Whether weather

I ended up writing this essay following a series of encounters earlier this year. It was a particularly rainy day in the spring, which prompted me to stay longer at the university. I hadn’t prepared for that. Finally it stopped raining and I could head home. After stopping to do some groceries, I was at this nearby two-by-two lane intersection.

The view in that intersection was just bizarre. The rain was gone, but it had got colder. All that moisture had condensed into water vapor, resulting in a fairly thick fog. You couldn’t really see past the intersection.

The roads leading to the intersection are lit sodium lights. They are those golden yellow older lights. You know them when you see them. They are not at all like the newer white LED lights.

It was already dark. The combination of the thick fog and the sodium lights made me think of J. M. W. Turner. It was like one of his paintings. The outlines of just about everything were more or less distorted. Only what was close by, up to the center of the crossing, or so, appeared as you’d expect.

I remembered reading what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari had written about Turner in ‘Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’. They (132) specifically comment his late works, noting that:

“The canvas turns in on itself[.]”

By this they, and I, mean that what’s depicted, the landscape, is no longer what it used to be. It’s hardly a landscape or, rather, it’s a landscape reimagined. They (132) expand on this:

“The canvas is truly broken, sundered by what penetrates it. All that remains is a background of gold and fog, intense, intensive, traversed in depth by what has just sundered its breadth: the schiz.”

What I saw, there and then, was indeed that combination. There was the gold from the sodium lights, which illuminated the fog. The lights appeared as these golden globes and the fog beneath them as these beams of gold.

Why this matters? Well, it’s because, for them (132), this changes how we see the world:

“Everything becomes mixed and confused, and it is here that the breakthrough—not the breakdown—occurs.”

Indeed. Indeed. There was just this intense light and golden yellow color. The outlines were still there, at least up to the center of the intersection, but they were not clear. Everything was a bit fuzzy.

But why do the two call this a breakthrough and not a breakdown? Well, they (132) mention that Turner’s earlier work was marked by all these depictions of catastrophes of all kind. Usually the outcome is thought to be simply negative, but they want us to think otherwise.

Deleuze commented this further in his own seminars. He covers this on the sessions that took place in March 31, 1981, April 7, 1981, April 28, 1981, and May 19, 1984. This is also covered in a recent book that covers these sessions, ‘On Painting: Courses, March–June 1981’. To explain why a catastrophe is not just something negative, Deleuze (3) points out in this book that:

“Paintings of an avalanche can be said to capture a generalized disequilibrium. But in the end, this doesn’t get us very far, since, at first glance, we still remain at the level of what the painting represents.”

Note how he acknowledges that you can, of course, look at Turner’s paintings and think of them as depictions of this or that disaster, representing it on canvas. He (3) adds to this:

“[W]e are moving from the catastrophe represented in a painting— whether a local catastrophe or catastrophe as a whole— to a much more secret catastrophe that affects the act of painting itself.”

In other words, he also acknowledges that you can also look at Turner’s paintings and think of them not only as representing this or that disaster, but also as representing disaster itself, that is to say what amounts to a disaster, as opposed to some specific disaster. So, what matters here is that Turner’s late work is disastrous in its own right.

What makes Turner’s late works disastrous or, to use Deleuze’s preferred word, catastrophic? Well, it’s the way that Turner painted. It undoes what most people think matters in painting, as Deleuze (4) goes on to add:

“What is painted and the act of painting tend to be identified with each other.”

It’s difficult to find clear outlines and shapes in Turner’s late work. It’s mostly a blur. There’s a notable absence of what I’d call lasting forms. You have to make sense of the landscape by relying on light and color. So, what you have instead is what Deleuze (4) calls ephemeral forms, such as “gusts of steam and balls of fire”.

So, what’s remarkable about Turner, at least according to Deleuze, is that he didn’t just paint, like you’d expect, but rather that changed what it means to paint. Now, I’m hardly an artist, not to mention a painter, but I do agree. I think you’ll also agree or end up agreeing if you check out Turner’s paintings.

But what did Turner do to warrant this kind of attention? How did he change what it means to paint? Well, according to Deleuze (5), painting becomes all about the color:

“[T]his catastrophe inherent in the act of painting is inseparable from … [t]he birth of color.”

