Recent theoretical and philosophical movements within the study of material culture are more carefully attending to the variety of ways in which human artefacts, institutions, and cultural developments extend, shape and alter human cognition over time. Material Engagement Theory in particular has set out to map, explore and understand the relational nature of mind and material world as can be read through cultural artefacts. Within the context of MET, the neurological concept of metaplasticity has been expanded to include the affective (...) domains of technology, materials, and things in the neurological development and architecture of the plastic human mind; a ‘transactional’ relationship between a plastic mind and a plastic material world that are correlated at the ontological level. The challenges of mapping this metaplasticity of mind lie in understanding how the mind and material culture should be understood in relation to the constantly changing lifeworlds of humans over time; the ecological, social, technological and environmental contexts that form the historical specificity of cognitive development. This paper explores how the historical specificity of metaplasticity can be made tangible through the study of material culture, focusing upon the particular activity of oil painting. It will be argued that paintings can provide clues to the historical specificity of the mind that crosses the lifeworld of human action; the technological, phenomenological, philosophical, material, and social conditions underpinning the creation of a painted mark. Drawing from a range of sources that have a root within a Deleuzian process philosophy, the paper builds an account of painting that can be read as expressing the encultured and historical manipulation of paint as an expressive material in itself; an action rendered visible that express the historical emergence of mind. (shrink)

Animating Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological idea of the body as a pre-reflective organizing principle in perception, consciousness and language has become a productive and popular endeavor within philosophy of mind during the last two decades. In this context Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of an embodied mind has played a central role in the attempts to naturalize phenomenological insights in relation to cognitive science and neuropsychological research. In this dialogue the central role of art and aesthetics in phenomenology has been neglected or at best (...) treated as a peripheral phenomenon. In this article I argue that the failure to place art and aesthetics at the center of thought within phenomenology leads to a neglect of the expressive primacy of the body in movement. In the current naturalization of phenomenology the questions related to expressive movement are often consigned to the notions of motor intentionality or gesture. However, in his book How the Body Shapes the Mind the philosopher Shaun Gallagher interestingly concludes, based on experimental results, that bodily movements of gesture cannot be accounted for by the phenomenologically adapted notions of ‘body image’ and ‘body schema’. Symptomatically, Gallagher ends his chapter on bodily gesture with a section title asking the relevant question that remains unanswered within a phenomenology of mind: Expressive movement from the beginning? The search for an answer to this question points, in my view, to the possibility of a more radical understanding of the embodied mind based on the primacy of expressive experimentation rather than representational experience, which makes the question of art and aesthetics a core issue. Following the image of thought in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze I argue that art, as the production of sensation through experimentation, presents us with a mode of thinking that accounts for expressive bodily movement as a constitutive force in subjective thought and experience. (shrink)

Reading with Gilles Deleuze, this thesis explores art as a production that abandons representation as a formation of identity in favour of an ontology of becoming. I argue that the move to abstraction in painting resonates with the aim of "thought without image" because it counters representation with a radical materiality that returns painting to the movement of matter. In order to situate Deleuze's thinking on art within a trajectory of a philosophy of becoming I open the thesis with a (...) chapter on Bergson and Merleau-Ponty. Here I introduce the notion of 'thinking in painting' and argue that, while in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of art painting is a pedagogical investigation of the pre-human, chaotic and invisible 'depth' of a lived visible world, Deleuze takes Bergson's commitment to the possibility of moving beyond the human seriously and reverses the order of perception in order to seize the non-human virtual that eludes actualization. For Deleuze, the task of painting is therefore not to reveal the ontogenesis of the actual and the lived, but to extract the virtual and to embody it as a monument to that event. In abstraction the interest moves from the mechanism of perception to the work of paint, and in the subsequent chapters on Mondrian, Pollock, Klee and Bacon I explore specific practices and their peculiar logic of sensation. In Mondrian we see the strange space of virtuality unleashed when the line is not constrained by the closure of the punctual system, and in Pollock's explosive "all-over" paintings identify that space not as a chaos but as a chaosmosis or machinic heterogeneity. I argue that by understanding these modulating and rhythmic compositions as haptic spaces, we break through the distancing of visibility and can begin to think at the level of expressive matter. I then turn to Klee, and using the famous image of "taking a walk with a line" explore the notion of the emergent figure in the context of Klee's aim to "render visible". What we find is an art where space and the form of expression works on the plane of composition and refers only to the unfolding rhythms of the abstract line. In the final chapter I discuss Bacon's portraits and look at how the multiplicity of the event that is maintained in the diagrammatic composition is drawn into the recognizable face. I conclude that the embodiment of the non-human event forces thought to confront the possibility of the emergent identity that is realized in the abstraction of "thinking in painting". (shrink)

