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- [00:00]
Nathan Smith
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- [01:46]
Nathan Smith
Rules and restrictions apply. Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, I'm Nathan Smith, a host for the New Books Network. I have the pleasure today to speak with two authors and translators. First, Charles Stavall, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Wayne State University, and Dan Smith, professor of Philosophy at Purdue University. The text we're discussing is the recently published translation that Charles Stavall did of Deleuze's 1981 seminar on painting, and Dan is joining us as the two have worked together. But Dan kind of heads up the Deleuze translation. Deleuze Seminar translation website that has been working to compile, transcribe, and then translate recordings of the various seminars that he did. So in addition to the work that they've both done with the DELU seminars, Dan is also the translator of the Francis Bacon book or Francis Bacon Logic of Sensation text by Deleuze that was based upon or came on the heels of this seminar. And as we'll go into a little bit, a lot of the seminars that Deleuze gave in the late 70s and 80s, he would then turn over into attacks. So you know, the Foucault book, Spinoza, the second Spinoza book, Leibniz and the Baroque, the Cinema texts, and the Francis Bacon book all had some relationship to a lecture that he was giving at that time. Naturally, based on their joint work on the Dallas seminar, but also on Dan's work in translating the Francis Bacon book, we thought this would be a lovely opportunity to get them together to talk about this project. This particular seminar was published by the University of Minnesota Press earlier this year, and I guess to introduce it, I will read you some of the good words from the back of the text before diving into our interview, so available for the first time in English. The complete and annotated Transcripts of the Liz's 1981 Seminars on Painting From 1970 until 1987, Gilles Deleuze held a weekly seminar at the Experimental University of Vincennes and starting in 1980 at St. Denis. My French is terrible, so I hope I said that correctly. In the spring of 1981, he began a series of eight seminars on painting and its intersections with philosophy. The recorded sessions, newly transcribed and translated into English, are now available in in their entirety for the first time, extensively annotated by philosopher David Lepouge on Painting, illuminates Deleuze's thinking on artistic creation, significantly extending the lines of thought in his book Francis Bacon through paintings and writings by Rembrandt, Delcroze, Turner, Cezanne, Van Gogh, kli, Pollock, and Bacon, Deleuze explores the creative process from chaos to the pictorial fact. The introduction and use of color features prominently as Deleuze elaborates on artistic and philosophical concepts such as the diagram, modulation, code, and the digital and the analogical. Through this scrutiny, he raises a series of profound and stimulating questions for his students. How does a painter ward off grayness and attain color? What is line without contour? Why paint at all? Written and thought in a rhizomatic manner that is thoroughly Deleuzian, strange, powerful, and novel On Painting traverses both the conception of art History and the possibility of color as a philosophical concept. So without further ado, here is our discussion. We are talking about. Deleuze was on painting, which is the. Was it 80 and 81? Is that the year or. No, it's just 81. The seminars that he did. Yes, and he did in many of these seminars. And you two have been instrumental in collating, compiling and translating these seminars. Can you tell us a little bit about that process?
- [06:30]
Charles Stavall
Going to pass it to Dan, because Dan was there at the beginning.
- [06:34]
Dan Smith
Well, I could say one of the reasons we got started on this is, for me personally, University of Paris 8 students there were kind of hired to start transcribing the seminars that Deleuze gave at the University of Paris 8. And the reason they could be transcribed was there was a Japanese student whose last name was Suzuki, who was at every seminar Deleuze gave, sat right next to him and recorded his seminars, I think, for seven or eight years before he retired. So those were then taken up by the National Library of France, put in MP3 format, and they're now part of the archive. So the University of Paris transcribed those, and then we've been trying to translate them into English at our project. But what made me excited about these is that these were more or less experimental kind of laboratory work, I think, of them, for Deleuze to try his concepts and to work with the students on the projects he was undertaking. So there's an enormous amount of material in the seminars that are not contained in the books. The books wind up being very small, abridged, pricey of what went on in the seminars. So I was really excited, as someone who loves Deleuze and thinks he's a great philosopher, to go back and see the seminars and to have access to all that material that is hidden away in the seminar. So that's really what motivated the project. Of course, there have been a lot of issues along the way of how to bring this all to fruition, but that was the start part.
- [08:06]
Nathan Smith
Yeah. And the. And just for the. For the listeners, the. The books that. It does appear that many of the seminars ended up being these. His. His shorter books, kind of post thousand plateaus. His, like, main work and Anti Oedipus with Guattari. So the, you know, you have the Francis Bacon book that we're going to talk. Well, what. The lecture on which the Francis Bacon book seems to have been correlated. There's the cinema lectures, the Ladder Spinoza book, Leibniz is another one. Am I missing any of those? There's a whole Year on Foucault book.
- [08:44]
Charles Stavall
Yep.
- [08:45]
Nathan Smith
Right. So, yeah. So a lot of these seem to be coupled with these seminars, which, as you say, it's in reading the transcripts and in reading, you know, this one as well, as well as the other ones on your website, it does really seem like people are just bringing in material that they saw and like to get at that experimental nature. Do you have any insight into that? What was it like? We read the monographs that come out of it and like you said, they seem more like an abstract of an entire course and the courses seem, in reference to the abstract, a little bit more free and experimental.
- [09:27]
Dan Smith
I mean, it's curious. I'll say a couple of things and then hand it over to Charlie. But like the example I always give, there's a seminar he gave on Leibniz called the Tavern where he's talking about freedom in Leibniz. And the question for Leibniz, should I stay home and keep working or should I go to the Tavern and have drinks with my friends? It's a question of freedom, human freedom, and how we go about making decisions. It's like 30 single spaced pages. Like an extraordinary analysis because Leibniz doesn't talk much about human freedom. Usually he's talking about God's freedom when he creates the world and the best of all possible worlds. So I read that and I thought, why does this not appear in Deleuze's book that came out of that seminar? Because I don't, I didn't remember it and I went and looked at the book and indeed it's there, but it's all condensed to, I think, three sentences, literally, this 30 page, single space seminar, which is rich and going in lots of different directions. He just summarizes the key elements of it in his book and then moves on. And for me, there's no way I could reconstitute from the book what went on in the seminar. But once you read the seminar, it says an enormous amount what you, you see in the book, the experimental side, and this is the second thing I'll say is Deleuze, it's cur. He always wanted to get feedback from students and I think he really genuinely invited that. And yet at the same time, every time students talk, you could tell he had a place he wanted to go and it would just slightly distract him and sometimes he'd have trouble getting back to where he wanted to. I think he, you know, personally, his pedagogy moved in both directions. He came prepared. He had a deduction concepts he wanted to lay out. But he was really interested in getting the students involved. But when they did get involved, it sometimes threw him off. And he. He would go in a place he wasn't prepared to and then have to come back. But that's also what makes the seminars great, because you see how it's really on the spot dealing with students and what happens in the seminar. And Charlie has written a bit about this delicious pedagogy that's quite different in the seminars, obviously, than what ultimately appears in his books.
