White Wall/Black Hole

White Wall/Black Hole

studies

The below developed in correspondance w/ the works in the exhibition of the same title thank you to all who read and enjoy... MCA

Whether it is hedonism or pessimism, utilitarianism or eudaemonism--all these ways of thinking that measure the value of things in accordance with pleasure and pain, which are merely epiphenomena and wholly secondary, are ways of thinking that stay in the foreground and navets on which everyone conscious of creative powers and an artistic conscience will look down not without derision nor without pity. - Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil1 He wrote: Ive been around the world several times, and now only banality still interests me. On this trip, Ive tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter. - Chris Marker, Sans Soleil2 Happiness -- What takes place under its auspices? On the one hand, a moralizing of the affections and sensations and therefore a homologous set of relations is placed between the feelings, so that the relative positions seem only to occupy points on a quantitative hierarchy of emotion. A Chutes and Ladders psyche. On the other hand, following a misunderstanding from the former, a specific concept of time arises as a quasi-cause: a double articulation of laziness and/or obedient subjectivity, cyclical as well as linear. A strait line into the mire. Deleuze and Guattari: The white wall carries into the black hole.3 The corollary of time carries a dual effect of a capacity neither to sustain the life one has, nor to produce the life one wants (taking this in Agnes Martins sense4, though as the case may be); to experience life as an illness which must be overcome. Thus the Idea of happiness is constructed in an unqualified state, that is to say, as a sheer impossibility. But it is precisely at the level of transcendence (impossibility) that happiness as such is effectuated, not through the content of the idea, which strictly speaking has no content, but as an order-word5. One seeks to derive a meek pleasure from the justification of ennui, from the self-imposed banality of ones own sadness (but always under the pretense of hope). It is, of course, only on the level of self-consciousness that ones emotions come to dominate, to reterritorialize upon the affects, albeit not typically in a conscious way. This is, as far as I can discern, the common western human condition. The psychologists have a word for this: neurosis. Freud went so far as to impart it as the presupposition of all cognitive activity (Oedipus), although Deleuze and Guattari have shown at length how profoundly mistaken he was, as well as how profound he was in his mistake (Anti-Oedipus)6. But it is precisely this mild mental illness that is the real danger. Everything here is disdain, self-fulfillment instead of desire, ressentiment, and mediocrity as having been bent with the wind or gravity, a weeping willow, (or as artists like to call it, professionalism). This is also, to be sure, related to a hypersensitivity called forth by the so-called everydayness of our experiences; the skin is soft but often rubbed sore. Non-western or pre-western, so-called primitive, societies and cultures maintain instead an alterior cruelty (alligator skin)7 and know nothing of happiness or sadness so defined of western tragedy. Moreover, it is on the threshold of our cultural pin-prick sensitivity and our platitudinous routinism that Horror--and the genre attests--is expressed and felt. Nevertheless, isnt this sensitivity also our advantage--a way to new senses all together? The Eudaemonists and last-mans8 slogan: Mihi in odio set. An Optimists point of departure: Things are not going to get better.9 A warning to any new conception of the old bad habit of the perfect future, expressed in future perfect--You will have been waiting to learn the meaning of a single word.

