Art as Apprenticeship of Signs
by Beth Metcalf
In Proust and Signs chapter 1,
Deleuze describes Proust’s types of signs. The first
type is the signs of worldliness. The worldly signs stand
for action and thought. They claim to be arbitrary. They
do not represent something else. They are empty signs.
The second type of sign is that of love. These signs
individualize the one who bears the sign. The beloved one
expresses a possible world that is Other, unknowable, and
without communication; like Leibniz’s monads without
windows. Jealousy is the law of love because, in the other
world that excludes me, I am an object among others. The
signs of love are deceptive. They conceal what they
express. The third world is that of sensuous signs. The
quality of the sensuous sign no longer appears to be a property
of an object. There is an essence in common with a
different object that must be deciphered. But the sensuous
signs are still inadequate. They fill us with joy, but they
are still material signs that seem to actualize a world of
spatial extensity. Time is still spatialized.
Prior to the Search there are worldly signs,
signs of love, and sensuous signs at the level of the individual.
They close into the Logos of an intelligence that comes before.
Logos is a prior intelligible image of what is thought to be
possible. It is an abstract knowledge that unites faculties
in the maintenance of structural identity. However in PS
chapter 8, Deleuze tells us that Proust’s world is an
antilogos. Intelligence comes after a temporal
apprenticeship of signs. This reaches an essence
(Deleuze’s term is ‘sense’) that is not a
presupposed Image that comes before. Intelligence comes
after a disjoining of the faculties. Thought is
creative when it comes after an encounter with signs in a
pre-individual and incorporeal construction of sense. The
Logos is given as an Image of Thought that comes before.
But antilogos shows us that the given comes after. Disparate
intensive coupling is that by which the given is given as diverse
(Difference & Repetition 222).
In PS chapter 7, Deleuze describes the
categories of the Search when intelligence comes after.
They are not the categories of representation where intelligence
comes before. Categories of the Search are implication and
explication, envelopment and development. Meaning is
implicated or enveloped in the sign. Signs emanate from
sensuous qualities that are like containers. The container
attributes its quality to the contained things it designates.
Then the sign explicates and develops when it unfolds in an
image. Essence complicates sign and meaning, putting the
one in the other to determine their distance and relation. Sign
is the involution of meaning. Meaning is the development of
the sign. Essence (Deleuze’s ‘sense’)
inheres in an expression (meaning implicated or enveloped in the
sign) and is attributed to a thing (signs that explicate and
develop in an image) without merging with either. If an
essence were to merge with either sign or meaning, then
everything would be totalized into one Dogmatic Image according
to representational categories of conceptual identity. According
to Deleuze (PS 90), Proust’s essence is a “third
term” that complicates the sign and meaning, enveloping the
one in the other. Essence is sufficient reason for
relation between sign and meaning.
As Deleuze says Expressionism in
Philosophy 335, “In short, what is expressed everywhere
intervenes as a third term that transforms dualities.
Beyond real causality, beyond ideal representation, what is
expressed is discovered as a third term that makes
distinctions infinitely more real and identity infinitely better
thought. What is expressed is sense: deeper that the
relation of causality, deeper than the relation of
representation.” [Emphasis added]
With the fourth type of signs in art, the
apprentice comes to understand what could not have been
understood before. The signs of art are pre-individual and
immaterial. Only at the end of the Search does the
apprentice understand that intelligence come after an
interpretation of signs. Only at the end does the
apprentice understand that material meaning had already
incarnated a dematerialized essence. The world of art
reacts on all the other signs which had already incarnated
immaterial-ideal essence in material meaning. Art is the
production of objects and essences never experienced before.
Whereas the first three types of signs appeared to lead to
material actualization, the signs of art counter-actualize the
event in the time of Aion. It is present without thickness
that endlessly subdivides still-future and already-past. The
material sensuous signs point us toward incorporeal essences that
inhere in artistic expressions and are attributed to objects as
they were never experienced before. Signs of art are
ultimate dematerialized signs that reach spiritualized essences.