- [11:25]
Charles Stavall
One of the things that I find in relation to what Dan just said, if you look, Felix Guattari wrote, or let's put it this way, wrote notes to Deleuze, constantly wrote notes to Deleuze. And that was their manner of collaborating. And they exchanged these notes back and forth. And out of these notes Anti Oedipus got produced, and then so did a thousand plateaus. And then these were compiled. Many of these notes were compiled in a volume that's been translated as the Anti Oedipus Papers. And it also includes some of Guattari's correspondence and journals, a couple of his journals that are contemporaneous with developing Anti Oedipus and so forth. And some. One of the things you see in there, and I think this relates to this, what I call this phenomenon, freeze dried Deleuze in his actual published texts in relationship to the seminars. Guattari himself was completely flabbergasted and frustrated in certain ways, outraged by the way that Deleuze would take his copious notes, going off in all sorts of directions. Never, I want to say never, but that's a little harsh, but not always entirely oriented and clear. Deleuze would take a lot of this stuff. And basically Deleuze seemed to be a master compiler of material, his own material, for sure, but also what Guattari brought to him. And so Guattari, whereas Guattari singed, his tendency, was to go off in all directions at all horizons. Deleuze was the kind of person, okay, in order to get this out in the text, we kind of got to rein this in. And he seemed to be a master at it. If you think of the. Dan, you want to say something? If you think of the way that Guattari and Deleuze didn't meet until June of or spring of 1969, and Antioedipus came out in 1972. And by the time Deleuze began teaching at Paris 8 in fall of 1970, so just a little over a year that they were collaborating with Each other. They already had enough material assembled to be able to. For Deleuze, be able to propose to Pierre Klosovsky an article that appeared in a special issue of Lark French Journal. It was dedicated to Kozowski. They published their first joint piece that comes out of. Mostly comes out of chapter two of Anti Oedipus, although there are segments of it, chapter one. But basically they had in place within a year enough material that they could propose this to Klasevsky. And that came out in December of 1970. But moreover, Deleuze began teaching the material in fall 1970 in one part of his seminar. And so he was developing. I mean, they work so rapidly. And it just seemed like Guattari, once he got into the regime that Deleuze imposed on him, of sitting down and writing every day and then communicating that material to him. I. I had this image of couriers running across Paris with material to. Between these two guys, then Deleuze would seriously sit down and rework it. I believe that Fanny Deleuze had a lot to do with this whole project in terms of just the typing aspect of it. But in any case, and they worked at breakneck speed because these weren't. This was not a digital era. This was an era in which, you know, if you remember. I don't know if you ever could remember the old days. I'm not sure even Dan, how much you had the old days of. Of submitting manuscripts. But paper manuscripts were what were submitted and had to be, you know, shipped before there was such a thing as, you know, shipping a digital document to a press. And so in any case, this was a time where in the early 70s, they had to have a manuscript in place to then take it over to Minui in terms of, you know, you know, where I'm going with this. All the means of production at that point were much more cumbersome than they at least should be in principle today. Sometimes they seem cumbersome, but in any case, that's other issues coming into play. But they really work fast on that book. And when you look also at getting to Dan's point about this duality, if you will, how things get shrunk down, I think that that was one of the Liz's traits that he really had that as a skill. Guattaria really just irrit Guattari, in many ways, he felt himself channeled, reined in, almost boxed in, even somehow packaged. And then he felt he was represented. And he had to come out and represent this book in interviews and so forth. But that seems to be something that Deleuze carried forward throughout his entire life and later on in his life. He talks about this trait as something that he sees as an element of style. S. As in style in Iabbi Seder. In the interview with Barnet, he talks about, for him, the great stylist. He points to Kerouac as the example of how Kerouac became more and more. There was more and more of a sobriety bringing the text down into what he described compared to a fine Japanese line painting. And I see that that's how I consider what he was doing through the last decade or so of his career, that is, through the cinema books, which they tended in some ways to be more and more refined in relationship to the seminars. Certainly the Foucault book. If you look at how long the Foucault book is. And the Foucault book also includes two essays that were previously published. So it's even shorter than just the regular page length. If you look at it, 26 sessions from the Foucault came down into those three chapters, those three main chapters of the Foucault book. Then you come to Leibniz and the Baroque. And Dan just gave you one excellent example. My example is Mallarme, the French poet Stephane Mallarme, and Deleuze devoting quite a bit of time in the Leibniz and the Baroque seminar to Mallorme. Mallarme is in the Leibniz in the Baroque book, the Fold. But, you know, don't blink while you're reading, because he may zip right by. But if you read Mallarme, if you read the seminars closely, you see the Mallarme and the references to Mallarme are sort of implicit in a number of different sentences that Deleuze is bringing back. And then I think, what is philosophy is also another example of this refinement of so many different streams of thought and development over the course of Deleuze's career, that they're able to bring that together in a way that is pretty remarkable, but also refined in the way that I'm using the term.
- [19:26]
Nathan Smith
Yeah, no, I'm struck by. I was just listening to that. And I kept oscillating in my brain between trying to understand. Not necessarily. I'm not trying to do like, the psychoanaly schizoanalysis, sorry, of. Of his relationships. But it is interesting that it seems that in a lot of these, I was oscillating between, like, oh, he's kind of acting like the modulator, as he kind of talks about in a couple of different places. But then also, I was like. But also he's kind of like the body of the despot. Or, you know, he's the body. You know, he's the thing that, like, acquires kind of. What does he call it? The quasi cause, causality of like. Which you can perhaps see in the erasure of. In a certain sense, you know, people often just talk about Deleuze, even when they're talking about Deleuze and Guattari, you know, like, he. As being an originator of, like, there are all these productive machines. And he's trying to. Going, like, all right, but I want to talk about a passive synthesis and Kant, you know, with Kant, and try to, like, take this material that people were bringing to him. But also being like, insofar as it. It helps him. And obviously, you know, these things, you know, he muses on him. He's always asking for references. You know, when someone brings something up, he's like, I don't know that book. What is that book? I want to know, you know, not to, like, you know, disparage. Disparage the approach. But he's always, you know, that kind of like, off and on. I have an idea that I want to pursue insofar as this little productive organ can be brought into a larger organization. And it's fluid in a certain sense. But I don't.
- [21:04]
Charles Stavall
I don't.
- [21:04]
Nathan Smith
I've never thought of that pairing within their relations. I don't know if that's just kind of an offhand thought, if. Have you. Is there any. Any ideas that. That springs to mind?
- [21:17]
Dan Smith
Well, there is one place. You know, they published a book called the Anti Oedipus Papers of what Guattari was giving to Deleuze. And there's some diary entries there where he does complain, Guattari, that he felt like Deleuze was kind of an overcoding machine, as you said, like a despot. He took his stuff and imposed order on it. And as Charlie says, I think he was, if not resentful, at least felt like his voice had been somewhat taken up into loses. Yeah, so I think that's probably true to a certain degree. And in that you see a lot of concepts that didn't get taken up into the books. There's a whole notion of the audio visual that Guattari was developing that doesn't appear in what is philosophy. They talk about concepts, philosophical concepts, scientific functions and, you know, artistic percepts and affects. But when Guattari's writing about that, he added lived experience to that and that whole category just fell out for some reason. I can see why. Maybe because they weren't. Toulouse wasn't keen on phenomenology and leveque and lived experience, but nonetheless, Guattari was. So it's interesting to look at those manuscripts and see what got taken up by what didn't get taken up. It's a complex relationship, I think.
- [22:32]
Nathan Smith
Yeah. Interesting. Well, to take off. So the larger project you guys have been. You working on, these are. There are many of these seminars, I believe, Spinoza. You're already working on the Spinoza lectures, compiling them for publication, Correct?
- [22:49]
Charles Stavall
Yeah. I should sort of put it in a framework we have. As Dan mentioned earlier.
- [23:00]
Nathan Smith
You know.
- [23:03]
Charles Stavall
The Paris 8 project brought online systematically most of the transcripts of the recordings prepared by Hidenobu Suzuki. But prior to Paris 8, Richard Pinhas, 1 of Deleuze students, had also put up a site called Web Deleuze. And Web Deleuze is a little bit less structured than Parasite because Pinos had his own gig as a musician. So it's less curated. The number of translations are sort of inconsistent and so forth. And the transcripts tend. Many of the transcripts tend to be a little bit more fragmentary in certain spots. Parasite went a lot farther and also recruited. I counted over 200 different transcribers at different points to bring these texts out. But Dan's project from the get go, was a much more systematic way of trying to bring all these strains together. And one of the aspects that was unforeseen to me originally, but became necessary, is that we had to go ahead and retranscribe everything. Let's listen to the transcriptions, read the transcriptions that have been done, listen to the recordings and make sure that they were as faithful as they could be to the transcriptions, could be to the recordings, because there tended to be, in certain spots, a lot of slippage. And so we worked really hard on that. And we've been bringing these out now, thanks to successive NEH grants that Dan was able to land and through the auspices of the Purdue Grant Department. But the next phase, which we had not foreseen at all, was the fact that the rationale for doing all this had been that Deleuze had forbidden these recordings to be brought out in print, and consequently Pinhas, and then Paris 8 and then our project felt like we were doing the good work that Deleuze did sanction, which was the digitization of these recordings into transcripts and translations. Little did we know that, well in advance of Deleuze centenary This year, Edition de Minuit, along with David La Pujad as editor, decided that now is the time that we should be able to bring these out into print. And so they started with the painting book, came out in October 2023. Then a year later, in October of 2024, they came out with the Spinoza seminars. So eight sessions for a painting, 15 sessions for Spinoza, and then for the centenary 2025, just a few weeks ago, they delighted the French public and the world with two volumes. One is called Sur les Ligni de Vie, so lines. And that's basically just two back to back sessions that come at the end of the 1979-1980 academic year. So they're Deleuze's final sessions at Vincennes University before they moved over to St. Denis and they decided to add a little session from 1977, I believe that pertains to the material in these two back to back sessions. So that's a little book that came out, it's about 144 pages long. And what Dan and I were talking about earlier was the fact that I finished translating that basically for myself at the moment, and then when I get into better shape, I'll send it to Dan. But when it would come out is a huge question mark at this point. But then the other book that they published two weeks ago were the 13 sessions at the beginning of the 1979-80 academic year. And those are on the last sessions on a thousand plateaus. A thousand plateaus didn't come out until October of 1980. And so he was teaching, still teaching from a thousand plateaus, working on plateaus 12, 13 and 14. There's material, it shifts back and forth. And he was working on those three plateaus during two years, the last two years, 78, 79, for which we only have one lecture available or one transcript available, and then 7,980, there are 13 sessions. That was the year that Suzuki started recording.