Notes On Themes

The 18th century Scotsman David Hume conceived of a theory of the subject (or non-subject) in which an individual substance could not be inferred by the empirical fact of a living entity, instead he deduced that the fiction of, or belief in, the subject was the product of series of habits (repeated empirical and sensory relations) by association through memory; that by this habitus a self is perceived. Personae, strictly speaking, are nothing more than an accumulation of traits, which for Hume was a metaphysical affair1. I would like to think about work in this way, yet not necessarily within the framework of a requisite habit or subject, but as a series of living capacities joined variably, and paradoxically by refrain, or, by themes. Themes function through a kind of noological olfaction, and not through metaphors of vision; Themes are non-localizable but immediate and obvious. Not repeated per se nor uniform, like quantum particles they denote a field of probability, a tendency, in terms of spacial articulation, rather than an object. It is no accident that smell is tied to memory in a very specific way, as a trigger, a singularity. And just as the act of smell is an engagement with the chemical particles of the thing smelled, so too I would like to envision the reception of art by way articles or Mind-Stuff (no longer proceeding by centralization within the organ of the brain, which already assumes a reterritorialization on the level of the organism)2. And all of this could be seen as a kind of Baroque decorum or an arabesque--in all the complexity of its positions, along with the heterogenesis which conditions them--without any allusion to profundity, revealing, concealing, ascension, absence, self-reflexivity, Being, or any other transcendental operation. In short, surface without exterior, a flat-multiplicity or diagram3. There are affective or aesthetic as well as conceptual themes, but the list need not stop there. Neither is privileged over the other, but one always takes precedence, as the case may be, by their entering into and out of mediums and into and out of formal relations specific to the work(s) in question. Both types of themes can be considered transmutable images of thought (which have nothing to do with images one sees), their limina described by a curve in which the the traversal of the arch determines the movement through kinds by way of degrees (again stressing its necessarily corporeal dissemination or displacement): in short, multiplicity. This curve, and these themes, consequently provide the distinction between what is called art and what is called philosophy, each seen from its position on the curve. Deleuze has similarly discussed a correspondence between cries, calls or screams and concepts4. A themography has no proprietary function and no essential co-ordinates, it is not a categorical imperative; it is, by turns, appellative and signed. A palimpsest which is, in time, traced through with cognomen and with shortcuts, taken together as anomalies (like the scholia in the books of the library at Alexandria). And as such is haunted by ghosts, so here are a few sprites. The great 19th century neurotic tradition in literature: to become Jane Austen for the sake of something entirely different, it is not so much that women are witches, but rather that sorcery proceeds by way of this becoming-woman.5 This was the attempt with Baby Pictures. By contrast there are the masculine pitfalls of If There Were No Sun, It Would Be Night, expressed through the two authors, Heraclitus and Rodney Dangerfield (neither of them got any respect); pitfalls (black holes) that had already been superseded by Bas Jan Ader but are in need of redress. Of course faces abound; if this show is about anything, if it has a central figure, it is the face. Or rather, it might be more accurate to say the face is about the show, in the sense of the faces particular relationship to bordering.6 In John Cassavetes A Woman Under the Influence the woman cant recognize faces, shes supposed to be crazy (Cassavetes knows better), schizo. She cant organize her signs around

