deleuze on painting: the dream of a segment

 

In the fifth grade,  I began to learn about lines and geometry. Long afterwards, I began to wonder if there were questions I should have asked back then. Wondering if there were questions you should have asked in elementary school is a discipline with a name: philosophy.

My question is: is drawing a line an essential feature of a line, or an accident? To be a little less simple, is it a necessary feature of a line that it can be represented?

On the one hand, the answer would seem to be no. After all, the first thing we learn about lines is that they are infinite. Thus, even given an infinite pencil, and infinite amount of time, and infinite energy, you could never get to the end of drawing even one line. Whereever you stopped, you would have drawn a segment of a line.

Now we all know that the segment of a line mirrors the essential – that is, the angle of the line.  Given this property of the line segment, why waste your infinite energy on drawing the infinite line? But we have still not answered our first question. Rather we have changed it. Does the line segment mirror something essential about the line – by which I mean, given the definition of the line, can we derive a proof that it must essentially be segmentable? Or is the line segment conceptually distinct from the definition of the line – merely a happy accident that allows us to have an image of lines, which are for the most part invisible things.

These questions come to mind when we, and by we I mean me, read Deleuze’s 1981 lectures on painting, which were published in 2023. On Painting, the title of the course, seems an oddly Hegelian title for such a non-Hegelian, indeed anti-Hegelian philosopher.

Deleuze, however, does not begin with history, but with concepts. Or Deleuzian concepts.

He begins not with perspective, or the Egyptians, or with beauty. He begins with the diagram.

Consider the question about the line as a sort of parable or riddle. A koan. By doing so, we can get close to the idiolect of the diagram in Deleuze. He wants to talk about painting given a set in which painting can seem to be highly figurative, or impressionistic, or monochrome, or abstract expressionist. He wants to begin with painting as a manufactured thing.

He takes what he calls the “diagrammatic” approach to distinguish two systems, which accord with two hierarchies. One system accords primacy to the eye over the hand. In this system, painting is a question of color and line.

In another system – one that Deleuze prefers, and one that leads us from the Renaissance to Pollack and beyond – the hand operates outside of, apart from, unchained by the eye. In this system, the fundamental elements are the stroke – the “trait” – and the mark – the “tache”.

Deleuze wants to start, conceptually – outside of the eye’s history, vision’s history – with a germ-chaos. A scribble, a blur, a smudge, a stain. He wants to start from dirt, the expelled thing from the Platonic kingdom of ideas.

This expelled thing helps Deleuze trace a story of painting  that reads like a slave uprising – the hand “slaps” the eye, the stroke-mark communicates with the chaos-germ, the manual follows its own lines of flight, so to speak. And in so doing comes into relation with the “gris” – with grayness. Deleuze, that magpie philosopher, takes the term from Klee. Grayness is the undifferentiated. Out of it we derive our black-white and light-color system.

It is only at this point that we understand – as we do with the question of the representation of the line – that the artist has never been a master of resemblance, but is rather concerned with tearing the appearance from the res, the thing. The painter operates to dis-resemble, so to speak. And here Deleuze goes into a glorious riff about the canvas, the chevalet – easel or stand – and the lure of the window.

Which, to my mind, brings us back to the peculiarities of the segment. Segmentarity, it turns out, is something my fifth grade self should have paid more attention to, since it is the window through which we view so many thousands of things, without ever stopping to consider the metaphysics of the segment.

So today I will spare a moment or two to let myself be wrapped up in a dream of segmentarity.

You do you.