In PS chapter 9, Deleuze describes what the
apprentice finally understands at the end of the Search when the
signs of art react on all the other types of signs. The
‘worldly signs’ now take on the figure of open boxes in
the incommensurability of content and container. Essence
inheres in a container and is attributed to its designated
content. The container encases, envelops, and implies its
content. Things, persons, and boxes are containers with
contents that have no common measure. Heterogeneous
fragments of content are explicated, unfolded and developed in
incommensurable containers. The task of the apprentice is
to learn why someone becomes differentiated as part of one world
and not another. The second figure in the image of sealed
vessels is the complication between wholes and parts. It
complicates the coexistence of non-communicating parts. Sealed
vessels mark the opposition of parts to non-corresponding wholes.
The ‘deceptive signs of love’ in the figure of
‘sealed vessels’ express a possible singular Other
world that cannot be known. To love is to explicate and
develop unknown worlds that are enveloped in the loved one.
Jealousy sequesters and individuates the loved one. It is
the meaning of love’s signs. The two figures of open
boxes and sealed vessels comingle because each has its double
inside the other. I take this virtual coexistence to be
what Deleuze calls (DR206) the ‘perplication’ of
‘varieties of differential relations’ (open boxes) and
‘distribution of singular points’ (sealed vessels).
Proust’s third figure of ‘sensuous signs’ are
triggered by involuntary memory. They create an internal
resonance between two series -- past and present. The
sensuous signs create new connections without unifying many parts
into one whole. Intensive individuation emerges as coupling
of series with internal resonance.
Involuntary memory of the sensuous signs
fills us with joy, but it is still too material. However,
the involuntary memory of art’s incorporeal signs reaches an
internal difference of telescoping distances, creating new
essences of time regained. The essence inheres in an
incorporeal sign but is attributed to an object as never
experienced. As long as signs were at a corporeal level,
they were still related according to the old structuralism*.
However, signs of art are incorporeal spiritualized essence and
de-materialized substance that reach the new structure*.
In the Conclusion to Part II, Deleuze understands Proust to point
toward the new structure that is not at the level of
signified/signifier of the old structuralism. The narrator
is madman, a universal schizophrenic, who sends transversal
threads across the heterogeneous series as intensive powers of
his organ-less body. The narrator is a machine of the
Search who has no voluntary use of faculties. He does not
function as a subject. He cannot see, perceive, remember,
or understand because there is no image that comes before. The
narrator is an undifferentiated body without organs that opens
boxes and seals vessels. He is a spider that responds only
to signs of disparate intensity. The narrator has only
involuntary sensibility, memory, and thought of an organ-less
body in its reaction to signs. He is a spider who responds
only to the vibrations of its web. He responds only to
signs of his schizoid universe. He is the transversal that
opens and closes the cells and vessels. Deleuze sees
Albertine (vertical passional series) and Charlus (the horizontal
paranoid series) as the two regimes of madness that arise from
the two “accidents” of the old structuralism*.
In the passional series essence merges with the signifier. In
the paranoid series essence merges with signified signs. But
the narrator is the schizoid diagonal-transversal that cuts
across all series. This produces singular use that allows
the work of art to function. It does not produce universal
truth. Narrator is the new structure* that lets the
empty square circulate freely. He opens the boxes of
non-personal individuation. He closes vessels of
pre-individual singularities. He crosses all series to let
them communicate transversally. Only at the end of the
Search does the narrator know he is this spider through which
time is regained. Time is the dimension of Proust’s
narrator. The narrator explicates and unfolds the content
of open containers. The narrator (without unity of self) is
choice of non-communicating vessels. Non-spatial,
incorporeal distances are constituted. Lost time is the
forgetting that creates disjunction. Regained time creates
new continuities. New conjunctions of the disjoined are the
creation of never experienced essences. Time lost
intertwines with time regained. It is the real distinction
of all singularity that is said as the whole of time. The
narrator is the univocity of time.