the face, as a result her affect flies off in all directions and facial tics also. The man doesnt like that (hes hyper-sensitive and a brute, crushed by his authoritarian mother and the perception of his social milieu), he sends her to the nut-house. The film could also be called A Man Under the Influence. He has tics also (spasmodic ones as opposed to her convulsive tics)7, he loves her and her tics but cant stand up to the pressure of events (sometimes the mom wins, sometimes the job, sometimes the doctors.) She comes back from the mental hospital. She loves him but doesnt have the mechanism of repression that would allow the relationship to fully organize itself conjugally (but she wants that because she really loves him, he wants that and doesnt want it because it implies the sublimation of his lover and their love). Its a relatively happy ending, they pick up the pieces, but we know their troubles arent over. Its a beautiful and sad story. Black Mirrors give the black hole a relative autonomy by re-doubling the wall, giving itself a position as its own white wall (or black wall); a meta-wall on the white wall of the gallery, bouncing faces upon faces within the phenomenon of redundancy by increasing the bordering effects while maintaining its own expressive resonance. In short, it constitutes a reterritorialization. This has always been the problem of modern painting, to the point that we now call painting not what has paint, but what has constituted its own wall through the ground or substrate (the seduction of the stretcher). The negative threshold between the two regimes (signifiance/subjectification) is reached but from the POV of the Subject. This does not occur, however, during the transition from a despotic assemblage to an authoritarian one. On the contrary it occurs during an already fully authoritarian milieu, perhaps on its way out? It is in this sense that we may speak of the artist that goes on platforming, re-imparting the wall, maintaining the black hole8. The relationship of all these runs through an interstice of memory (mine, yours, ours, theirs, {its?}) The photos relation to memory, however, is secondary. Memory (at least the kind we are engaging here) is an already qualified phenomenon of recording that presupposes a subjective faculty of judgement, photos are first and foremost material, chemical, electrical, luminous and spacio-temporal indexes and are therefore primarily territorial, even if the territory itself is conceptual. This is why capitalism constantly employs the photographic image (not to mention all the factors of production that give it privilege as a medium, and it is consequently why the face is everywhere in the photographic, the filmic. D.W. Griffith has a lust for the face, he goes on facializing everything with his vignetted close-ups; villains, damsels, heros, squirrels, birds, houses, landscapes, holes in walls, he can even make the phallus into a face (a gun in your face)9. Why do the kids in IT 10have their own specialized hallucinations (Daddy, Werewolf, Zombie, Moon, etc) yet all recurrently come across Pennywise the clown, both collectively as a pack and individually? As Chris Marker through Brando says, horror has a face and a name (ft.nt.), not because Pennywise is Its true form, but because horror (and comedy) require memory (as well as each other) and memory requires artifice (e.g. the face). Pennywise refers to the analogical and symbolic order of the kids. When Eddy yells This is battery acid you slime! the first time it works on Pennywise because hes imaginary, the second time hes crushed like an ant, because It is real (although the spider is for the sake of presentation). The losers club cant live without the face regulating their experience. Pennywise as an avatar possesses a relative power of memory (according to the distribution of the face projected by the kids themselves), but he also serves another more powerful role, and this is his nonsymbolic counter-part; he stands as an Anomalous in irresistible becomings of all different kinds, through the alliance (as diabolical as it may be) with the kids. It is the Abstract Machine effectuating this becoming. This is the reason of their shared amnesia. And this is also present in the catatonia or insanity of the dead-lights (a botched Body without Organs.) Of course, they kill the monster (the spider), but they killed its phantasm before (Pennywise), the spider is not the end. But the gang (in their adulthood) has to reterritorialize on their memories or die. They say, better signify-

ing and subjective than dead (except Stan who earlier says, better dead than Abstract Machine). Cartoons are funny because their fields move between the poles of extreme facialization on the one hand, and an articulation of bodies through their absolutely qualitative speeds on the other. A hand-becomes a sword, or a spatula, because of the action it performs or is performed upon it, its speed; the teeth become piano keys not because they were punched out, to look like black and white keys (order of resemblance) but because of the speeds they carry out (a teetering tooth or teeth couple with an exponential increase in velocity and a descent of musical notes). It is the disparity that is funny. Cartoons come in many forms: Charlie Chaplin made cartoons, so did Samuel Beckett. The comic is always a paradox: comedy accompanies a nearly unbearable sadness, because at each instance they come from the same source and at the same time. This also composes, the poles of the show; I hope to waver you wildly through them, to make you nauseated by your own reaction, whether it be from good humor or bad (sanguine and melancholic alike). Of course theres always more to it...11

Contemporary How Come? Todays artists have a bad habit of copying each others work with funky alterations and by consensus. This is done with pleasure and the high spirits of throw-away mentality. These are the artists who vehemently discarded the past/history in order to unburden themselves. But they have created a weighty past of their own and the unique phenomenon that their past is the present, the present the past and their future now. This leaves them with no place to go and nothing to do. - Sturtevant, The Razzle Dazzle of Thinking 1 This new object we can call objectile it refers neither to the beginnings of the industrial era nor to the idea of the standard that still upheld a semblance of essence and imposed a law of constancy (the object produced by and for the masses), but to our current state of things, where fluctuation of the norm replaces the permanence of law; where the object assumes a place in a continuum of variationThe new status of the object no longer refers its condition to spacial mold -- in other words, to a relation of form-matter -- but to a temporal modulation that implies as much the beginnings of a continuous variation of matter as a continuous development of form. - Gilles Deleuze, The Fold 2 There is no such thing as contemporary art. - Agnes Martin, Writings/Schriften 3