To be clear, Turner probably didn’t intend to do any of this. He just kind of did. I think it’s also worth pointing out that it’s not that there’s nothing on canvas anymore in Turner’s late paintings. It’s no just a blur, a swirl of color. You can see some outlines in, for example, ‘The Wreck Buoy’ and ‘The Departure of The Fleet’. I can also see the aqueduct, the small boat and the train in ‘Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway’. While arguably as fuzzy as it gets, even ‘Norham Castle, Sunrise’ has silhouettes. I think it’s more apt to say that there are no clear outlines, as opposed to saying that there are no outlines in his late work.

Deleuze also comments on this. He (6) points out how difficult it is to work this way. It’s not just add colors on a canvas and that’s it. No. It still needs to work. If you look at ‘Norham Castle, Sunrise’, it’s still a landscape painting. There’s still the silhouette of Norham Castle, that is also reflected on the water, just as there’s the sunrise, that blotch of yellow above the castle that is also reflected on the water.

It’d be tempting to say that it’s more like Turner used the least amount of effort in coming up with that painting. Like it’s just some colors on a canvas. There’s a notable lack of detail, but that’s the thing. Some might say that it’s a cop out, that he isn’t skilled enough to paint in great detail. On the contrary, what he does in that painting is super difficult to pull off, because it involves the least amount of detail. Had he gone beyond that, he would have failed. This is why Deleuze (6) points out that no one except the painter ever sees most of the paintings. There’s a very fine line that separates a great work of art from trash, which is why most paintings are indeed thrown in the trash.

Using color this way, to create a landscape painting is very different from what people were used to and still are used to. Deleuze and Guattari (172) comment on this in ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’, noting that, for a long time, color used to be something that was added to painting:

“Compose them …, color them in, complete them, arrange them[.]”

They (173) also specify this with Titian’s work:

“Titian began his paintings in black and white, not to
make outlines to fill in, but as the matrix for each of the colors to come.”

Color was not something that you began with. Instead, you started with the outlines, filled in the rest and only then added color to it. It was all black and white first. Then you colorized the painting.

That’s how Titian worked. These days you can use infrared imaging to see what’s under the paint and, yeah, he did work first in black and white. It was only then that he worked with color, not to fill in the gaps between existing black paint, like merely filling in outlines, but indeed to colorize the painting.

To be clear, this is not to say that you shouldn’t paint in that way, starting in black and white. It makes sense. You know what’s supposed to be where and how light or dark this or that should be. Then you colorize it. The color is, however, treated as something that comes later in the process.

I think it makes sense to connect this with digital photography, because nearly everyone has a camera, in their phone. Light and color tends to be treated separate in digital photography. In fact, most camera sensors capture everything in black and white. The colors are added in separately. There is an added layer on top of the sensor, a red-green-blue (RGB) color filter array (CFA) known as a Bayer filter, that is responsible for handling the colors.

It might come to you as a surprise, but not only are the colors added in, only 1/3 of colors are measured, while 2/3 are inferred. Each pixel takes in only red, green or blue light. The rest are interpolated. This actually works pretty well. The loss of detail is not a major concern. Plus, it’s possible to move the sensor, to shift pixels accordingly, so that one does not have to interpolate 2/3 of the color data for each pixel.

The concern here is not the loss of detail or color accuracy. I am using this as an example, because it mirrors the way painters used to work. It’s figuring out everything in black and white first, followed by colorization.

Skeletal images, fleshed out

Deleuze and Guattari mention Ignatius Loyola as an influential example of how this works. They (533) credit Roland Barthes for having observed in ‘Sade, Fourier, Loyola’ that it was Loyola that came up with “skeletal images subordinated to a language” and “active schemas to be completed in, like those found in catechisms and devotional handbooks.”

It appears that it was one of Deleuze’s students, Anne Querrien, who made Deleuze aware of Loyola’s composition of place, which appears to be a close match to people’s understanding as landscape these days. This is covered in one of Deleuze’s seminar sessions, dated January 13, 1976, in which Querrien points out that:

” [W]ith respect to landscape, to landscapity… the Jesuits speak about this. In ascesis, in the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the first phase is the composition of a place: meaning that one always has to be represented in a place or landscape.”