- [28:15]
Nathan Smith
So.
- [28:17]
Charles Stavall
It'S funny to hear you say it's not inaccurate, but nonetheless, it's funny to hear you say that the On Painting book is sort of an offshoot of our project. And we could say, yes, it is, to the extent that we've been working on these seminars. And so it's a kind of a fortuitous circumstance for University of Minnesota Press to be able to hook up with our project project and be able to produce these successive translations, because I just submitted to the press the On Spinoza translation. And so hopefully that'll be out in 2026 sometime but on the other hand, the only reason these are available is because a whole set of unauthorized translations have already come out in Spanish published in Argentina, and several more in Italy published in Verona. And none of these translators or presses made any effort, it seems, to seek any kind of permission to do so. They have been termed tradition sauvage or wild translations. And that seems to be one of the inspirations, besides the fact I believe that it's good marketing to roll up to Duluth Centenary with several years of publications of this sort. But nonetheless, that's one of the inspirations for this whole enterprise.
- [29:56]
Nathan Smith
Yeah, yeah. No, and I. I guess I should note that is like in reading, Charles, your.
- [30:03]
Charles Stavall
Your.
- [30:03]
Nathan Smith
Your forward or an introduction to the book. You are small. Yeah. Preface. You're. You seem to be trying to like you. Like you address both these things where you're like, there's a pre. Existing. Is it like, sir, which is what you just referenced via the. The French edition, as well as the work you've been doing with the translation collective. So, yeah, no, that. That is a. That is a point which I. I'm. I'm very happy that we have Dan to talk about that side. If my French was better than a reading slash translation level, I would have loved to talk with. With David as well. So. So, yeah.
- [30:43]
Charles Stavall
Do you.
- [30:44]
Nathan Smith
Do you see this as kind of like. So, yeah, you're. You're kind of having the. Is it Max Broad?
- [30:50]
Dan Smith
Yes.
- [30:51]
Nathan Smith
Yeah.
- [30:52]
Charles Stavall
Yeah.
- [30:52]
Nathan Smith
It's kind of like a Max Broad moment of like, hey, destroy all my manuscripts. It's like, well, at some point, you know, come on.
- [30:58]
Charles Stavall
So.
- [30:58]
Nathan Smith
But. So, yeah, the French are starting to put these things out in a little bit more of a systematic. Not just as you. Yeah. The rogue.
- [31:08]
Charles Stavall
They're definitive editions. And the French are really superb on definitive editions. The Bibliotheque de la Playade editions are renowned worldwide as the definitive. If you get in the Pleiad, you're canonized. In fact, Sartre resisted the Nobel Prize as well as being put in the play Pleyad while he was still alive. Precisely for that reason. He didn't want to be canonized. And then he. Then he died and he became canonized because he's in the play. So we'll have to wait and see if the play would pick up any of these minui additions. It seems. It seems like it's in the cards. But I wouldn't have put money on these editions that came out over the last few years, and I would have lost that bet. Hang on. I mean, I would have betted, but I would have lost out. So if you want to put money on the play, it could happen. You never know. But yeah, it's. It's quite. And it's a. It's an industry, you know, it's. It's a publishing industry. And like so many other. And. And they have their, their bottom line and they're certainly. These constitute what they call in publishing, I guess, a backlist of texts that will always be. Always be selling. And that's true, I believe, also on the translation side.
- [32:40]
Nathan Smith
Sure, for sure. Interesting. Yeah.
- [32:43]
Dan Smith
I think it's great if I can jump in to say that these are coming out by La Pujad, because as Charlie said, Deleuze had said no posthumous publication when he died, and his widow Fanny interpreted that to mean no print publication. But she was kind of old school, but she allowed all this stuff to come out online because she didn't apparently consider that to be a publication. So we had a number of publishers come to us and ask if they could do essentially Deleuze Nauklaas and publish it. And we just had to say no because we didn't have permission to do that. So that's why we went this route of doing everything online. But La Pujad now, I think rightly so, has seen that's the time now to have these come out in print. And he's editing them and getting rid of the ums and ahs and. And extraneous things and making, as Charlie says, the definitive editions. I think it's a great thing.
- [33:32]
Nathan Smith
Yeah. No, and I guess for the listeners, in stark contrast to the kind of like mill of the Foucault seminars, for instance, that have been. Come out for a while now, as well as I think Chicago has been working on the Derrida seminars in a similar type of vein. The Deleuze ones have been like this being the first. First print translation in English of these seminars is a noted deviance from some of the other. Some of his contemporaries.
- [34:05]
Dan Smith
Yeah, no, that's right.
- [34:06]
Nathan Smith
I had no idea.
- [34:08]
Charles Stavall
And one of the things also that La Pujad has done in the spirit and the letter of the definitive edition is to. This is what I was discussing with Dan when we. We first were just chatting earlier, the apparatus of footnotes. Because he's also turned these books not just into the seminars, but also cross referencing. And so I'm sure you saw that in the footnotes on painting. One of the things I've heard comments to by different people over the last few years about the Liza Seminars is that this is true of his written work to some extent is how vast some of the references are to different texts and thinkers. But in these seminars, sometimes they're quite elusive and there's not time, if you will, or Deleuze wasn't prepared to give a full footnote reference or bibliographical reference. And so, so La Pujad has taken that challenge up in a definite way. And then I've been able to backstop him on a number of things because my references, if the book is in translation, if the reference is in translation, I'll put the English translation reference in there, because anybody could find the reference in French online anyway. So it's not like we have to necessarily put both unless the actual data publication is relevant in the context. But this has been, you know, this turns these books into something a little bit more powerful than just the seminars themselves. And this will become, I think, increasingly apparent when the AN Spinoza comes out, because the An Spinoza book sort of consistently provides references not available to the students sitting in class, references to the actual citations from Ethics and various other Spinoza texts. And also the recent book that just came out on the state apparatus, the second book that came out a few weeks ago on the State apparatus and the war machine, that is the sessions from 7980, La Pugad has put in there just a massive cross referencing. And not just cross referencing the references, but often the citations from the text of a thousand plateaus to which Deleuze is referring. And so Deleuze will make an allusion to a particular strain of thought that's developed in a thousand plateaus. Well, in comes the footnote to say, okay, it's on this page and it's within this context. And, and that makes these sessions and, and that text a very, very powerful text. Probably quite a teaching tool for, you know, for classes.
- [37:30]
Nathan Smith
Yeah, no, and it's. I, I, you know, I have recently been, I've been looking into some of the, I'm blanking on his first name. I have the French over there, the Blanche.
- [37:41]
Charles Stavall
Yeah, Robert.
- [37:42]
Nathan Smith
Robert, yeah, Robert Blanche. And like tracing down that like, was John. I think it's John Roth, is his name Ro. Yeah. Has been like tracing down some of the ways in which he takes up the idea of axiomatics and trying. Yeah, and it's this, it's just like a passing reference to this thinker that I didn't know much about. And it really only comes up in, in relation to that one thing. I've been looking at some of his, the Intellectual structures books, which came out, I think, a little bit after axiomatics. But, yeah, and it's just this, like, little reference that some, you know, some of these, like, in the text, he'll say things like, oh, this is related to Perse's diagram, which he explicates a little bit more here in the seminar. But other than in the seminar, the cinema books. As someone who's been interested in Purse, like, trying to find. I'm like, okay, I see Peirce is, like, vaguely referenced in the linguistics of, you know, the plateau on regimes of signs or something. But it's. It's very fleeting, and it's hard to know exactly where he got all these things. So being able to track, like, oh, well, he was access. Had access to this French translation of Purse that came out here and which. Which is duplicated here on painting as well, is invaluable because some of these, they're very hard and very illuminating to be able to go back and go, oh, that's kind of what they're talking about here. It's incredible to do.