Background Agnes said it for all the wrong reasons. She wished for her work to be viewed as classical, through a continuous line of art, she saw no bifurcation. Art, for her, was an historical constant. Im going to agree, but by way of betrayal. We are traversing a line that derived from the problem faced, chiefly by art theorists and critics, when the word modern had taken on the properties of a period, or an archaism. In other words, with the waning of the historical avant-garde, of High Modernism as such, and as both a consequence and a cause, the emergence of other various interdisciplinary artistic practices in the sixties and seventies, and problems proposed by the work of several post-war authors--the concise example being the advent of the Lyotards post-modern (which can only properly denote counter-historical mode, and not, as it is usually abused, a new historical epoch)--the term modern could no longer retain its more general character of now, and thus an equivalent was sought. Hence contemporary. The museums lined up (list of institutions) and the historicizing began in all directions; the artists, too, lined up soon enough, even if, especially if, unwittingly. Diagram The milieu of contemporary art seems today to be suffering, in a sense, from itself; namely from its own contemporaneity. The problem to be expressed is not of linguistic concern, rather it is solely the production-consumption relation, but from the perspective of production, that is our concern, our only concern. So why give so much consideration and importance to a single term? It is

because of the network of transformations which occur in the field of art-production itself merely by the deployment, the enunciation of the word, through all that it carries with it (what D&G call the order-word {mot dordre})4. This network itself follows quite literally, in this case, from the denotation of the term: to be contemporary means to be together w/ time, to be w/ time. And therefore, is it not also to be on time--a kind of aesthetic punctuality? Hence the pressures of these transformations effectuate an order or frequency of resemblance; it is precisely here that two distinct definitions of aesthetics are necessary, one contemporary in its usage (although surely with a history of its own) which is reflexive of resemblance, the other with a far more retro-active force, which relates to the percept. The two will be distinguished by the letter: 1.) aesthetics 2.) aisthetics (from the aistheta). But there is a third term in the series that can be produced at the threshold of the a(e/i)sthetics (which operate coextensively or contemporarily). The statement of being contemporary, as a point of subjectification: I will be left behind, I will become without time, late, adjacent to the historical flood (and it is always an I that states this); either left to the wreckage or turned toward the past, yet forced to flutter away into the future all these little angels.5 This is the statement that accompanies a reterritorialization upon aisthetics as a frequency of resemblance (aesthetics). In order to stay relevant to the discussion as it were, the content (particles) of works must be made to conform generally to fields of codified formal variation or aesthetic regimes (as indeterminate ranges), which in turn establish basic reflexive harmonies between a formal regime of expression and its respective genre or taxon (at the same time marginal and majoritarian, which coincides with an self-regulating market diversity).6 Furthermore, on the level of discourse, these taxa, already formalized in writing, are taken up once more and establish, in advance and at a particular level, the expression of the content of what is captured within that regime, often without the discourse itself. The over all forms are gathered under the signifier of content itself, and made to inhere within an artworks internal semiotic, so that the senses dont so much perceive as make-sense, register or recognize. And both the formal regimes and their taxa evolve together with the molten slowness of connotation; giving us all the nausea of the present, a big pile of historical wreckage. It is in this sense that one may talk about different practices: social practice, post-conceptual practice, new media, interactivity, neomodernism , post-minimalism. But it is at the point of subjectification--in a sense where one starts and when everything just described has effectively already taken place--that the contemporary as a cycle or period is constituted. And it is the cycle, from the point of view of the production of the individual artist or group, that sets effectuates an agency interms frequency of resemblance, and not all the prep-work just mentioned (but its a continual chicken or the egg); when the artists work begins to resemble the contemporary as such from the standpoint of their own production to itself and not from the standpoint of an apparatus of capture or a discursive categorization, even if it is determined by it. It is not so much resemblance tout court that is at issue, but rather that it has taken on a new relation to the art object and is taken up as an object itself, in terms of a formal and final cause.We all get our Jiminy Crickets of contemporary art. The black hole of artistic subjectivity, or as Kant has named it: Aesthetics7. Consequently, the I will be left behind is also where the line, or thread, is constituted, as end point, goal, purpose, or telos; as the universality of art in history, in the sense that art is going some where or that it has an end to reach. And this is the white wall, most frequently erected in the forms of institutions. Spiral and line. The heap of wreckage and the wind that blows you along, the two times that are with Time. The Angel of History, the great Face of Art today.

