I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Musings, I write freely and wanderingly about some topic that’s on my mind.
Last night I couldn’t sleep, because earlier in the day I had drunk a healthy-sized glass of what I thought was cold brew, but was actually cold brew concentrate — double strength. I only realized my error when my daughter was talking about buying “cold brew concentrate.”
“What’s that?” I said, and she told me it was what was in the bottle of cold brew I had finished from the fridge. Oops!
Since I couldn’t sleep, I listened to a few Philosophize This! podcast episodes including Deleuze Interprets Nietzsche (Difference, Joy, Affirmation). Usually such a podcast will put me right to sleep, but I made it all the way to the end of this one, where podcaster Stephen West shares Deleuze’s ideas on art, that art is not a form of information or communication to Deleuze. Instead, it’s something that “helps people think and feel beyond the prescribed limitations of the information they get on a day-to-day basis.” It “inspires new thoughts and new ways of engaging with the constantly changing circumstances we live in.”
This ties back to Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch, a person who “creatively differentiates their existence” rather than living with the herd.
This is what I seek to do with the conceptual art projects I take on: Snow Bound, which pairs abstract paintings with photos created after the fact; Things Men Gave Me, which pairs essays with paintings inspired by the essays; and even,] Motion Memory, a series of paintings inspired by my memories of mechanical machinery on mountains.
Today I want to learn more about Gilles Deleuze, and his reframing of Nietzschean affirmation, creative differentiation, and will to power.
Who was Gilles Deleuze?
Gilles Louis René Deleuze (1925 – 1995) was a French philosopher who wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls him “one of the most influential and prolific French philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century.”
His great work was Difference and Repetition, in which he attempts to develop a metaphysics adequate to contemporary mathematics and science. But he also wrote studies in the history of philosophy (including on Nietzsche, Kant, and Foucault) and on the arts (including a two-volume study of the cinema, a work on the painter Francis Bacon, and an essay collection on literature). He wrote several books with Félix Guattari, a political activist and psychoanalyist, including Capitalism and Schizophrenia, a two-volume work that argues that capitalism constantly dismantles traditional social structures and then traps people through oppressive psychological and economic norms. That is something I’d like to learn more about in the future, as it fits very well with my own experience of contemporary life under capitalism and the DSM-5.
Deleuze on Nietzsche and art
Deleuze wrote a book Nietzsche and Philosophy which was published in 1962. He read Nietzsche as a theorist of forces, difference, and creation. For Deleuze, art is the ultimate practice of the Nietzschean will to power, a tool for the supreme activity of transvaluing life.
But what does that mean? What is transvaluation? In German the term is Umwertung aller Werte or the “transvaluation of all values.” By transvaluation, Nietzsche meant a rewriting of values, based on tracing values back to the question “What type of will or force produces this value?”
Nietzsche wanted to move past the negativity and slave morality of Christianity towards a new way of evaluating action and lives. He thought great people should become legislators of new values, not just accept the (Christian or Enlightenment) values of the herd, which are nihilistic and reactionary.
Deleuze proposed that creative acts can be the ultimate engines of transvaluation. An artist can shatter clichés and create new opportunities for sensation. She can shift what human beings are capable of perceiving and experiencing, blasting away cultural dogma.
Deleuze thought that human perception is constantly mediated by socially conditioned and automatic ways of seeing, hearing, and thinking — clichés. The act of artistic creation can be a way of acting against this, a way of dismantling convention and replacing it with new values, new thinking, new ideas.
Good art can thus force an encounter with the Real, unmediated by social cliché. It can disrupt the viewer’s (or the reader’s or the watcher’s) habitual way of perceiving the world.
To Deleuze, true art is never a passive reaction to the world but rather an act of affirmation and differentiation in which the artist forces something new into existence via an active, joyfully chaotic explosion of energy.
Moving forward with my art
I didn’t even realize I wanted to do it, or was doing it: bringing new meaning and values into being with my art and dismantling clichéd ways of thinking in the process.
This is exactly what I want to do with my latest artwork in progress, a study of great novels with adulteresses as their heroines, one which takes a new look at adultery and most especially a woman’s adultery (which is always more freighted than a man’s because of the question of paternity, should children arrive).
Before I started this project I thought I knew the basic outlines of the four novels I’m representing (and re-presenting) in my artwork. The four novels with my unsubtle, clichéd understanding of their plots are:
- The Scarlet Letter – adulterous woman in Puritan New England is punished and socially isolated by having to wear a scarlet letter “A” all the time
- Anna Karenina – Russian woman has an affair, becomes socially isolated, throws herself under a train
- Madame Bovary – frivolous young wife pursues multiple affairs, spends too much money, then kills herself with poison when it all falls apart
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover – married woman figures out she likes sex
There is some truth to my crude understandings of the plots of these books. But a great novel is never just a crude story. Each of these novels has elements of tragedy, and also of transformation. Perhaps I might add yet another T word to that: trangression. A wife cheating on her husband is nothing if not transgressive.
In each novel, the author takes a more subtle perspective than simply, “Wife has affair, that is bad and immoral, she must be punished by the gods / fate / her society.” In each novel, in fact, the author is engaged in an act of Deleuzian-Nietzschean creative differentiation. Each story leads the reader to question standard understandings of adultery committed by a woman.
What exactly do I want to say with my artwork? It is still a work in progress, and I don’t entirely know yet. But here’s what I’m circling around:
In life and in novels, both men and women commit adultery, but for women the stakes are higher. Society punishes women more for adultery for numerous reasons: because a woman’s adultery may put paternity and inheritance at risk, because women have in the past been considered subordinate to or even owned by men, because of Christian ideas about women-as-temptress and women as bringing evil into paradise, and more.
In four classic novels, an adulteress shows us that marital infidelity on the part of a woman is more than just a sin, results not just in social sanctions and isolation but can be a force for the woman’s transformation and growth, and, while often leading to tragedy, represent in each case show a passionate woman struggle to achieve aliveness and individuation under the oppressive control of social expectation and convention.
The elements of this are:
- A woman suffering under the demands of societal control and expectation
- That woman’s search for a feeling of aliveness and a sense of meaning in her life
- The transgression of adultery
- The transformation of her self and other people around her that ensues
- And, sometimes, tragic outcomes
This makes me think again of Simon Critchley on tragedy:
Tragedy gives voice to what suffers in us and in others, and how we might become cognizant of that suffering, and work with that suffering, where suffering is that pathos that we undergo, where tragic passion is both something undergone and partially overtaken in action (I want to emphasize the word “partially”—agency in tragedy is ever partial).
Simon Critchley, Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us
There is a tragic passion to the adultery presented in each of the four novels, and, with agency, it can be partially overtaken, but not completely.
What’s missing from this is the aspect of transformation, which is shown in all four novels, whether for the better (Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, Constance Chatterley in Lady Chatterley’s Lover) or for the worse (Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary).
How to say all this in one artwork, with maximum dimensions 20″ H x 13″ W x 13″ D? That’s what I’m going to figure out.