To unpack that, note that it was very important for Loyola to imagine oneself being somewhere. One isn’t actually there, in this or that place or landscape. Instead, one imagines being there, in an image of the place or landscape, hence the point Querrien makes about representation here.

This is, however, nonetheless attributable Barthes, as he covers this in his book some five years before this seminar session took place. This is why Deleuze and Guattari (533) credit Barthes for this observation.

If you take a closer look at ‘The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola’, you’ll find that he is occupied with coming up with images that Barthes (50) mentions as “banal” and “skeletal”. He (50) exemplifies this with unimaginative Loyola’s imagery is. For example, Loyola’s (44-45) meditation on hell relies on imagining according to different senses:

• Sight: vast and fiery
• Hearing: wailing and howling
• Smell: putrid and sulfurous
• Taste: bitter
• Touch: burning

This is indeed banal, skeletal, if not cartoonish. That said, Barthes (51) reckons that “Ignatius’s image reservoir is nonexistent” and that “his imagination is powerful”. It is not that Loyola relies on existing images, like depictions of hellfire or the like, but rather they are “exhaustively cultivated” by him through language, as Barthes (51) points out. In other words, Loyola relies on a skeletal frame, to which he then adds these banal units or points, which Barthes (51-54) calls imitations. Long story short, these imitations are the images themselves and they all based on the Bible and who Loyola expects people to imitate in their life is Jesus, as Barthes (54) points out.

According to Barthes (51), the power of Loyola’s imagination lies not in telling people what they must imagine, but in determining the limits of their imagination. This establishes the structure of their imagination, a code that defines what one can imagine and what one cannot imagine, as specified by Barthes (51-52).

To unwittingly throw in some Erving Goffman here, perhaps, Barthes (54) also mentions that each unit, i.e., imitation or image, is framed and the frame is it enclosed in is based on the code. That makes sense, considering that the code is what defines what can and cannot be imagined.

This code functions as a grid or a matrix. Therefore, everything is separated, to the point of obsession, so that it’s all articulated, by which Barthes (52) means that it is divided or segmented. Loyola calls this discernment, which Barthes (53) elaborates as having to do with distinguishing, separating, parting, limiting and evaluating. It’s all about dividing and subdividing, classifying and numbering, as he (52) points out.

This is obsession with language has to do with Loyola’s obsession with not knowing God, but with receiving God’s message. In Barthes’ view (53), Loyola sought theophany, i.e., the manifestation of God, through semiophany, i.e., the manifestation of God’s word.

The mystics discussed by Barthes (53-54), namely Theresa of Avila and John of the Cross, did not share Loyola’s view on language. For them, as remarkable as language can be, it failed to account for experience itself, as noted by Barthes (53):

“Articulation appears to all as the condition, warranty, and fate of language: to outstrip language, articulation must be exhausted, extenuated, after having been recognized.”

The way I understand this, it made little sense to the mystics to try to explain what one senses … through one’s senses. It reminds me of what Michel Foucault (10) states in ‘The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences’:

“[I]t is in vain that we say what we see; what we see
never resides in what we say.”

This is not to say that we can’t say something about what we see, but rather that what we say is not the same as what we see. This works the other way around as well, as he (10) goes on to add:

“And it is in vain that we attempt to show, by the use of images …, what we are saying[.]”

Loyola was all about the language and just couldn’t see beyond it, as Barthes (53) goes on to add:

“[L]anguage is his definite horizon and articulation an operation he can never abandon in favor of indistinct—ineffable—states.”

To comment on the image further, the way I understand it, the image of the mystic is something very specific, like a flash, yet erratic, as Barthes (55) points out. In contrast to the vision of the mystic, the image of Loyola is a view, like what one sees or what one sees depicted in a painting, as pointed out by Barthes (55).

To clarify the terms used by Barthes (55), vision is not to be confused with sight. Okay, it can be used interchangeably, but that’s not what he is after here. He means vision as this direct and sudden awareness, like a revelation. View is not a sight either, but rather a view of something, from somewhere, or a depiction of a view of something, from somewhere. It therefore matches the dictionary definitions of landscape. It deals with how it (OED, s.v. “landscape”, n.) is understood as a view:

“A view or prospect of natural inland scenery, such as can be taken in at a glance from one point of view[.]”