- [39:10]
Charles Stavall
I had one of those moments just in the last 24 hours. What was that? Well, at the end of the Spinoza seminar and the beginning of the painting book, as I mentioned there, the March 31, 1981 session is an hour of mostly Q and A, but Deleuze is giving a long answer or two, about an hour to end the Spinoza seminar. And then he jumps into the painting seminar, and he jumps in there on the question of catastrophe. Now, the join there is that at the end of the Spinoza. The last couple weeks of the Spinoza seminar, he's been talking about the different kinds of knowledge and rising up through these levels of knowledge into the third kind of knowledge, which would lead to beatitude, sort of, in many ways, a state of living grace that's hard to maintain. I imagine I ain't got there yet. But nonetheless, moving up through these. And yet, as Deleuze is talking about beatitude here in the March 31 session, he says, but then, as you know, this could all go wrong. It could go off the rails, it could go sideways and could lead to a catastrophe. I'm compressing. And then there's a pause, it says, which takes us into our next seminar. And then he goes in and he starts talking about the painting. So, you know, this is. This is. This is fine. It's a very clever way of making the transition. But what dawned on me over the last 24 hours, and in fact, it was like, about 3:30 or 4:00am this morning, as I was laying in bed trying to get back to sleep, for some reason I had woken up, might have had something to do with cats, but any case, I was laying in bed and as running through my mind this aspect, then I realized something, that for students who've been going to the Deleuze seminar this academic year of 81, that Deleuze just completed the Spinoza seminar and then begins a painting seminar, it follows directly on the end of the previous year, which corresponds to this new little book called On Lifelines. And in On Lifelines, he emphasizes the importance of lines of flight that can lead to lines of destruction. And he really develops this in these two sessions in a particular way. And it dawned on me that whereas when you just look at the end of the Spinoza seminar and the shift into the On Painting seminar, you see this kind of, okay, well, he's doing such a good job talking about beatitude, why does he bring in this whole thing about going sideways? Well, it's precisely in the context of talking about Spinoza a year previously, in May, June of 1980, that he brought in Spinoza and he brought in the specificity of this idea of lines of life as being particularly important, but also lines of death, death as having nonetheless, an importance and also constituting a danger. And he developed this in great detail in those two sessions that are now being published in this little book. And it just occurred to me that for students attuned to what Deleuze's references are, that particular shift at the end of the Spinoza and into the painting conjured up the cross reference to what he had been speaking about the previous May and the previous June about these lines of life and lines of death. And in those seminars at the end of academic year of 1980, he brings in Spinoza's theory of death explicitly and talks about this in terms of these lines of life. So. So it suddenly dawned on me at 3am or 4am this morning that, yes, this is how this elusiveness within the Deleuze pedagogy is something that if you are a regular in these seminars, a lot of these illusions wouldn't be lost on you. For many people just showing up, of course they would be, but for the people who have been coming in successive years, and many of the. Many of those people, many of the students had, there was somebody they could follow along.
- [43:55]
Nathan Smith
Yeah. Do you think that that was like a larger. Because I'm curious, because that, I mean, that does kind of fit in with a certain logic within some of his works where there I'm thinking of like Leonard Lawlor's writings on the Logic of Sense, where he's talking about how Deleuze is constantly fighting this like two front battle between on the one hand, cliches, doxa, you know, like for life to get to what we were talking about. Corny things, things that are kind of like out of date and like, oh, that doesn't really mean anything. But also chaos. And he's like balancing here and it in which is, you know, in some sense, you know what he's talking about with the diagram and all of these concepts of like. When you're ending one session or one like series of like things, it gets closer to something not necessarily positive, but like, you know, color in the. The painting book feels like an accomplishment. Like we're getting somewhere, it's coming together. And do you think that these types of moments of him going. But also there's the potential that this fails is a way of like transitioning and kind of like reopening things up into a next topic or something, or.
- [45:08]
Charles Stavall
Not necessarily the next topic. But also he's. He's constantly bringing in a third choice. When he sets up binaries, he seems to always slide in a third choice. There's always going to be this third that'll come in and that I can think of the way he sets up sense, the structure of sense making in logic of sense. And then you have the empty square. And when he's talking about just the diagram itself and the process at the beginning of On Painting, as he develops the difference, the different steps towards the creation, that threat of chaos is there. And it depends on which vocabulary we want to use. Now if we go back to the idea of the lifelines, the lifelines are always threatened by being sucked into the black hole of chaos, of the abyss. And the future is uncertain and the end is always near type of thing. And so he's constantly. That's always there, that's always undercurrent. Which is not something he necessarily wants to emphasize on a daily basis. But nonetheless you can see this move towards like in the opening of On Painting, how he develops, in the first two chapters, how he develops the process of change training from this catastrophe, from this murkiness, that ultra actual disaster, moving you through to the pictorial fact and the diagram itself. And how the diagram as a term within the text is actually quite slippery. It takes on a number of different nuances. The derivation of it itself is not necessarily from Peirce, because his reference On Painting is to a Comment that Bacon made in one of his interviews. Except. Except Bacon didn't make that comment about the diagram. He made it. He. Bacon was talking about the graph. And so the diagram is useful for Deleuze as a term because, yeah, he knows this from Peirce, and he's going to be using it in different ways as he moves forward along in the 1980s, but in terms of, say, it's cinema, in terms of Foucault. But nonetheless, it's a useful term. It moves him forward because as you notice, as you go forward in on painting, although the diagram has its importance in the opening chapters, then other terms begin to come into play and other oppositions and other third terms, he turns his attention to those until you move toward the end of the book where you're coming into the structure of color caller force and. And how we've moved from the murkiness of the danger of chaos all the way to the sort of triumph we feel at the end of the book of how these forces always prevalent in the work of Francis Bacon, how, nonetheless, he's able to bring this out much more broadly through the work of the Impressionists and post Impressionists.
- [48:30]
Nathan Smith
Yeah. And, I mean, Francis Bacon himself is, for Deleuze, one of those third figures. And in some sense, between, you know, the. The two sides of abstract art and abstract expressionism, we have Francis Bacon, who's taking little bits of, you know, if those are the extreme poles and their relationships, they're. They're two different ways of handling chaos. Francis Bacon comes in as the third way, you know, so. So I'm curious. So we've talked a lot about the seminar. Dan, you are also the translator, if I'm not mistaken, of the Francis Bacon book.
- [49:05]
Dan Smith
Yes.
- [49:06]
Nathan Smith
Yeah. Do you have any. And I know that you've written a lot about how to approach this work on your three conceptual trajectories. Is there anything that you like? How do you see these two things functioning together? Other.
- [49:23]
Dan Smith
Well, it's interesting because apparently Deleuze did the seminar. Charlie can correct me. I think he did it first and then the book came out later. But in the seminar, Bacon is mentioned maybe two or three times, but always interesting. So the seminar was not on Francis Bacon, and then when he published the book based on the seminar, he decided to make it a book about Francis Bacon. He never quite explains why. I know there were two big exhibitions that took place in Paris around that time where he obviously would have have seen Bacon. Michel Leri had written stuff on Bacon, so he was probably interested through that. So why that happened, that's one interesting question, why it became a book on Francis Bacon. But I think there are two things just about the seminar and the book that I think are maybe not necessarily novelties, but one Deleuze makes a distinction between history and becoming. I remember having a friend, an art historian named Jenny Anger, who teaches at Grinnell, where I had my first job, and she read this book and really liked it. But she said, you know, this is a book that no art historian could ever write because it doesn't really explain Bacon's work. It doesn't say anything about the history of where he came from or that he was gay or that he was a gambler or that he drank a lot, or that World War II had just taken place. You know, there's all the angst of that, and he came into that or existentialism as a philosophical background, which is what most books on Francis Bacon talk about. And I think partly Deleuze's point is, and why he distinguishes history and becoming goes, yeah, that's true. That's Bacon's history. But does it really explain why Bacon became Bacon? Because there are a lot of people living at that same time, you know, who aren't Francis Bacon, who didn't become painters or if they became painters, like Lucian Freud, for instance, but they went into a very different trajectory on what they did in their art. So history says where we come from, but as Deleuze says, it doesn't say what we've become. And it seemed like what he tried to do in bringing Francis Bacon, in addition to what he did in the seminar, is to look at that which is really the singularity of what Bacon had produced, given the fact, yes, this was the historical background that he was working in, but that historical background doesn't really explain the work. So that's the first thing, trying to get to the singularity of Bacon. But then the question is, how does Deleuze get at that singularity? And that kind of gets the heart of what Deleuze thinks about philosophy. He says philosophers are. They create concepts, and in that sense, they're like artists and that they're creative. But the flip side of that is that artists or painters like Bacon, he thinks, are also thinkers. They just don't think in concepts. A painter like Bacon thinks in terms of lines and colors, like a filmmaker will think in images, and a sculptor will think of bronze or wood or whatever they happen to work, work in. So then Deleuze says, for me, as a philosopher, what I try to do is to create the concepts that correspond to the thought process that Bacon is working out in his paintings. But he's doing that not with regard to concepts, but in line and color actually in his paintings. So what's remarkable about the Bacon book and why it's not really a work in art history, is that it's very specifically looking at the paintings and then trying to develop concepts like the figure, like the catastrophe, like the diagram, forced resonance. And you know, all these concepts Deleuze comes up with because he's a philosopher, he needs those concepts to explicate the thought process I think that he finds going on at Francis Bacon's work. He's not a philosopher, but he is a thinker. He just thinks in terms of line and color, and Deleuze is trying to pull out the concepts that correspond to that. So in that sense, it's a very original philosophical project with regard to painting and not really a project in art history per se. And I think that's the real value of what this book is trying to do.