In PS chapter 2, Deleuze tells us that
Proust’s truth is not an abstract generality. Truth is
explication of signs in their temporal development. Under
the violence of deceptive signs, the jealous one is forced into
the search for truth that has an essential relation to time.
Encounter of an unknown Other forces the Search. A
violent encounter forces the necessity of thought. Voluntary
memory only gives truths of a prior conceptual form. Voluntary
truths represent only the abstract possibilities of Logos that comes
before. Then truth lacks the necessity of encounter.
Worldly signs, signs of love, and even sensuous signs, are signs
of lost or wasted time. This is because they are material
signs that come before a violent encounter unhinges the faculties
and forces us to think. However, when intelligence comes
after an apprenticeship of signs the apprentice learns that
all types of signs point toward immaterial truths. In the
repetition of series of loves, each loved one made us feel pain.
But the series of loves turns to joy when intelligence comes
after. The involuntary memory of sensuous signs regains
time at the heart of time lost. The involuntary memory in
signs of art regains time and reacts on all other types of signs.
Immaterial essences are incarnated in matter. All
participate in, and react to, each other. Time is regained
in incorporeal signs of art.
In PS chapter 3, Deleuze says that objective
recognition is our natural habit. It is the assumption that
each sign designates an object it signifies. When
intelligence comes before finding an internal difference,
essence still merges with either its sign or its meaning. There
is no encounter. However when intelligence comes after,
time is no longer already spatialized in a conceptual image.
Then there is nomadic distribution into heterogeneous series.
That which bears the sign is immaterial milieu that never lets an
essence merge with its subject or object, sign or meaning,
signifier or signified. Then the incorporeal signs can fill
without filling the empty square*. Signs of art reach the
incorporeal field of sense that never merges with signifieds or
signifiers. Art reaches the field of alogical and
immaterial essences. (PS38) “It is the essence that
constitutes the sign insofar as it is irreducible to the object
emitting it; it is the essence that constitutes the meaning
insofar as it is irreducible to the subject apprehending
it”. Signs of art reach dimensions never experienced
before.
In the Conclusion to Part I, we are told
that the good-will of the philosopher-friend discovers merely
abstract truths. Voluntary memory hinges the faculties
together in merely possible truths that come before. Perception,
memory, and imagination are contingent. Ideas of pure
intelligence have only logical truth of a prior possibility.
Their choice is not necessary. But the sign is object of a
forced encounter. It is experienced as a violent threat to
the subjective unity and the objective identity of faculties.
Deleuze describes forces that cannot be conceived, remembered, or
imagined. They are disparate forces of intensity that can
only be sensed. There is an involuntary exercise as each
faculty discovers its own limits and necessity of its
own singular essences. Their essence is sufficient
reason that unites the sign with its own meaning. Intelligence
comes after. Sign and meaning are partial objects
disjoined and conjoined in new essences never experienced before.
At the end of the Search, the apprentice
understands all types of signs in a new way. A singular
individuating essence is produced by a differenciator that makes
two series coexist and resonate. Production of
differentiated partial objects is complementary to the resonances
of intensive individuation. Forced movement (DR117-8) is
produced by a dark precursor, or esoteric object, that relates
heterogeneous series and disparate things. These resonating
series have nothing to do with the horizontal
(syntagmatic-metonymic) where essence merges with signifieds.