Strategies It is interesting that this word has stuck with such ubiquity considering the warning cries of so many authors (dear indeed to many a critic and theorist) that, foreshadowing its danger and others like it, served to invent protections against its proceeding, even if these warnings and these concepts went largely unheard, easily forgotten, or unused. The list: Nietzsches Untimely Meditations (the second one in particular), his pathos of distance and so many other foretellings8; the entire thrust of Benjamins The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction was a warning, his Theses too9; Derridas exhaustive critique of presence, which was central to his early work. He had later, contretemps, literally - against time, counter-time which intends precisely the inverse of the meaning of contemporary10; the whole of Lyotards mature oeuvre vociferates in censure. There are many other and more bracing examples, but for brevity: The title of this book [The Differend] suggests (through the generic value of the definite article) that a universal rule of judgment between heterogeneous genres is lacking in general.11 So what happened? What was so ineffective about these warnings? Perhaps, so much time was put into the arresting of these paradigms from being established that it became in end in itself. Art, by proxy, taking further root into its own dead-end circuits, art pour lart, or clinging to the vestiges of its utopian end of history, art with morals, each of which produce their own hyperbolizing meta-arts. What had been missed was precisely the obvious, right where, right when it had become the difficult read12. The mistake was inherent as much in messianists, as in the apocalyptic prophets; both mistook deterritorialization as a means to avoid reterriorialization, or worse, as a means to it. They werent creative enough. The way out (line of flight) does not lead one any where, but nothing consequently stays the same. Art will never save you from life, art is for life, and for nothing else. Thus, with all these problems in mind, I would like to attempt some rules for an aleatory game that constitutes terms to the power of x (meaning that making your own rules is a necessary to the game, however they are never its condition.) Rules 1.) Perception. Wrest perception (aisthetics) from the faculties of Judgment (aesthetics), and its corresponding subjective law, for the sake of intensive capacities in affect: Perception is a function. A function is part of a process. It does not identify. We are not identified by perception. Work is a function in which we seem to be identified. But in reality work is a part of the process of life in which we cannot perceive the beginning or the end of our function We cannot therefore identify ourselves with our work.13 This consequently builds in deterrents to black holes of subjectivity. But two things should be noted; firstly, one should never confuse this as an excuse for lazy thought, or to stop thinking (on this point Agnes Martin exposes her own spiritual-idealism, both Platonic and Buddhist), it merely implies a different relation of thought to bodies and of to percepts to analysis (no longer logical, mechanical, or spiritual, but machinic). Secondly, getting rid of judgment doesnt presuppose getting rid of selection, it again implies a new relation of ethics to the assemblage. Art is a politics, but it is not and never has been political. Everything is a politics, given a certain POV on the assemblage. 3.) History. Conceive stories involving intersections of forces with differential speeds. History is not made by its figures so much as the singularity of its particular rhythm, even though these figures people history. Developing tempos (in Nietzsches sense)14 which can intersect with different figures, times, and movements. It is the movements which have to ability to reach

