DeLanda on Art
When we talk about the phylum Chordata we’re talking about a style. Isn’t it vertebrates a kind of style? You can tell them apart immediately from the phylum Arthropoda which is insects. And insects in all the incredible variety of forms form a style.
And so what Deleuze would say is styles didn’t need us to come into being. It’s the other way around. Nature has styles and it is we humans that need to learn from that because we are part of it. We are made out of flesh and blood we are one of those styles. In order to assert our singularity, our uniqueness, our difference, it is important of course that we need to start considering all the different forms of difference - difference in variation difference, in intensity difference in in the kind of differential calculus that I just said - that exist in nature, that power nature, and try to use it.
A lot of times we use those things unconsciously. We are simply good artists that don’t know how to explain what we do. But we can. We can tell about intensities. We can tell whether a painting strikes us, or is powerful or, on the other hand, is subdued because it’s subdued on purpose. And you’re playing with intensity. It’s not necessarily using that vocabulary.
Now the last thing that Deleuze would want to do is impose a particular ideology on art because artists are the search process. They are the kind of probe head at the tip of the search and so Deleuze always kind of let them pass. Proust and Kafka are the creators. He followed them. Rather than say “oh well I’m better than Kafka and Proust” he quotes them as people who saw - who drove humanity in a particularly intense direction. He wrote a couple of books on cinema. He wrote about Francis Bacon and painting. He writes quite a bit of about music in a thousand plateaus with Felix Guattari. So for him artists are the… cutting edge of this process.
What he would want is that when artists begin to talk about their art that they would have a better vocabulary. Instead of deconstructing things when … the word “deconstruction” they don’t even know what it means… So what Deleuze would want to do is yes, do art, but the moment you start talking about your art don’t go hide behind those funky words. Use words that mean something because the last thing we want artists to be doing is giving us these pseudo explanations of their art cast it in the latest terminology”