It also deals with how it (OED, s.v. “landscape”, n.) is understood also as a depiction of a view:

“A picture representing natural inland scenery[.]”

So, it’s either of these, or both (OED, s.v. “landscape”, n.):

“In generalized sense …: Inland natural scenery, or its representation in painting.”

Now, of course, Loyola’s view is multisensory, but that does not contradict the dictionary definitions of landscape (OED, s.v. “landscape”, n.):

“In various transferred and figurative uses.”

That said, the other senses are thus subordinated to sight. They are understood in visual terms. Barthes (55) comments on this, noting that while Loyola is open to all senses, he privileged vision:

“Its subjects are various: a temple, a mountain, a vale of tears, the Virgin’s chamber, a warrior camp, a garden, a sepulcher, etc.”

Barthes (65) also notes that those before Loyola, and many of his Christian contemporaries, abhorred everything visual. For them, hearing was the privileged sense, followed by touch. Sight was relegated to a third position. Loyola’s role was to make sight the privileged sense.

Loyola went as far as to commission illustrations of biblical scenes. This task was taken up by one of his followers, Jérôme Nadal, and you can find them in ‘Evangelicae Historiae Imagines’ (Images Of The Evangelical Gospels) and ‘Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia’ (Notes and Meditations on the Gospels). Querrien mentions these illustrations in the seminar session:

“There is a series of key landscapes [.]”

She then emphasizes their importance to Loyola:

“He ordered a collection of engravings, placing himself in landscapes where Christ had apparently lived. And this is how he began his spiritual exercises.”

This appears to have surprised Deleuze, who responds by asking her whether it was truly the case. She answers that this was indeed the case, as you’ll notice yourself if you flip through Loyola’s book. That’s why the composition of place is such an important part of his exercises.

This fascinates Deleuze. He concludes that the Jesuits, following Loyola, the founder of order, used it for their own purposes. Querrien interrupts Deleuze, to correct him. It was not that the Jesuits used the composition of place, i.e., landscape, and the engravings that illustrated the biblical landscapes for their own purposes, like in their own exercises, but rather that they were for the people, as she points out.

These books that contain these landscapes can be found fairly easily online. They are in Latin, but that’s not a problem inasmuch as you are just interested in the illustrations (or you happen to know Latin).

Those two books were published after Leon Battista Alberti’s ‘De pictura’ (On Painting), which is the manual of its time on how to utilize linear perspective in painting. It is also utilized in the biblical illustrations, similar to landscape paintings.

It’s also not that Loyola casually mentions these places or, should I say, landscapes. No. He takes his sweet time with them, paying attention to detail, as Barthes (55) goes on to add:

“[C]onsider the length of the road, its width, if it passes through a plain or across valleys and hills, etc.”

If this seems familiar, you are probably thinking landscape research from the early 1900s. As much as there is not to like about that research tradition that was all about morphology, you can’t say that they didn’t put effort into their research. The attention to detail is impressive.

You will find J. G. Granö address weather conditions in ‘Pure Geography’, Siefried Passarge in ‘Die Grundlagen der Landschaftskunde: Ein Lehrbuch und eine Anleitung zu landschaftskundlicher Forschung und Darstellung: Vol. I–III’, Carl Sauer in ‘The Morphology of Landscape’ and Paul Vidal de la Blache’s ‘Principles of Human Geography’. That said, they all deal with such ephemeral forms only in passing and in reference to the lasting forms. For them, something like rain is indeed ephemeral and to be accounted for in the way it is seasonal and affects lasting forms like vegetation in the landscape.

I do have to give them credit for that though. Just recognizing such ephemeral forms is rare in landscape research. You could also argue that even though they opt to focus on the lasting forms, they end up questioning them by acknowledging the ephemeral forms, even if that was not their intention. How lasting is this and/or that form? It’s no longer that clear cut. It’s more like, well, see, that vegetation can be understood as a lasting form, but it is only like that because of the ephemeral forms. You need the right weather conditions, sunshine and rain, for that.