out for connections from all different manners of time, all different epochs. The relevancy of the present should be seen as an event which connects up with a certain number of others through alliance; it should never be given precedent from the standpoint of the social (this leads back into the most obligatory and negative black holes of the contemporary). For Lyotard there were postmodernisms all over history, it did not come afterward. Become truly post-modern, in a Lyotardian way. Art is a cosmic, metaphysical affair, you are messing with the stuff of the world, creating worlds, do not depreciate that. The eventual intersections of different histories or speeds of time is a process of struggle, but moreover one of love. Without a real love in these intersections you will be forced into one or another of the traps for justification. Start in the middle, even if that means at the beginning; draw lines across all kinds. It is commonly believed that accomplishment follows dreams. Nothing could be further from the truth. Those who dream dream and those who can act are active. The pretense of children is not a dream. They are playing and they know it. Children make a perfect response to life.15 2.) Institution. Abandon all hope of abolishing institutions and/or of making institutions which are free, democratic, or lacking in a hegemony proper to them, and if possible abandon hope in general. Never believe that institutions create value, they can only extract value and distribute it. Above all, use institutions but with caution: Violence, destructiveness and possessiveness are an integral part of response to the concrete. This distresses some people very much and they would like to escape from the response to the concrete in order to avoid them. But there is no escape.The transcendent response that isunrelated to the concrete environment is so blissful and seems so much more innocent that we wish to seek to maintain it at the expense of the concrete response. This is not possible and it is not desirable.16 4.) Objectives. The object of the discipline is a new affection of variable sizes, which is variation itself.17 Avoid common sense, as well as all illusions of a sensus communis: This has always been the object of art, its unity, solely by virtue of its radical difference. Art, if it can be named, is named so not by its contemporary conventions (which it always has) but by its affective heterogenesis. This is the meaning of a radical, heretical, empiricism18 or a pragmatism in art. Every thought should recall the debris of a smile.19 For the understanding of such a foundation I cite Sturtevant, who was able to remove every aspect of resemblance to express the silent power of art, that is, the pure difference which constitutes the well-spring of her repeats; a real becoming-imperceptible. And then, like any great artist, she moved on. Make material themes not objects, make haecceities, events, not spectacles, make concepts not objections, criticisms, make diagrams, planes, not plans. A positive response to life (which we call happiness) is not a single response. It is infinitely various and goes far beyond what we are able to bear.Criticism and discontent expressed concretely are complaint and destructiveness. All negative expression is anti-life and anti-art.20

no

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Happiness 1.) Fredrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, Our Virtues cited in The Basic Writings of Nietzsche trans. Walter Kaufmann (Modern Library, New York, 1992) section 225, p. 343. 2.) Chris Marker, Sans Soleil (the english language version). 3.) See Anges Martin, Writings/Schriften, On the Perfection Underlying Life pp. 69-73 especially the end of p. 73. 4.) For the relation between obedience and laziness, and on the significance of the mire in Robinsons struggles on the Island of Esperanza see Michel Tournier Friday or the Other Island, trans. Noman Denny (William Collins, London 1969). For the concept of the face or faciality (the white wall/black hole system) see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), Year Zero: Faciality, pp. 167-191. There is a running confrontation throughout these three essays with the face as well as with D&Gs analysis of the face and of the abstract machine of faciality. Also these essays are invariably indebted to D&Gs work, and also to Deleuzes, and these attempts could be seen as studies of their work as much as, or more than, works of my own on happiness, themes or contemporaneity. This is not, however, without its own battles; there is a classical distinction between theory and practice which is being disturbed here, as well as the more imparitive disruption of the distinction between thought (especially knowledge or understanding) and action. Typically Action is the end or final cause of Knowledge (throughout these essays Ive tried to pull thought and action through one another). In short, to approach thought by practice, or pragmatics, rather than by application. 5.) Ibid. Nov. 20, 1923: Postulates On Linguistics, pp. 71-110. 6.) The definition and diagnostics of neuroses vary according to the text, but the theory of a generalized Oedipal complex is most evident in practice in Three Case Histories (New York: Macmillan, 1963) excluding to a certain degree the case of Schreber. See also Anti-Oedipus trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). 7.)