DEFINING THE LIMITS OF THE FIELD. Because 'consciousness and the body' is central to so many philosophical endeavors, I cannot provide a comprehensive survey of recent work. So we must begin by limiting the scope of our inquiry. First, we will concentrate on work done in English or translated into English, simply to ensure ease of access to the texts under examination. Second, we will concentrate on work done in the last 15 years or so, since the early 1990s. Third, (...) we will concentrate on those philosophers who treat both consciousness and the body together. Thus we will not treat philosophers who look at body representations in culture, nor philosophers who examine socio-political bodily practices with minimal or no reference to consciousness. Finally, even with the philosophers we choose to treat, we cannot be comprehensive and will instead make representative choices among their works. With that being said, we will have a fairly liberal definition of continental philosophy, operationally defined as that which makes (non-exclusive) reference to the classic phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Thus we will include the radical.. (shrink)

What does it mean for philosophy to take seriously the chaos that haunts and threatens to undermine the fleetingly static formations that populate our epistemological landscapes? What does it mean to learn, think and know on a plane detached from transcendent truths, from recognition and representation, from the inverted image of falsity? We risk badly mangling our answers to these questions so long as we take for granted the orthodoxal image of thought and its conservative postulates. But critique is not (...) enough, we need reconception, creativity; we need thought. This paper locates in Deleuze's ‘Image of Thought’ precisely these resources in the form of a philosophy of learning, taking as its guiding light the claim that learning ought no longer to name a merely transitory movement between a lack of knowledge and its fulfilment in the apprehension of truth, but the domain from which the transcendental conditions of thought itself are to be drawn. (shrink)

Forthcoming in Cognitive Architecture: from bio-politics to noo-politics, eds. Deborah Hauptmann, Warren Neidich and Abdul-Karim Mustapha INTRODUCTION The cognitive and affective sciences have benefitted in the last twenty years from a rethinking of the long-dominant computer model of the mind espoused by the standard approaches of computationalism and connectionism. The development of this alternative, often named the “embodied mind” approach or the “4EA” approach (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended, affective), has relied on a trio of classical 20th century phenomenologists for its (...) philosophical framework: Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty.[1] In this essay I propose that the French thinker Gilles Deleuze can provide the conceptual framework that will enable us to thematize some unstated presuppositions of the 4EA School, as well as to sharpen, extend and / or radicalize some of their explicit presuppositions. I highlight three areas here: 1) an ontology of distributed and differential systems, using Deleuze’s notion of the virtual; 2) a thought of multiple subjectification practices rather than a thought of “the” subject, even if it be seen as embodied and embedded; and 3) a rethinking of the notion of affect in order to thematize a notion of “political affect.”[2] I will develop this proposal with reference to Bruce Wexler’s Brain and Culture,[3] a work which resonates superbly with the Deleuzean approach. (shrink)

While Deleuze and Guattari's passion for certain literature is well known, the nature of a ‘Deleuzian’ literary criticism remains an open question. However, most critics appear to agree that Deleuze and Guattari's comments on meaning and interpretation offer an ontological alternative to the textual focus of deconstruction. Through an interrogation of the difficult style of their books in relation to Plato, Nietzsche and Derrida, this paper offers a different reading of Deleuze and Guattari in relation to literary criticism. Despite appearances, (...) transcendental empiricism and the project of ‘overturning Platonism’ provide a Deleuzian theory of reading that attends to textuality. (shrink)

Understanding the exact nature of Deleuze's debt to Kant forms a large part of contemporary Deleuzian scholarship, a project made all the more urgent since the publication of Meillassoux's critique of correlationism in 2007. These Kantian readings present Deleuze as someone who continues Kant's transcendental project by reconsidering the nature of ‘immanent critique’. Immanent critique is no longer seen here as part of the critical enquiry into the possible conditions of experience, but as a staging of an encounter with the (...) genetic principle constituting these conditions, the real condition common to both the human subject and the world in which he or she lives. Such is the implicit demand of genetic recasting: that critique in its immanent form is something we can experience and learn. Presented with this demand, this essay addresses the problem of staging this immanent form of critique. It looks to Deleuze's essay on the work of Samuel Beckett, ‘The Exhausted’, to suggest a possible site for such an encounter with constitutive principle. Specifically, in Deleuze's discussion of … but the clouds … it finds a theory of the image, which can be understood in genetic terms, as a theory of the virtual. Thus the essay puts forward the thesis that Beckett, in constructing the image through the exhaustive process, recreates the virtual plane, in its openness and flux. (shrink)

This paper argues that Chris Marker's 1982 film Sans Soleil derives its affective force from doublings and ‘faces’ of horror and beauty that reveal a twofold synthesis of actual and virtual. While a focus upon the material, ever in relation to transient yet lingering sensations, cannot discharge the power and force of the film, this paper endeavours nevertheless to assess and evoke Marker and Deleuze's own interrogative methods that thoroughly explore, in the manner of a revelatory ‘schizoanalysis’ or empiricism, molecular (...) and variable operations beneath our ‘molar’ structures and organisations. As Sans Soleil's voiceover states, ‘If they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black’, a provocative remark that invokes indefinable singularities and the darkness of a wound, cracking of time and splitting of self in film, life and death. Considerations of death, consciousness and subjectivity extend this paper's examinations. (shrink)