If you want more detailed accounts of ephemeral forms in relation to landscape, check out Mick Atha’s ‘Ephemeral landscapes’ and Paul Brassley’s ‘On the unrecognized significance of the ephemeral landscape’. If you are specifically interested in weather in relation to landscape, I think Willy Hellpach’s ‘Die geopsychischen Erscheinungen : Wetter, Klima und Landschaft in ihrem Einfluss auf das Seelenleben’ is worth checking out.

Loyola’s conception of a view, and therefore of place and landscape, was, first and foremost a matter of composition, as Deleuze and Guattari (533) point out in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. It’s also worth emphasizing that there was nothing whimsical about Loyola’s compositions. They were not some travelers’ accounts, like what they saw, what it reminded of them, and how it made them feel. No. It was all highly systematic and highly systematized, as stressed by Barthes (56):

“[T]he exceptional, and exceptionally systematized, scope Ignatius gives to the language of ‘views’ has a historical and so to speak dogmatic significance[.]”

What made it so systematic and systematized then? Well, according to Barthes (56), it has to do with how he defined a view as something semiological, and thus subordinated it to language:

“Ignatius … linked the image to an order of discontinuity, he … articulated imitation, and he … thus made the image a linguistic unit, the element of a code.”

In other words, he didn’t appreciate a view, or a depiction of a view as such, on its own terms, as something that one sees. That would have been a mystic’s conception of a view and therefore of landscape. Instead, he sought to articulate what he saw, making that what defines a view or the depiction of a view. These articulations consisted of images, which are, themselves, imitations, hence their banality.

This matter is also mentioned in the seminar session, right after Querrien’s and Deleuze’s back and forth on Loyola. Another student shares a story of how a priest scolded the student for looking at a photo of a half-naked woman in a magazine. The priest didn’t want the student to spread this image.

This anecdote amuses the others in the seminar and especially Deleuze. Why? Well, I can’t know for sure, but I would say because it is such a good example of how things haven’t changed that much over the centuries.

This connects neatly to what bothers Barthes (56, 63) about Loyola, how he insisted on juxtaposing supposedly good images, i.e., imitations of Jesus, with supposedly evil image, i.e., imitations of Satan. Why? Well, this bothers Barthes (56) because it is a binary conception: one is always good and then whatever it is contrasted with is thus bad, if not simply evil.

So, the problem with that image in that magazine was that it just an image, among images. It wasn’t the image that the church approved. It was rather that it was beyond the limits of imagination set by Loyola for the people.

To account for the importance of language for Loyola, it’s worth noting that it was crucial to how confession works and that gave the Catholic Church a lot of power over people. Summarizing Barthes (65), hearing used to be the privileged sense, because its ties to language. It could be trusted, whereas touch and sight were not to be trusted. Moreover, anything you could touch or see was associated with desires and pleasures of the flesh.

Barthes (67) emphasizes this and states that Christianity was not just a matter of faith, what you believe in, but a matter of articulation, what you said in the company of others:

“[T]here is no prayer other than articulated.”

It was … decades ago … but I do remember mentioning this to … I can’t be sure who it was … but … anyway … I think a Lutheran Priest (Finland being a largely Lutheran country). I was of the opinion that, God being omniscient, it makes no difference whether or not one expresses one’s faith. To me, it was simply nonsensical that one’s faith could be judged by according to what one says. After all, people say all kinds of things. There’s no way to tell if it’s just lip service. I thought that it makes way more sense to judge that by what people actually do, rather than taking their word as counting for anything. Let’s just say that the priest did not agree with me. I was, apparently, just wrong.

Back then, I had no clue why the priest disagreed with me. I mean, it made no sense. God knows everything, so how can it make any difference whether the speech is inner or outer. What I did not understand, naïve me, was that it was not God that disagreed with me. It was the priest. The idea that one can commune with God, silently, with or without other people, is just heresy to priests, as noted by Barthes (67). Okay, Quakers might be the exception to that, as they don’t have priests, but that’s not the point.

Back to Loyola, who, according to Barthes (67), made “the field of the image … a linguistic system” and gave “it a linguistic being”. In summary, Loyola embraced images, not because he disagreed with others, but because he thought he could make them orderly, to codify them, the same way one codifies languages. They must therefore be understood in terms of form, modeled after linguistic form, of course.