- [53:15]
Charles Stavall
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Nathan Smith
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Nathan Smith
Sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Yeah, no, and I. I. That's. That is one thing that I always every time I'm, you know, explaining or leading a class discussion or assigning something as a musician, I on the refrain obviously is a. A big touch point. And I'm like, he's going to give you a potted history of Western tonality and like the progressive chromaticism and then the Liber, you know, which is a very like, kind of like old school type history, you know. And I try to, you know, convey. I'm like, pay attention to these things. Yes, he's taking this kind of potted history, but he's trying to extract relationships and more of a philosophical orientation to explain something else instead of trying to, you know, go like, ah, yes. And then Wagner started using different notes, you know, like, that's not really the, the approach he's taking, which very much so also here in the Bacon book, where it seems like he's simultaneously trying to make broad statements about painting in general, but he's obviously just like selecting little bits of the history that are trying to bring out things like the catastrophe, the diagram modulating of color in history, as well as, you know, eventually leading to, you know, how the color kind of comes into that. Which also speaks to why Bacon perhaps was, you know, one of the, like, linchpins of this. Of this work, because he does seem to simultaneously deal with this holding off of catastrophe. But then also especially in his discussions of like, the painting of flesh and stuff like that, to bring in kind of the colorist. So a colorist who is simultaneously working intently with the diagram to try to bring out, you know, the pictorial fact might be a nice way of. Because, yeah, the Bacon especially comes up a lot in this. In the On Painting book, in the first bit when he's talking about the diagram. But then he. He wanders elsewhere and he's reading from Klee, he's reading from a number of painters, Cezanne, and it kind of gets lost. But there are little references. I think when he starts going into the colorism, when he starts talking about the treatment of flesh and how Bacon and others have tried to render the purples and the reds and everything mixed together is resurfacing there. Yeah. Charles, did you have any or. Oh, I think both of you are. Both of you are muted.
- [57:13]
Charles Stavall
Dan, did you want to say something?
- [57:15]
Nathan Smith
Go ahead.
- [57:15]
Dan Smith
Oh, sorry, I muted myself for a second. Yeah. I just wanted to say I think one of the reasons Deleuze might have been attracted to Bacon is, you know, he has this notion of the body without organs, which is something beyond the organic body, something beyond lived experience. Lots of people see Bacon's paintings. Like, when I teach this book, half the students, they just don't like Bacon. They have a kind of adverse reaction to them because they're kind of horrific, but, you know, their bodies that are distorted and deformed. But Bacon explained that by saying, look, I'm just trying to paint. And as Deleuze says, the forces that are within the body and acting upon the body. And at one point he says, look, if you were, you know, like tortured in a way, or forced to sit on a stool, you know, for eight hours, you'd eventually contort yourself in lots of different directions and try to get comfortable. And what I'm trying to paint is not just represent the body sitting on the stool, but to paint the forces that are at work in this body that's becoming increasingly uncomfortable and tortured and tried to render visible those forces. And so that's very different, as you say, from these extremes of abstraction or expressionism, you know, Francis or Jackson Pollock, you know, expressionist side, or lots of people on the abstract side because it was tied to the body, but not just the organic body. And then, of course, Bacon became a colorist and used, you know, lots of means of getting at this, the production of forces. And to a point you made about music. It's curious that in terms of art history, like the thinkers the Lewis appeals to the most in this book are really kind of old classic thinkers like Rigel and Wolflin and Woehinger, who I think are very much old school thinkers for most art historians. And yet Deleuze reads them, resurrects them, and puts them in the service of whatever. A very different kind of avant garde analysis of Francis Bacon. So he's very curious on that score. And I think you're right to point out there's something parallel going on in his analyses of music.
- [59:11]
Nathan Smith
Yeah, no, and I've always wondered. We mentioned Pinas. Is that how you pronounce his last name? So, yeah, I really liked in the unpainting, when he starts talking about the modulator and he is like, am I getting this right? Am I talking. He's double checking with the musician on whether he's getting digital and analog. Correct. But sorry, Charles, you also had.
- [59:34]
Charles Stavall
I just wanted to ask Dan something I never even noticed. Paid any attention to before, but perhaps you could enlighten. So I picked. Picked up your translation of the Bacon book, and I opened it up in here, and I see that there's this author's introduction to the English edition. And is there a story behind this appearing in. It's in the Minnesota text. I want to see if it's in the. Yes, the author's preference to the English editions in the Bloomsbury as well. I just was wondering, did you do that translation? And was that commissioned by someone? Because it's dated in 1984. And you can see by looking at that. I was just looking through it briefly, I could see a number of points that Deleuze is bringing up in the Cinema seminars that are brought into this particular introduction to this English translation. It's funny to see that. And they say, oh, yeah, but he wrote this a couple years later than the book, than the Logic of Sensation. And you can see he's worked forward a bit and is thinking on different topics. So any tales here?
- [60:58]
Dan Smith
That's interesting that there's already stuff from the cinema seminars creeping into this intro. There is a story to this. In fact, this was an article that was published, I believe, in a magazine called Art Forum, which is an English language. I don't know if it's British or American. American. So Deleuze was asked to, as he frequently did, you know, he published the Nietzsche book and then did a sort of short Nietzsche essay summarizing the book. And he wrote a big book on Spinoza and then a shorter book kind of summarizing the themes. And I think that's what he was doing here. He published the book. Art Forum asked, can you write us a text, kind of. Kind of giving a precis of that? So he did that. So I was aware of that. And we asked Deleuze if we could use it as the preface. And he said, fine. But I could tell of points that the translation may have been, I don't know, just inaccurate because I'd been translating the book. I thought, well, I can suspect what the French was, but I don't know. So I asked Lewis, A, if we could publish it as the preface to the English translation, and B, if he had a copy of the French text so we could just check the translation. And he said yes to the first and no to the second. He said, I don't have the text anymore. I sent it off to Art Forum, and that was the last I saw of it. And they translated it. And so this is all we had, was the English translation. And I think. I can't recall. There might have been one or two things that I thought, obviously we need to change. But Deleuze more or less said, you know, probably should just keep it as is because, you know, whoever translated it was close to close to the text. So, I mean, it's a great little piece, but actually, I hadn't noticed, Charlie, what you said that Some themes from the Cinema seminars are already creeping into this later preface.
- [62:40]
Charles Stavall
Well, the reference that just jumped out at me was to Olivier Messiah. And let me see, it's in the Minnesota edition. It's on page with Roman numeral 32, where he's already been speaking. I think earlier he was talking about music. But any case, he brings in the reference to Messiah's piece Chrono Chromie, which is something that he brings up somewhere for sure, in the Cinema seminars because of the importance of the Kronos aspect, the movement image and the time image. Here we got something like a time color, as it were, in the title of Chromo Chromie. But I remember this term, this title popping up in different spots, dots. I could track it down real quick if I wanted to. But in any case, it just seemed to me like. Well, there seemed to be just. I mean, this is definitely on. This is definitely in service of summing up his text of the logic of Sensation. But, you know, one can still see that it's still sense that it's 1984, given the referential field that he's working in at that time. Time, yeah.