They have nothing to do with the vertical
(paradigmatic-metaphoric) where essence merges with the
signifier. Rather they reach transversal diagonals. That
is, they are a new structure that is distinct from the old
structuralism*. The diagonal-transversal creates essences
that never merge with either signifier or signified, words or
things. Proust’s signs are not parts of a whole,
original or produced. Signs are partial objects that
have no prior totality or lost unity. Parts do not develop
with a common rhythm or speed. Essence is individuating
singular viewpoint that is the third term between sign and
meaning. Art deciphers incongruous temporal signs without a
transcendent unifying viewpoint. Art is (PS115) “to
gather up the ultimate fragments, to sweep along at different
speeds all the pieces, each one of which refers to a different
whole, to no whole at all, or to no other whole than that of
style.”
In PS chapter 10, Deleuze lays out three
levels of the Proustian theory. The first level of the
Search is heterosexual love as oppositional relation of man and
woman which homogenizes the original series. It can only
reproduce its own homogeneity. The second level decomposes
that first level into two heterogeneous series that are still too
material. Each person is a hermaphrodite that cannot
fertilize itself. The two sexes are still at the level of
individuals where intelligence comes before. (PS10-11)
“The [original] Hermaphrodite is not a being capable of
reproducing itself. Far from uniting the sexes, it
separates them. It is the source from which there
continually proceed the two divergent homosexual series, that of
Sodom and that of Gomorrah……The two sexes shall die,
each in a place apart”. But at the third level there
are male and female parts of a man or woman that relate to male
and female parts of another man or woman (as partial objects).
The male or female part of a man or woman relate to the female or
male part of another woman or man in aberrant transversal
relations between non-communicating vessels. The third
transexual level is a world of transversal aberrant
communication, like the wasp and orchid. A third party (an
intervening ‘sense’) fertilizes the hermaphrodite.
At the level of the individual, there is coexistence of series
that do not communicate because they are still too material.
But the transexual is the pre-individual diagonal-transversal
across series. In the fragmented universe of the Search,
there is no unifying or totalizing Logos to be regained. The
antilogos is a new law of incommensurable fragments. There
are no longer merely non-communicating vessels, but transversal
unities between open boxes that cannot be totalized. The
intensive partial objects of one world may be forced into
another. Proust, unlike Leibniz, never restores a
pre-established harmony of viewpoints in a same world. The
Search is a telescoping of infinite distances. It
unites intensive fragments of disparate worlds. Law of the
Search is the antilogos of partial objects.
Proust asks, ‘How can we preserve the
past as it is in itself?’ In PS chapter 5, Deleuze
notes the secondary role of memory in Proust. Voluntary
memory is merely an association of resemblances in an image that
comes before. Voluntary memory is relation between an
actual present and a present that it has been and is now past.
Presents pass in succession in this time Deleuze calls
‘Chronos’. The worldly signs and signs of love
are material signs of voluntary memory that come too late. Intelligence
comes before. The involuntary memory of sensuous signs is
still too material. Sensuous signs are superior to worldly
signs and signs love, but they are inferior to signs of art. Involuntary
memories of sensuous signs are bad metaphors within a general
material structure of analogy. They prepare us for art.
But signs of art reach a new kind of ‘metaphor’ in its
ontological sense. Metaphor must first find a common
essence in an artistic style before its singular use can
be revealed. Signs of art reach the being of the past as it
is in itself. Art’s involuntary memory reaches the
virtual coexistence of past and present – the time Deleuze
calls ‘Aion’.
At the end of the Search, the apprentice
understands all the signs in a new way. Through a series of
successive loves, essence becomes more and more general. Essences
become incarnated as singular worlds, each with its own general
law that cannot be totalized with others. Each love is
different in relation to other loves and to itself. Each
love repeats the law of the series. Love is serial
repetition that may approach its own singular essence of
artistic style --- its own singular law of generality --- its
own singular use. The past virtually coexists with the
present it has been. The present is past at the same time
as it is present. The moment coexists with itself as
present and its own past. It is past that was never
experienced but preserves a singular essence of time for us.
That is, it preserves a singular essence that unites meaning with
its own sign. Intelligence comes after.
