Logic of Sensation
by Beth Metcalf
In ‘What is Philosophy?’
Deleuze and Guattari tell us that philosophy creates concepts of
events, science constructs states of affairs in functions, and
art erects monuments with sensations. Each must use its own
means when speaking of another discipline. Science must use
its functions when speaking of sensations or concepts. Art
has sensation of concepts and functions. Philosophy has to
use concepts when thinking about science’s functions or art’s
sensations. Therefore, when Deleuze writes ‘Francis
Bacon, The Logic of Sensation’, he writes as a
philosopher of Bacon’s art. ‘The Logic of
Sensation’ is Deleuze’s philosophical concept of
univocity that he sees exemplified in Bacon’s paintings.
From Deleuze’s philosophical perspective, Bacon’s art
avoids representation and narration by reaching univocal
sensation. The Figure becomes a singular fact that can
never succumb to the generalizing notion that a copy can
represent a model.
Deleuze says that Bacon isolates the Figure.
Isolation liberates the Figure. The Figure becomes singular
fact that is not part of any totalizing relational structure,
original or produced. Deleuze says that Bacon’s three
elements are the field as spatializing material structure, the
Figure as fact, and the contour as a membrane of exchange of
flows between Figure and field. The first movement is
from field to Figure. The Figure is composed by the
movement that comes from the spatializing field. Figure
becomes ‘place’ through this movement --- an empty
place that circulates through orders and across levels. The
Figure waits. The slowness of waiting -- ‘What is
going to happen?’ But there is also another movement
in the other direction. It is the movement from Figure to
field. The Figure is a body that is not waiting for
something from the field. It waits for something
inside itself. The Figure tends to dissipate into the
field. Figure is a body that waits to escape from itself.
This is the speed of ‘What happened?’ The Figure
waits from its place of solitude. I take this to reflect
what Deleuze elsewhere calls the time of ‘Aion’. The
slow waiting of ‘What is going to happen?’ The
speed of ‘What happened?’ The Figure is the place
of solitude in a present without thickness. This is not the
time of spectacle as represented to a spectator. It is the
movement of the event. It is the nomadic distribution of
forces that compose sensation. The contour is the membrane
that exchanges flows in both directions between figure and field.
There is a rhythm of the systole that contracts the body and goes
from field to Figure. There is diastole that extends and
dissipates the body and goes from Figure to field. The
coexistence of all movement introduces rhythm into painting.
Diastole – the world closes in around the Figure. Systole
– the Figure contracts or expands to rejoin the field.
Then there are coupled Figures of intensity.
Disparate Figures become the same fact. A zone of
indiscernibility is the diagram that territorializes and
deterritorializes. Bacon paints a zone of indiscernibility
between man and animal. This is not a combination of forms
but the common fact of becoming animal. The body is the
material of the Figure opposed to the spatializing field of
material structure. Bacon dismantles the personalizing face
to rediscover a zone of individuation. This is not a
combination of forms but the common fact of man and animal –
the fact of body as meat and flesh.
Sensation is not represented in an object.
Bacon paints the immediacy of this singular sensation as
it passes through orders and levels without mediation of a prior
form. There are not equivocal sensations represented by
objects united in a common structure, but orders of real
difference said as same. There are disparate relations
between rhythm and sensation as these pass across different
orders and levels. Disparate relations of rhythm compose
new singular sensations. Therefore, it is not
representational figuration that provokes a sensation. When
Bacon paints the Pope’s scream, he paints the sensation
itself, not the horrified face. If a generalized horror of
the personalized face is introduced, the sensation of the scream
is botched. Horror is inferred from the scream, not the
reverse. If the scream is inferred from a subjective
sensation of horror or a horrifying object, then narration and
representation are re-introduced. The scream is botched.
For Bacon, the form related to sensation
(Figure) is not a form related to an object represented
(figuration). Sensation passes from one level to another,
deforming bodies, acting directly on the nervous system, and
liberating the Figure. This does not merely transform a
form. It deforms bodies. There are not equivocal
sensations of a unified organism, but different levels of
univocal sensation. Therefore, I take Bacon’s ‘logic
of sensation’ to be that which Deleuze calls ‘univocity’.