One can the see the difference in nature between these two scarifications. The first is territorial and ties the body to a people and a land by way of a corporeal regime of signs, and by coding (cruelty conditions the pain economy). The second establishes a subject of the statement by employing purely linguistic signs, consequently subordinating the body to a subjective property of mind (through the subjective expression of an opinion). The economies of pain are also entirely heterogeneuous in the two cases. For an analysis of the primitive, or savage, human territory see Ch. 3 Savages, Barbarians,Civilized Men especially sections 1-2 in Anti-Oedipus pp. 139-153. For a general discussion of their concepts of territory, territorialization, de-/re-territorialization see The Refrain in A Thousand Plateaus (ATP). 8.) See the figure of the last man as the inventor of Happiness in, Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra cited in The Portable Nietzsche trans. Walter Kaufmann (Penguin Books, New York, 1982). 9.) Optimism is taken from Leibnizs doctrine of the best of all possible worlds. Hence things are not going to get better. Notes On Themes 1.) See David Hume, A Treatise On Human Nature in Selected Essays (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008) and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (the Open Court Publishing Co., La Salle, Illinois, 1966). See also Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays On a Life trans. Anne Boymann (Zone Books, New York, 2001), especially the second essay on Hume; pp. 36-52. 2.) Dictionary of Philosophy: 15th Edition, Revised. Ed. Dagobert D. Runes (Philosophical Library Inc., New York, 1960) p. 198. 3.) For the flat-multiplicity see ATP, 1730: Becoming Intense, Becoming Animal... pp. 248-252, especially p. 251:

It is only in appearance that a plane plane of this kind reduces the number of dimensions; for it gathers in all the dimensions to the extent that flat multiplicities--which nonetheless have an increasing or decreasing number of dimensions--are inscribed upon it.(their italics). For the diagram and the diagrammatic See ATP, 587 b.c.-a.d. 70: On Several Regimes Of Signs pp. 141-146. 4.) See the unofficially translated lectures given by Deleuze on http://www.webdeleuze.com, in particular the six part series on Leibniz transcribed from audio recording and translated by Charles J. Stivale (the lectures occured from April 15th through May 20th 1980). For a general discussion on D&Gs view of philosophy see, of course, What Is Philosphy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (Columbia University Press, New York, 1994). 5.) ATP ,Becoming Intense, Becoming Animal..., p.248. 6.) On the limit-faces and the Terrestrial Signifying Despotic Face in particular see ATP, Year Zero: Faciality pp. 182-183: An effect of capturing a surface that becomes more enclosed the more it expands. 7.) Ibid. p. 188: Dismantling the face is no mean affair. Madness is a definite danger: Is it by chance that schizos lose their sense of the face, their own and others, their sense of the landscape, and the sense of language and its dominnant significations all at the same time?... What is a tic? It is precisely the continually refought battle between a faciality trait that tries to escape the sovereign organization of the face and the face itself, which clamps back down on the trait, takes hold of it again, blocks its line of flight, and reimposes its organization upon it. (There is a medical distinction between the clonic or convulsive tic and the tonic or spasmodic tic; perhaps we can say that in the first case the faciality trait that is trying to escape has the upper hand, whereas in the second case the facial organization that is trying to clamp back down or immobilize itself has the upper hand.). 8.) For a discussion of platforms and platformists see David Robbins, High Entertainment in Art Lies issue #57, http://www.artlies.org/article.php?id=1585&issue=57&s=0 See Also The Velvet Grind (JRP/Ringier Kunstverlag, Zurich; 2006). However we diverge, to a degree, on the following point: Insofar as the third and fourth phases of synthetic time become less passive, it also increases proportionately its potential factor of exploitation, precisely through a conjuction of labor/leisure exemplified by interactive media sites (youtube and the like) which have found a different method for the extraction of surplus value other than the commodity. Also the social-networking sites constitute an entirely different relation of time and space, especially of space in relation to the interior digital world and the exterior non-digital one. I also disaggree with the consequences he draws, and thus with Robbins entire notion of high entertainment; I fail to see why synthetic time would be fundamentally entertainment. However his analysis of the internal form of youtube (for example its tagging system) is indispensible, if only for its taxonomical (or antitaxonomical) implications. 9.) The two Griffith films in mind are An Unseen Enemy (1912) and The Birth of a Nation (1915). 10.) All references are to IT (1990), the made for TV movie adaptation, and not to Steven Kings novel. 11.)