- [64:20]
Dan Smith
That's quite interesting. I know Messiah is referred to in the book, in passing, in the Bacon book, but I'm not sure he refers to Chronochromy in particular, because what he takes, if I recall from Messiah's different rhythmic characters, like, in music, it's rhythm that becomes the parallel to the characters in a novel. And there's a passive rhythm, an active rhythm, and then I think what he calls an attendant rhythm, but he calls them rhythmic characters. And I think that's an idea he gets from Messiah. And then he applies it to, or uses it to explicate Bacon's paintings as well, saying there's something similar going on in music, in painting as there is in music. But that's quite interesting. I never quite noticed that.
- [65:02]
Nathan Smith
He does seem to have. I mean, it's interesting to hear the backstory behind how that the English introduction came to be. But, yeah, Messian's another one of those figures that I. I see him often positioning in a similar way to Bacon of, like, standing between orthodoxy and, you know, like, the chaos of free improvisation versus, like, hyper serialization, that which he likes Belez, but like, Belez was also. You know, he writes a lot about Blez, but Blez was also like an integral serialist, which would lie more to a certain extent toward the way he characterizes abstract art here in relation to painting as kind of the intellectual, not Intellectualization, that's maybe not the right word. But keeping chaos, as he says, to a minimum, such that one can explore other things. As opposed to the abstract Expressionists. Messian has a similar type of relationship between those two, where he's doing some wacky stuff. There's still like. But it's not free improv. He has this. He has systems that he establishes, like you're saying rhythmic characters and putting them into dialogue with one another, which kind of like threads that. That middle space between improv and like, you know, I guess kind of like freedom and determinism of like whether the system of musical composition determines things. Or you have things. Things determined by chance and. Or improvisation.
- [66:38]
Charles Stavall
I looked it up, by the way, in the Cinema 2 seminar, in the session 18 on 26 April 1983, the seminar starts as if Deleuze was already in conversation with somebody. It starts with, you know, with a dot, dot, dot, and the first paragraph. So the first paragraph is the story read from which point of view? From the point of view of our second order of research on time. That is to say, this second order of research on time was no longer the indirect image of time obtained starting from movement, but the indirect image of time obtained starting from light. In other words, it was what the musician Olivier Messiaen names in the title of one of his works, Chrono Chromie. And in Chrono Chromie, Messiaen's text invokes the angel of the Apocalypse crowned with a rainbow. Now, a couple of you in. Intervenes specifically to say that with regard to red, to call it red, there was something very important which appeared or which occurred with Matisse. And I don't know. I didn't know and I didn't have the time to go look at Matisse's writings. And on that, it's up to you to say if there's any. Is there a red of Matisse which holds something important for us at this particular juncture? So he's starting this seminar out in dialogue with the students. Students based on students comments that started clearly before the. The session began, before the button got pushed to start. Start recording. But then they're. They're continuing in on that. But he's got that reference right off. Off right from the jump. And it's the only reference in. In on the. No, he brings it up further, but he.
- [68:29]
Nathan Smith
Using.
- [68:30]
Charles Stavall
Not. Not the reference to Messian's work, but he's using the term chronochromy throughout. Throughout the session. So, you know, he. He adopts this term, the title, and then shifts it into his terminology and what he's developing this. This. This color time, as it were. Yeah, that's 83, Dan. And. And this is a text that was from art form 84. So I'm see. I'm seeing the. I'm seeing the slide here.
- [69:04]
Dan Smith
Yeah, no, that's very insightful. That's fantastic. Yeah.
- [69:07]
Charles Stavall
Well, I've.
- [69:07]
Nathan Smith
I've had you guys for about an hour. We've been recording. So I. I do want to. I want to ask one more big question, if that's all right with you. We've covered the translation. We've gotten into some of the, you know, the, like, some. Some of the key concepts which, you know, you. You lay out very nicely. Charles, on the. The translation I. Or the transition, I believe it's from diagram to synthesizer or modulator and then into color as like, the three conceptual trajectories it goes through. And Dan, you've. You've obviously written in the preface the logic of sensation. The three kind of like three avenues through which one could go. And as I have both of you here, I'm just curious because I remember early on on, back when I was naive and I used to think that these were the same book. So the Logic of Sense and the Logic of Sensation. I'm just curious, what is.
- [70:09]
Dan Smith
What do.
- [70:09]
Nathan Smith
What do you guys think the word logic means to Delos? Is there some kind of like, how do you see that operating with. In what he thinks? And how do you. What distinguishes kind of this, you know, as we've kind of already touched on the idea of artists working with affects or percepts. No, maybe not perception, but like the working in sensation, not necessarily working in thought, versus him constructing concepts. What's. So the two words, logic and sense, are those two related in some way between these two texts?
- [70:43]
Dan Smith
I would say yes. I mean, logic of sense is more obvious. Sense is more obviously associated with logic, because Frege famously. It's an essay on sense and reference in the sense of a sentence. It's like in English you say the tree is green, but in French you say l' abre ver, but they both mean the same thing. But that meaning is the sense of the proposition, something ideal that's different from the senses that express that. And you could do the same sentence in lots of different languages. So he's trying to get the logic of that ideality, that is sense. So that's something that logic itself and people like Frege and Bertrand, Rothschild, Russell had dealt with. It's A little different saying, logic of sensation, because that's getting farther away from language, which is what logic deals with. But I think it's a deliberate, I don't want to say provocation on Deleuze's part. It's a phrase, I think, that comes from Cezanne, that Merleau Ponty picks up, that there is a logic of sensation, and that's really what painters are thinking about. It's a philosophical undertaking, making of what colors you put on the canvas and what's the logic of those sensations as they come out, those sites. Kandinsky had a famous book concerning the spiritual in art. By simply suggesting certain colors, when put together on a canvas, in certain ways, kind of produce a spiritual effect. So there's a logic there. And if you put complementary colors or colors that aren't complementary, there's a logic there that is not a linguistic logic, not a formal logic that we usually think of, but nonetheless, I don't want to say rationality, but logic there that Deleuze is trying to look into. I think that's why the book, as you're suggesting, ends with considerations of color. He's a colorist, like Gauguin, like Van Gogh, which means all the effects you produce in your painting don't use chiaroscuro or lightness and darkness. You don't put shadows. You're not so concerned about that. You try to get all those effects by simply. Simply putting colors next to each other. And that's one particular logic of sensation, as opposed to Rembrandt, who's very much into chiaroscuro and things like that. So I think that's partly why he uses that term. There is a parallel between those two books. This Logic of Sense book is more clearly oriented toward traditional logic, but I think it's a kind of provocation to say we can also go something that seems far from traditional logic, which is perception and sensation, and say there is a kind of logic there. And that, in fact, is something I think painters are very, very aware of. And why he thinks painters are philosophers or thinkers as much as our philosophers. They're just thinking about this logic of sensation in a really concrete way as they're going about doing their work.
- [73:30]
Charles Stavall
And to further complicate this use of the term logic, when deleuze started at Paris 8 in fall 1970, and we don't have any transcripts from this year, but his first teaching assignment was to teach two seminars back to back, this was the only time he did this. The first hour and a half was A seminar called Logic of Desire. And the second seminar that backed up on it was Spinoza's Logic. And so he had those, those moving forward throughout the 70, 71 academic year. And my take on those was, okay, so he had a logic of brand already in motion with logic Doucens, and so why not? He's working with Guattari. So let's be provocative and talk about a logic of desire because it's as provocative as the idea of the logic of sensation and then Spinoza's logic. My take on that is that Deleuze was he had just published in 1970 a tiny little booklet, a manual in a book series that publishes sort of a short precis on various topics or authors. And so this is an introductory manual on Spinoza. And it was based on this introductory manual published in 1970, that it was picked up a decade later and developed by Deleuze deliberately for publication by Minui as Spino as a practical philosopher philosophy. But the original book, the original manual in a shorter, briefer form and containing the glossary that's included in the Spinoza Practical Philosophy is still in there in that original old book. Well, he had on hand then an abundance of notes, not the least of which is he had already written his, his minor dissertation on espinosa and expression, but he also had that just on hand. So it would have been quite a snap for him to be able to segue from talking about desire. Okay, so we're gonna make, we're not gonna make the kind of a transition I'd like to make. It's the second, second half of the hour and a, the three hour block I have. So now I'll do my Spinoza bit. And he had playing material on that. And that could be construed as a logic of Spinoza, Spinoza's logic, for the purposes of that particular teaching exercise.