Art reaches new continuities and creation of qualities never
imagined before. It reaches the joy of time regained in new
truths never experienced. With voluntary memory, there is
merely an extrinsic relation between separable impressions (that
in separating do not change in nature). But involuntary
memory of inseparable past and present moments preserves a
singular essence (that in dividing must change nature). There
is a common affective quality of internalized difference in the
immanent signs of art. Inseparable relations constitute an
internal difference of singular-universal essence --- truth as it
was never experienced. With the signs of art time is
regained.
In PS chapter 11, we are told that the
modern work of art is a machine that functions. It is use,
not meaning. It is a machine that produces truths. Violent
encounter unhinges the faculties and produces new meanings of
singular use. A faculty is chosen under the constraint of
signs and produces meaning --- a general law with its own
singular essence. There is no Totalizing Truth, but orders
of produced truths. The Search consists of three machines.
Habitus is psychic connections as the effect of coupling in
series of excitations. Eros individuates by intensive
resonance of spatio-temporal dynamisms. Thanatos is forced
movement that changes the essence. Time is regained by
universal alteration and catastrophic death – difference and
repetition. Each machine produces an order of truth as an
effect of time --- partial objects of lost time, resonances of
time regained, and lost time as the condition of the amplitude of
forced movement in time regained. Forced movement dilates
time infinitely as resonance contracts time. It is
univocity that fills the whole of being to different degrees of
intensity.
In PS chapter 12, Deleuze asks how the three
orders produce form without totalization. Partial objects
of the Search are fragmented and partitioned without lack.
Deleuze writes (PS 161), “Eternally partial objects, open
boxes and sealed vessels, swept on by time without forming a
whole or presupposing one, without lacking anything in the
quartering, and denouncing in advance every organic
unity….” Time is not a whole. Time prevents
the whole from forming. Wholes and parts are the effect of
machines creating temporary uses in non-communicating fragments.
Viewpoints are essences of individuated worlds without unity or
totality. There is unity of multiplicity --- a whole
of its own partial objects --- all real difference is said
as singular universe. The style of a work of art explicates
signs at different rhythms and rates of development. Style
telescopes distant partial objects, bringing them into contiguity
to produce an essence never experience before. It has no
unity of an already spatialized time that comes before. The
dimension of transversality establishes a singular essence of an
artist’s style. It conjoins its own distances.
The univocality of time has the power to unify its own
partial objects. Style does not receive its unity from a
prior image. Artistic style is the formal structure of a
world that comes after an apprenticeship of signs.
Deleuze says (PS40), “As long as we
discover a sign’s meaning in something else, matter still
subsists, refractory to spirit. On the contrary, art gives
us the true unity: unity of an immaterial sign and of an entirely
spiritual meaning. The essence is precisely this unity of
sign and meaning as it is revealed in the work of art.”
Essence revealed in art is singular internal difference.
There is not an extrinsic difference between objects. Difference
is really distinct worlds of viewpoint, ontologically
singular and filling the whole of being to different degrees of
intensity. Each expression of a really different world does
not exist outside its expression. (PS43) “But the
world expressed is not identified with the subject; it is
distinguished from the subject precisely as essence is
distinguished from existence, even from the subject’s own
existence. Essence does not exist outside the subject
expressing it, but it is expressed as the essence not of the
subject but of Being, or of the region of Being that is revealed
to the subject”. An intensive-incorporeal essence
individuates objects and subjects. Individuals do not
constitute the world, but essence singularizes the individual and
its own world. Essences are enveloped in what they
individuate. Style individuates the substance that is
incarnated in art. Style singularizes worlds of real
difference by intelligence that comes after an
apprenticeship of signs. Essence is intensive singular
difference that is never totalized into one generality of
“the” world. Essence singularizes meaning. Art
de-materializes substances. Art is univocal.
*See my article The Old and the New
Structure for explanation of the two “accidents” of
the old structure, and for the distinction between the old
structuralism and the new transversal structure.