The logic of sensation is not a rational logic. A
non-rational logic is produced in the relation between sensation
and rhythm (FB 37). There is no synthetic unity of objects
represented to a subject. The Figure is not
representational figuration. Rather sensation is the
non-resembling means that provokes a Figure. Bacon paints
the sensation itself in the univocal logic of sensation. Sensation
places in relation a rhythm of levels through which it passes.
Figure and field contract/expand in a rhythm. This disjoins
the faculties and finds a new common accord of organs. A
common accord of sensation is not derived through an organism.
There is only the body without organs.
Bacon’s expressionism is not a
phenomenon of the lived. There is new unity of rhythm only
when there is a violence that mixes levels in the body without
organs. However, the body without organs must not be
confused with an organism (i.e., an organization of organs).
Sensation is intensive vibration of the body without organs.
This has nothing to do with a phenomenological unity of an
organism. Painting is the “hysteria” of variable
amplitudes flowing throughout the body without organs. There
are gradients, zones of indiscernibility, orders and levels, and
intensive thresholds that produce provisional organs. The
body without organs is not without organs. It is without
the organization of an organism.
Time itself is painted in Bacon’s
Figure. Sensation is intensive vibration. Every
sensation implies a difference in level. The mouth at one
level is anus at another. This is hysterical reality of the
body without organs with its oscillations of speed and slowness
in the production of before-after. There is direct action
on the nervous system. Deleuze mentions the hysteria of
‘autoscopia’ where the transitory organs are felt under
the organization of the organism. (FB 43) “….it
is no longer my head, but I feel myself inside a
head….” The transitory organs of the body without
organs are felt under the organization of the body. Things
are felt as too present --- an interminable presence of
transitory organs. It is the waiting of perpetual delay ---
the speed of already happened. Painting makes visible this
hysterical presence. The eye is no longer a fixed organ.
The eye becomes a transitory organ across levels. Representation
and narration become impossible.
Phenomenology in art is not sufficient.
It invokes the lived body, but never reaches the unlivable power
of univocity. Univocal sensation is reached only when
rhythm plunges into chaos. The limit of the lived body is
the body without organs with its gradients, thresholds, and
levels. Bacon paints the intensity of the body without
organs. Phenomena of appearances and resemblances do not
provoke sensation. Rather, it is the reverse. Sensation
composes new singularities of never seen resemblances. Painting
renders visible the forces that are not visible in themselves.
Sensation “gives” something that does not resemble the
forces that condition it. It is the forces of time that
must be painted. Bacon paints the scream by creating a
relation between visibility of the open mouth and invisible
forces of the future. (FB 52-3) “Life screams at death….it
is this invisible force that life detects, flushes out, and makes
visible through the scream. Death is judged from the point
of view of life, and not the reverse, as we like to believe.”
Bacon’s painting renders the forces of time visible.
Therefore, Deleuze finds three relations in
Bacon’s painting. First, the simple relations of
movement from structure to Figure and from Figure to structure.
This is the fact of the Figure when the body feels forces of
isolation, deformation, and dissipation. Secondly, bodies
undergo coupling, two Figures resonate to become a single “matter
of fact”. Two sensations each at its own level can
share a zone of indiscernibility. In coupling of sensation,
rhythm is liberated as different levels resonate. Finally,
there is movement of force in the triptych. There is
separation of bodies that becomes a common fact of the Figures in
a rhythmic being --- a union that separates. A
joining-together separates the Figures in a new “matter of
fact”. The three panels are separated but not
isolated. There is no longer a limiting unity of each
Figure in isolation, but a distributive unity of panels. I
take these three relations to be what Deleuze elsewhere calls the
syntheses of connection, disjunction, and conjunction of flows in
new continuities and across levels. All relations are the
immediacy of immanence.
There are complex relations between the
painter’s eye and hand. There are heterogeneous
parallel series of optical and tactile images. The
relations are univocal. That is, they are really distinct
yet ontologically singular. Their singularity becomes the
haptic image by which the eye gains the sensation of touch.