- [76:32]
Dan Smith
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Charles Stavall
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Nathan Smith
Is that with the binoculars watching us?
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Charles Stavall
Cut the camera, they see us.
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Dan Smith
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Nathan Smith
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Charles Stavall
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Nathan Smith
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Charles Stavall
To assemble pre lit trees so you.
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Nathan Smith
Can spend less time setting up and more time celebrating.
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Charles Stavall
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- [77:33]
Nathan Smith
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- [78:46]
Dan Smith
No.
- [78:46]
Nathan Smith
First Critique through the third Critique. Yes, as opening up the difference, you know. And so this logic of sensation is like, well, we can still have something like a logic or something like this, you know, instead of it being like a rigid alignment of the faculties of sense, understanding, reason, etc, trying to construct a different one that, like, okay, they're not necessarily going to fall in line to this pecking order hierarchy, but trying to see how even within the sensible there can be a different, you know, there can be a different resonance that sparks that is not, not without logic or without thought, but it's also not subsuming the faculty of sensation or sense, you know, merely into kind of like a logic of icy object. And it has been synthesized already into a concept.
- [79:44]
Dan Smith
Yeah. Nathan, I totally agree with what you're saying because you mentioned earlier, Deleuze puts together, I mean, he's famous for saying philosophy is the creation of concepts. That's how he understands the activity of philosophy. But as you say, for him, a concept is not an icy analytic thing out there because he ties them to affects and percepts. He says if you hear concept, if it doesn't produce affects and percepts as well in you, then, you know, leave it alone and go look for another concept, not your concept. And I'm struck at some point he says this about Spinoza who's a very difficult writer in the sense that it's, you know, the ethics is written in a geometric style, like Euclid's proof axiom. Yeah. With axioms and propositions, corollaries. And, you know, it's not an easy book to get into conceptually. But Deleuze says. And yet Spinoza is one of those writers who has this weird affect on people. People read it and it's like, I don't know what this is about, but it affects me. And I think it's worth going in deeper. And I confess, when I read Deleuze, I had that exact same feeling. I had no clue often what Deleuze was saying conceptually.
- [80:46]
Nathan Smith
Oh, yeah.
- [80:47]
Dan Smith
But it had this affect that you felt like it was worth getting into further, you know, and so. And he says this about every philosopher. There's an affective level that often comes before the conceptual level. Certainly true with Spinoza. So the concepts are there. You may not know them well conceptually, but they affect you in a particular way. And then those concepts aren't going to have much value if you don't start perceiving the world differently. And that's often what concepts can and should do. I mean, this isn't a conceptual example, but I remember when I had a child, a baby, I suddenly saw the world differently. I saw, like, I was in the airport, I remember once, and we were looking to buy baby straws, stroller. And suddenly all I could see were all these baby strollers by the parents in the airport. And I'm like, oh, there's the breed of 3000 series. I maybe should buy that one because. And up till then, I literally, literally did not see those strollers in the airport. They were there, but they weren't part of my perception. And I think that's sort of an example what Deleuze is talking about with concepts, if they change how you perceive the world, and if they don't, well, then they're not working well, or at least this concept isn't working for you, and you should close that book and move on to another thing. Thinker.
- [81:55]
Nathan Smith
Yeah, it. Yeah. One of my other favorite examples that. Or, like, one that really helped this click for me was I. I think it's in Buchanan's. I think it's in the Assemblage Theory book where he talks about his kid and the Cars franchise. The movie franchise.
- [82:13]
Dan Smith
Yes.
- [82:13]
Nathan Smith
And he sees this, like, baked bean can and it has Lightning McQueen on it. And he's like, talking about, like, he's like, that. That's a better model for affect of like, that is, you know, it is activated for, you know, you know, for.
- [82:28]
Charles Stavall
For the kid.
- [82:28]
Nathan Smith
And it opens up onto an entirely different world. And also for him as a parent, knowing seeing his kid play with the toys and seeing the can of baked beans. There's nothing that the baked beans have to do with Lightning McQueen and the cars franchise, obviously, but it's like opening up that world where like, oh, this is of interest now. It is marked. Yeah, yeah.
- [82:49]
Dan Smith
It's a good phrase, opening up the world. Deluis has an example about a kid, you know, a guy taking Latin in school in France and hates it, and then suddenly starts doing really well and acing all the exams. What happened? He fell in love with one of the girls in the Latin class and set affect, you know, falling in love. And she's good at Latin, so he wants to be good at Latin. I remember I had to take piano lessons growing up and I hated them until someone at some point gave me. I don't know what I think it was like maybe a Beatles songbook. And suddenly I kind of let it be. And suddenly that's an affect. And su Piano became interesting to me in a way, had just been drudgery up till then. And that's what deluis, I think how he thinks about affect. It's an encounter that unleashes thought. And until you have that encounter, you might just be stuck until it sets loose something that up till that moment, Latin was boring. And now it's suddenly very interesting because you love.
- [83:42]
Nathan Smith
Yeah. And like, as a music teacher, like that. Exactly. I mean, I do that all the time. And it's like, you know, this kind of like, restructuring or, you know, he might talk, you know, might get into like a larger issue. Not necessarily assemblages writ large, but like the idea of, you know, as you're a piano student and you're say you're learning scales and then all of a sudden you learn the Beatles. And then the scales acquire the. The idea of practicing scales acquire a new valence in relation to, oh, there's a scale in this Beatles thing. If I practice my scales, I'll be able to play this Beatle, you know, and like, it restructures a certain relationship that even colors back onto the other. It's not just that you're only interested in the Beatles then. Right. It spreads to. And it can be an opportunity for you to reframe your entire relationship at the piano.
- [84:32]
Dan Smith
Yeah, that's brilliant. Yeah, that's exactly what happened.
- [84:35]
Nathan Smith
Yeah.
- [84:35]
Dan Smith
Suddenly Everything in piano became interesting because of the needles or whoever it was.
- [84:40]
Nathan Smith
And I imagine.
- [84:41]
Dan Smith
Yeah, what you think. Because there's a lot where Nietzsche says music is the direct language of the effects. Because most people's relation to music is, first of all, affective. You listen to music because it creates a mood and you are an affect. And only later, and maybe never, do you get to the conceptual level of actually learning music.
- [85:01]
Charles Stavall
Yeah.
- [85:03]
Nathan Smith
Yeah. I mean, I think that. I mean, this is a tough question because this is. I talked earlier about my. My advisor, who's more of a Derridian, and how, like, we. We share many things, but when it comes to the idea of, like, the word vibration, you want to talk about someone having an affect to a concept, the idea of vibration is anathema. Anathema to him. Not to disparage, you know, but like, that type of thing. So I do. And this, you know, has been an interesting thing that I've come up against numerous times in relationship to Deleuze, as well as Nancy, when Nancy writes about listening. And there's this awkward. So I guess, you know, to. To pin this of, like, the. You know, because Deleuze is one of those writers who does put a certain amount of weight behind the idea of sound as like, a privilege. Privileged site in some sense. Like in the refrain, you know, they. They have this speaking of a refrain in there, the constant refrain of, like, why is the refrain sonorous? Why is the refrain sonorous as he goes through. And at the end, you get the strongest thing because it's this weird type of, you know, it's the way that they're kind of skating around. I guess a metaphysics of presence is like. It just seems to be. Be more. You know, it seems to be more useful toward this kind of, like, deterritorialized line. But, like, that's also tempered by, you know, the idea that, like, the. The deterritorialized doesn't necessarily mean liberation. And I don't know. I mean that. Not to throw us back into the book as well, but I thought. I found it really interesting about how he was talking about the specificity of painting. Painting in relation to this, because I've had this trouble of, like, trying to. You know, I'm a musician and I read things about painting and everyone. Everyone's trying to make their medium in a certain way the medium that is going to help whatever. And so. And, you know, Derrida would be useful there and that. You're like, no, it's not the medium itself. It's, you know, know, Kind of the. The. The assumption of presence or the assumption of kind of, you know, pure transparency that. That allows. That itself is the thing that is, you know, kind of the. So all media equally should be kind of suspect in that regard. So Deleuze, similarly, like, especially in some of the sound stuff, keeps coming back to the importance of sound, but it's hard to know whether. Whether there is any. Like, then you have to run up against the idea. And the way I get around is, I guess, kind of just talking about history and the way it's being framed in some of these other writers. But, yeah, I don't know what would give sound. You know, that would give sound a certain substance or essence, even if it's a negative essence or, you know, the essence of becoming, that would reinstitute a certain type of metaphysics of presence. So I don't know. I. So, like, in relation to music and sound, it's. I. I tend to. I don't.