Contemporary... How Come? 1.) Elaine Sturtevant, footnote 4 of Interior/Exterior Visibilities in The Razzle Dazzle of Thinking (JRP/Ringier, Zurich, 2010). 2.) Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque trans. Tom Conely (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993) p. 19. 3.) Agnes Martin, What is Real?, Writings/Schriften (Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Cantz, Winterthur, 1991) p. 96. 4.) A Thousand Plateaus, Nov. 20, 1923: Postulates On Linguistics, pp. 71-110. 5.) Walter Benjamin, Theses On the Philosophy of History in Illuminations trans. (Schocken Books, New York, 2007) pp. 253-264 in particular see thesis IX, pp. 257-258. 6.) ...the faciality machine translates formed contents of whatever kind into a single substance of expression, it already subjugates them to the exclusive form of signifying and subjective expression. from ATP p. 180. 7.) See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement trans. J. H. Bernard (Hafner Press, New York, 1951) in particular see the Analytic of the Beautiful pp. 37-81 and Dialectic of Aesthetical Judgement pp. 182-202.

8.) Nietzsche, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life in Untimely Meditations trans. R. J. Hollingdale (University of Cambridge Press, Cambridge, 2007). 9.) Both of these essays can be found in Illuminations 10.) For Derridas critique of presence, one may refer to any number of books, but a concise example would be Diffrance in Margins of Philosophy trans. Alan Bass (University of Chicago Press, 1984). For the concept of contretemps see, The Politics of Friendship trans. George Collins (Verso, New York, 2005). 11.) Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases In Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1988) p. xi. 12.) The concepts of the obvious as the difficult read are developed by Justin Schlepp in an unpublished transcript of a slide show presentation entitled The Infernal Voluptuousness of Not Creating Anything* which took place at They Wont Find Us Here gallery in Minneapolis on April 8th 2011. 13.) Agnes Martin, The Still and Silent in Art, Writings/Schriften (Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Cantz, Winterthur, 1991) pp. 89-90. 14.) See. Fredrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil cited in The Basic Writings of Nietzsche. trans. Walter Kaufmann (Modern Library, New York, 1992) 15.) Agnes Martin, What We Do Not See If We Do Not See, Writings/Schriften pp.118-119. 16.) Ibid. What Is Real? p. 94 17.) Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, p. 17. See also D&Gs fine discussion and conception both of a minor science and of interancy in their chapter ...The War Machine in ATP, especially p. 362: ...figures are considered only from the viewpoint of the affections that befall them: sections, ablations, adjunctions, projections. One does not go by specific differences from a genus to its species, or by deduction from a stable essence to the properties deriving from it, but rather from a problem to the accidents that condition and resolve it. This involves all kinds of deformations, transmutations, passages to the limit, operations in which each figure designates an event much more than an essence; the square no longer exists independently of a quadrature, the cube of a cubature, the straight line of a rectification. Whereas the theorem belongs to the rational order, the problem is affective and is inseparable from the metamorphoses, generations, and creations within science itself. 18.) The term heretical emiricism is taken from Pier Paolo Passolini and is also the title of his posthumously published collection of writings. See Heretical Emiricism trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnet (New Academia Publishing, 2005) 19.) Jean Luc Godard, In Praise of Love (2001). 20.) Agnes Martin, What We Do Not See If We Do Not See, Writings/Schriften p. 113.