The problem that Barthes (70) identifies with this is that, being modeled on linguistic form, it’s infinitely circular. It’s a system. It appears stable, but it isn’t or, rather, the only thing stable about it is the system. In Loyola’s case, this is about dealing with sin, as Barthes (70) points out:

“[I]t helps to create between the sinner and the countless number of [the sinner’s] sins a narcissistic bond of property: lapse is a means of acceding to the individual’s identity, and in this sense the totally bookkeeping nature of sin as Ignatius’s manual establishes it[.]”

In other words, there’s the sinner who seeks redemption, but constantly fails at this. It’s like failing at the one thing you set out to do, over and over, and over, and over again. Barthes (70) exemplifies this:

“[O]ne prays, one regrets praying badly, one adds to the faulty prayer a supplementary prayer for forgiveness, etc.”

That’s how infinite circularity for you, as he (70) goes on to add:

“Accountancy … is able to support an infinite circularity of errors and of their accounting.”

So, as I pointed out already, the only thing that has identity, that is stable, is the system that prevents anything else from achieving any identity or purpose. There is no closure, just a vicious circle.

Barthes also comments on how it works these days. He (71) notes that this is not just about Loyola, nor about the teachings of the Catholic Church:

“The capitalist ideology, articulated both on the individualistic awareness of the person and on the inventorying of the goods which, belonging to [the person] personally, constitute [the person].”

This is indeed twofold. Firstly, there’s the individual, who is obsessed with labels, calling oneself man, white, middle-class, etc., without realizing that by categorizing oneself in that way, one is not at all an individual as one is dividing oneself, thus not being an individual, something indivisible. Secondly, the very same individual not only seeks to define oneself, in relation to oneself, but also in relation to everything else, namely what the person owns. In summary, there’s this combination of propriety, what lies within, and property, what lies without, that the individual strives for, without ever really making it, never really being this and/or that, nor having this and/or that. There is no resolve, as Barthes (71) points out.

If this seems familiar, it’s probably because you are thinking of the signifying chain, how a sign always only ever refer to another sign or, to be more specific, how a signifier only ever refers to another signifier, which only ever refers to another signifier, and so on, and so forth, in infinite regress, as Deleuze and Guattari (112-114) explain in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’.

Sorcerers and Mystics

There’s an interesting bit about Zen that Barthes (71) mentions in contrast to Loyola’s obsessions with accounting for everything and articulating it. In his (71) view, being Zen is all about getting de-obsessing, avoiding and, frankly, getting rid of “classes, lists, enumerations”, even of “articulation” and “language itself.”

Barthes’ (71) short characterization of what is to be Zen resonates with me particularly because it’s how I prefer to explain myself. For example, when I set out to do something, let’s say research, I already know what I am about to do and know that I can do it. No words are needed. I already know the way. This bothers others. They want me to classify, to list, to enumerate, i.e. to articulate how I can do that. This bothers me, because they fail to understand that I am already one with whatever I have set out do and, indeed, will do, with or without their approval.

I am also amused when people call others mystics, to insult them, because that way they reveal themselves as priests. They are the kind of people who do everything by the book, like quite literally by The Book, by which I mean the Bible, or anything has the equivalent status to it. They are the ones who believe it is their background, having studied the holy texts, that makes them knowledgeable and thus the kind of people other should turn to. Their hatred of mystics stems from jealousy. They can’t stand the idea that someone, somehow, just knows what’s what, without any accredited, academic and formal education or training.

If you are familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, yes, the role-playing game also known as D&D, wizards are the ones who studied magic. They absolutely hate other spellcasters. Clerics, druids and paladins owe their magic to gods, warlocks to tap into some other kind of otherworldly source, typically through some pact, like a deal with a demon, and bards are able to access magic through their art, whatever that may be. For the wizards, none of this is legitimate.

Sorcerers are even worse for wizards, drawing parallels with priests and mystics. Wizards are part of this selective society that values knowledge and training, just like priests. You can’t be just anyone to become a wizard, just like you can’t be just anyone to be a priest. Sorcerers are much like sorcerers, but they don’t need any knowledge, nor training. They can do what it is that they can do and no one can explain why. It’s like they can’t help it. They have direct access to magic, typically more powerful than that of the wizards, which is totally illegitimate to the wizards.