Sight discovers its own function of touch apart from its optical
function. The diagram creates a new sensation of
resemblance, an asignifying, non-representational resemblance
never seen before will emerge. The diagram is a zone of
indiscernibility between two forms from which the haptic Figure
emerges. It produces resemblance through non-resembling
means. The duality of the tactile and the optical is
surpassed in the diagram from which emerges the haptic function
of the eye. The diagram is logic of sensation from which
emerges Figures of haptic sensations.
The tactile-optical space is disrupted by
the catastrophe of the diagram. Something new emerges from
it. A form (the Figure) emerges from the diagram and acts
as an agent of transformation. The diagram distributes
formless forces. It produces resemblance by non-resembling
means. The diagram overcomes the duality of tactile/optical
and emerges in the haptic function. Sight discovers its own
function of touch apart from its optical function. Something
emerges from the diagram. The diagram-accident scrambles
the intentional figurative form. It takes asignifying
traits of Figures of different planes to create a sensation.
The diagram creates a new sensation of resemblance, an
asignifying, non-representational resemblance will emerge that
has never been experienced before.
The diagram draws zones of indiscernibility
among forms from which new Figures emerge. The duality of
the tactile and the optical is surpassed in the diagram from
which emerges the haptic function of the eye. As forces
pass through the violent catastrophe of the diagram; planes
collide, colors no longer delimit objects, and bodies are thrown
off balance. In order to avoid the continuation of
catastrophe, there must be a produced resemblance that does not
merely reproduce clichés. The painter must reach the
analogical language of modulation* through the diagram. Colorism
is the modulation that constitutes a visual sense of touch and a
haptic sense of sight.
The painter begins with a blank canvas that
is virtually filled with clichés. The problem is how to
begin without just reproducing clichés. Bacon begins with
the chaos of random marks in order to battle against cliché.
New resemblances are created through these accidents. When
Bacon clears the canvas of cliché’s with free random marks,
this does not outline a form but creates zones where forms become
indiscernible. Then the body without organs is a
provisional presence that introduces time into painting. Time
itself is painted in the hysterical reality of the body. “Autoscopia”
is hysterical presence. (FB 44) “Presence, presence…things
and being are present, too present…excessive presence…interminable
presence…insistence of a scream that survives the mouth, the
insistence of a body that survives the organism….the
identity of an already-there and an always-delayed.”
There is neither the object of sensation, nor the subject of
sensation. Rather, it is sensation itself that is the
“hysteria” of painting. The body without organs
is felt underneath the organization of the organs. Different
levels become different organs experienced as same sensation.
The artist does not paint the sensible or perceptible. Rather,
the sensations of percept and affect capture invisible and
insensible forces.
Abstract painting is mediated by a code that
still maintains clichés. On the other hand, action
painting fills the entire canvas scrambling codes into chaos.
But Deleuze sees in Bacon a “middle way” of the
diagram. Bacon’s diagram composes an analogical
language that does not reduce the diagram to a digital code.
But neither do diagrams proliferate into a chaotic scrambling of
code. Bacon’s “middle way” uses the
catastrophe of chaos in the battle against the clichés of
opinion. It collapses visual coordinates in order to
introduce new orders and rhythms. The diagram collapses the
old coordinates to create new experiences of sensation.
Bacon’s “middle way” is a
diagrammatic “abstract machine” that escapes identity
of a code. The diagram plunges into chaos in order to fight
clichés of opinion. But it does not merge with chaotic
forces. It liberates planes, colors, and bodies by passing
through violent catastrophe. It liberates the Figure.
Bacon paints modulation* of images. Bodies fall. Planes
collide. Color no longer delimits objects. The Figure
is sensation itself that emerges from chaos. It renders
visible the forces that are invisible. The diagram is the
Abstract Machine of asignifying, non-resembling, and
non-representational lines and zones. It is a non-rational
logic of sensation that creates new resemblances through
non-resembling means. Therefore, it is not representational
figuration that provokes sensation. Rather, sensation
produces, and is produced by, new resemblances of real
difference.
*Deleuze gives his explanation of modulation
in Cinema 2 p. 27-8. Painting is analogical art in
the sense that the diagram is modulation, not a mould, of
resemblance. Bacon uses color to modulate the image without
mediation of a code.