279-282 Castings: A Conversation Deborah Margo, Bianca Scliar Mancini and Janita Wiersma 283-308 Matter, Manner, Idea Sjoerd van Tuinen 309-334 On Critique Brian Massumi 335-338 Loco-Motion Andrew Murphie 339-341 An Emergent Tuning as Molecular Organizational Mode Heidi Fast 342-358 |
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