Deleuze's On Painting, Seminar 2: "Painting Force"

Battle of Cascina, Michelangelo, (Student copy of preliminary carton.)

Deleuze cites the above image as an anecdote that marks the date of art's emergence into full petulance in the face of both illustration and narration. "You want a battle scene, do you?!" But it equally could have been an example of the diagram of force. Twenty bodies, but only one tumultuous figure: falling and rising, emerging and submerging, dressing and undressing for war, in the twisting dis-orientation of life/death.

In "Seminar 2: Painting Forces," Deleuze continues to cycle through the strange three-part synthesis of time: pre-pictoral, catastrophic act of painting, emergent fact. But he continues to rework the canvas with each pass.

This time, first, by merging cliché with the germinal chaos itself, as if the blank canvas were already teaming with cliché in a kind of grey swarm of shadows. Complete with a rant on the stupidity of thinking that the challenge of creation is dealing with the blank page (and the ironic amount of ink spilled on elaborating such a vacuous concept!) The challenge of painting is always the opposite, to allow something particular to drop out of the teaming chaos, if only so that it, in turn, can be erased and deformed.

Second, he adds that—even in this germinal stage of cliché, where any given cliché is a kind of over-determined form, or pseudo-object—the shadows that are the task of painting to struggle with aren't present as such as objects, but still form a pre-pictorial virtual haze. Nevertheless, they are very real forces and weights! And this will eventually emerge in the catastrophe in the particular organizing "fact" of the pictorial. From the chaotic grey of shadows to the emergence into perception of an invisible force, a singular shadow figure that sweeps up all bodies.

Again, we should note the way in which this depiction, this talking-about-painting as a catastrophe, also continues to suggest the nature of Deleuze's own lecturing. Starting from a preliminary clearing of philosophy for an encounter with painting, he starts with a question, allows the notion of the diagram to emerge and then begins to work and rework the question in preliminary ways, until something begins to settle. 

In that spirit, here is a rough diagram, that will need to be reworked and probably erased as we continue through the seminars, but can perhaps serve as a few random marks that we can begin to use to find something diagrammatic to play with.