- [88:21]
Dan Smith
I don't.
- [88:21]
Nathan Smith
I don't see it as. As that radically different from the way he approaches different media or concepts, but I. So I don't know. What. What's your thought on that. That issue of the specificity of different mediums outside of, like, obviously, we're talking about you. These types of things need to happen. You know, he's talking about. This is about painting, it's about color. It's about a specific assemblage. Um, but I think that it's not that. I don't know. So the relation, to put it in a different word, the relationships with sound would be more about a certain historical or sociopolitical assemblage in which the idea of sound as this, you know, Kittler would say it's, you know, phonograph and the real. You know, it becomes operative in a way and marked in a way that, like, writing or drawing might not be. But it's not like a substantialist type of essence. It's more of a relational moment. I don't know. Yeah. What do you think about different media and how he approaches them?
- [89:22]
Dan Smith
I mean, I've heard people complain. Deleuze is a bit modernist from that point of view, because there's different media which have different capacities. Musil said there's certain things only the novel can discover because writing can do certain things that you can't do elsewhere. And so you have to look at each media. That being said, I do think Deleuze, one of the complaints also I've heard about what is philosophy. Deleuze seems to be kind of a Hybrid breaking down these boundaries. But you get to what his philosophy says. Well, philosophy produces concepts, science produces functions, art produces affects and percepts. And these seem to be these kind of strict demarcations. But I actually think he does that in order to say not that these are all separate things, but that to show that there are lines of resonance between them. You know, artists can make conceptual art use concept as a way of making art. And philosophers obviously take over scientific concepts and think through them. So I think he sets those out precisely in order to show there's open up the exploration of the lines of interaction between all those. And I suspect you might be able to say the same thing with regard to different media, that he's not so much a modernist. He I think came out of that tradition and does think that way. But I think in the end it's much more exploring the relations. Especially when he uses Messiah, for example, example that Charlie, to understand the triptych. He said, well, there's different rhythmic characters in Messian. That's a way of understanding pain, it comes from music. But he thinks that's a, that's a way of understanding, you know, a different, you know, non musical art.
- [90:53]
Nathan Smith
And the refrain plateau is started with or is prefaced by the Paul or the, the Klee portrait as well. And there are a number of like, you know, kind of through lines through there. Yeah, I don't know. Charles, do you have any, any thoughts on different media? Yeah, just different media. I guess it's the larger issue of like how, in what ways? I guess, let me put it this way. I guess to bring out like the Samundon style, but also what he talks about here. And I believe it's in relation to modulation of having, having the presence of multiple things, things without there being resemblance. So like how can you know that the idea of having cross media references, you know, I'm only talking about painting, but he's also going to bring in Messian or I'm only talking about sound, he's going to bring in painting about this. You know, how he theorizes these types of things as simultaneously being or, or in. And I think it's in relation to analogy, Analogy without resemblance. Do you, I don't know. How do you see that functioning as he moves between different disciplines and, and arts?
- [92:09]
Charles Stavall
Well, I, I, I see I'm probably disappoint you in my answer. But I see him making a strategic move in, when he comes at that point in chapters four and five of the painting book because I think he wants to get to color. And he wants to get to color through the signal spaces. But he started in a completely different spot. And that spot was working things out in the opening chapters about the diagram and so forth we've discussed. So how to make a bridge there. And that's where he comes through the discussion. Moving from the diagram, he moves into the whole idea of the digital and the analog. And so he's making a shift there through the digital and the analog. I find my feeling, it's the least, I hate to use this term, but substantially essential part of the seminar. And I also kind of think that the students come in at that point on these issues because they too have their own thoughts on what's digital. Remember, we're talking 1981. So what's digital? What modulation would be? Because that's where he's going to make his move. That's where he makes a shift from articulation to modulation. And he makes that pairing there, that opposition, that's sort of his key move at that point. But he has to go through the tactile, the idea of the third eye and so forth. So moving from the tactile, the haptic into the analog and then coming over to modulation. So I see this as a series of moves that he's making that I think also that may well puzzle some of the students that are listening, because it's at that point that he starts getting into a discussion with them about precisely this terminology and so forth. Ann, Carrie Ann and Richard Pitt Pinhas particular piping up. And that's one of the most fascinating moments of the seminar, that particular set of interventions, because particularly with Pinhas piping up andelis response to those which are absolutely hilarious. But Pinas piping up and talking about packet switching, the early terminology of what will become the infrastructure Internet. And so FINOS is obviously aware of what's going on, truly aware at that point of the digital in relationship to the French government's work with the Minitel and so forth. So those different kinds of technological aspects, he's really up on that. But he seems to be trying to inform Deleuze. And Deleuze certainly has a grasp on certain facets of this technology at that point, but nowhere near what Pinhas's grasp is. And so it's a way, in some ways it has to push back on this, otherwise the discussion is going to go in a direction that they'll take him away from his topic. But any case, that's sort of my. I'm a lot more specific about what you're Discussing in terms of the book, the sort of the central movements in the book.
- [96:20]
Nathan Smith
Yes. Yeah, yeah. No, and I think that that's it. That was the way that I, I, I often read when he talks about or brings in different, you know, disciplines in the way he kind of, like, blends things is. Well, it's, you know, in the way I said the, like, you can use a potted history of, you know, this is the development of painting. First there were the, these, then the, you know, and, and focusing on that type of history is less important than the way he's strategically deploying it to pull out some of these conceptual moves as you're kind of focusing in. On with that, like, it's less important about, like, when it comes in as it is trying to do some work for him to get toward, you know, where he's headed. Yeah. Dan, Anything?
- [97:06]
Dan Smith
Well, I'll just say, you know, when Deleuze himself gets, you know, he writes on cinema, he writes on literature, he writes on painting, he writes on lots of things. And yet at the, the, at bottom, he always insists that for him, he's always writing as a philosopher.
- [97:17]
Nathan Smith
Yeah, right.
- [97:18]
Dan Smith
And he's looking at these things. They're thinkers who work in music and painting and so on, but they're thinkers, and he just wants to draw the concepts for himself that will allow him to get at what he thinks is going on there. So I think you're right that he's interested in all sorts of media and the relations between them. But at bottom, he's always insisting. But I do all this myself as a philosopher.
- [97:40]
Nathan Smith
Right, right, right. Wow. I mean, I've had you for quite some time. Is there anything artist that you would like to, you know, talk about or announce? Not announce, but a flag for the listeners on. We already talked about the Spinoza book. We've talked a little bit about some of those things. Anything new with the translation collective, Dan, or the project, the seminars?
- [98:04]
Dan Smith
Well, I would just encourage people to use the seminars because I find even sometimes deloa scholars who I know and work with only cite them rarely. And I think they're a wonderful resource. I would just like to highlight that and flag it. And then, yes, these books, there's on painting is out, and there's three more in the works. Charlie's just finished the Spinoza book, and there's two more that have come out in French. So there's a lot in the pipeline coming out on the books as well. So we'll do a little bit, you know, PR for that.
- [98:32]
Nathan Smith
Yeah. And I'll definitely link the, the Duluth Seminars webpage.
- [98:37]
Charles Stavall
Yeah. Great. And I have a self serving promo. My publisher sent me the COVID spread front, front and back cover pages today, you know, so I can see how it looks. And so the book will be out, supposed to be out in December at the Edinburgh University Press. It's a book. The title is Unfolding the Deleuze Seminars 1970-1987 and it's the summaries of all 216 sessions and the seminar with an intro and conclusion. So yeah, that'll be out. And it's still a bit big for a stocking stuffer, but nonetheless one ring holiday as it gets around the corner.
- [99:27]
Nathan Smith
Yeah, fantastic. Well, thank you to both of you so much for taking the time to talk to me and listening to me ramble about music and, and painting and. Yeah, thank you.
- [99:39]
Charles Stavall
Okay, thank you.
- [99:40]
Dan Smith
It's been a pleasure.