If you aren’t familiar with D&D, but somehow happen to be familiar D&G, that is to say Deleuze and Guattari, sorcery is also discussed by them in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. They (116) juxtapose sorcerers and priests. In their (246) view, the two have different kinds of relations. Firstly, sorcerer does as the sorcerer chooses, as they (246) point out:

“The important thing is their affinity with alliance, with the pact, which gives them a status opposed to that of filiation.”

Here the D&G sorcerer encompasses the D&D sorcerer and the warlock, as they (246) go on to add:

“The relation with the anomalous is one of alliance. The sorcerer has a relation of alliance with the demon as the power of the anomalous.”

Now, what is anomalous is simply that they are willing to make new connections. They don’t privilege the family, which bothers the priests, as elaborated by the two (246):

“[I]t [i]s a power of alliance inspiring illicit unions or abominable loves.”

In their view (246), this is problematic for the priests, no matter how you attempt to regulate it:

“[A]lliance retains a dangerous and contagious power.”

In other words, alliances are inherently problematic for the priests, because they sidestep filiation. They are voluntary agreements, whereas the filiations are obligatory, based on or modeled after kinship. They establish connections with just about anyone, or anything, temporarily or permanently, outside the existing power relations.

Now, of course, they don’t actually believe that there are actual sorcerers out there, nor demons. That’s just what the priests want you to believe, as they (248) point out. Sorcery is just one of their (246) ways of explaining positions and relations that are considered anomalous in hierarchical societies and sorcerers are then one of their (247) ways of talking about people hold anomalous positions, often at the margins of society.

Sorcery is also connected to language. There’s an interesting bit in which they (506) state that sorcery appears when we are occupied with pragmatics. In my view, this has to do with how language is not representational, but rather non-representational. I think their translator, Brian Massumi, manages to explain this well in his foreword that’s contained in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. He (xv) points out that:

“Deleuze’s own image for a concept is … a ‘tool box.’”

To be precise, Deleuze actually said in ‘Intellectuals and Power’ that a theory is a toolbox. Therefore the concepts are the tools, whereas theory is the box. To add something to this, this is also Guattari’s image for a concept, as he (173) points out in ‘Microphysics of Power/Micropolitics of Desire’. Massumi (xv) further elaborates this:

“[Deleuze] calls his kind of philosophy ‘pragmatics’ because its goal is the invention of concepts that do not add up to a system of belief or an architecture of propositions that you either enter or you don’t, but instead pack a potential in the way a crowbar in a willing hand envelops an energy of prying.”

Indeed, language is all about the creation of concepts. This is not to say that all words are concepts, but rather that all concepts appear in language as words. Anyway, what matters is that whenever you use words, you are doing something with them, as opposed to describing something pre-existing, as established by J. L. Austin in ‘How to Do Things with Words’.

This is why I like to refer to concepts as conceptual tools. It is also why I am puzzled when there’s an absence of theory in articles, book chapters or books. To me, if you don’t have any theory or, as I like to call it, a conceptual framework, I have no idea what your conceptual tools are. I am left to wonder where the toolbox is and whether there any tools in that toolbox.

What I also want to highlight is how Massumi (xv) stresses that concepts function as tools in life. They are not merely something academics rely on when they talk about their work. When you understand a concept, not just what it is, like what tool it is, but also how it works, like what you can do with that tool, you’ve achieved something life changing, something truly revolutionary, as Massumi (xv) points out.

Color and light

To return to what I saw that one evening in that intersection, it was all about color and light. It was not Alberti’s and Loyola’s way of seeing and depicting a landscape that only accounts for the lasting forms, in some ideal weather conditions, as if there never was any weather. Instead, it was Turner’s way of seeing and depicting a landscape that also accounts for the ephemeral forms.

Unfortunately, I did not have one of my cameras with me, nor my tripod, and by the time I had what I needed, that fog was gone. Camera batteries take their sweet time to charge, that’s for sure.

I had a chance to revisit that encounter some months later, and I did have my camera with me then. That is, however, a story for another day.

References

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