Use of Deleuze’s process ontology

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to explore the clinical use of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical concepts such as repetition, virtuality, multiplicity, and difference of intensity, which together comprise his process ontology. I argue that Deleuze’s process ontology forms the basis of his transcendental aesthetics of sensation, specifically by focusing on his earlier work prior to his collaboration with Félix Guattari. This investigation uses the concepts of Agencement machinic as a method to study Deleuze’s aesthetics which is based on his establishment of nondiscursive art and nonverbal semiotics. This paper also argues that the displacement of Plato’s Idea by Deleuze’s intensive multiplicity endows a work of art with the highest ontological status in Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism. Throughout this paper, Deleuze’s process ontology is understood, used, and reinvented through the Documentation Art project, which creates experimental video art pieces from the digital documentation of the processes of Korean Bunche paintings, while not reducing a work of art to an expression of certain concepts. As a result, this paper shows how Documentation Art rejects the notion of representation stemming from Kant’s transcendental aesthetic, by making the invisible painting process visible, and explores unseen experimental capacities in Korean painting practices through the artistic singularization processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Gilles Deleuze
• process ontology
• singularization
• Documentation Art
• Korean painting
• transcendental aesthetics of sensation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Hyeyoung Maeng is an artist-researcher who earned an art practice-based PhD degree in Contemporary Arts from LICA at Lancaster University, UK. Her interdisciplinary artistic research investigates the aesthetics of Deleuze’s transcendental realism in relation to the aesthetics of Tao through the process of Korean Bunche painting, which is a multi-layered painting technique, using powder pigment mixed with water-soluble binders on Korean paper. She makes experimental video art pieces called Documentation Art from the process of creating Bunche paintings. She has had nine solo exhibitions and 48 group exhibitions internationally. Hyeyoung studied Korean painting and Taoist Aesthetics for her BFA and MFA at Kyung Hee University, South Korea. Hyeyoung earned a second MFA in contemporary painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she first started applying Deleuze’s ontology and philosophical concepts in her art practice. Currently, she teaches Art Educational Theory at Gongju National University of Education in South Korea.

Notes

1 In Negotiations, Deleuze (1995) considers his philosophy as a monstrous offspring of preexisting philosophical systems.

2 ‘Semiotics seeks to express a sensorial experience (auditory, visual) of the given of a problem that produced the image, without translating it into discursive language, and without reducing it to models of interpretation, imaginary analogy, or symbolic correspondence’ (Sauvagnargues 2013, 10).

3 ‘The critique is considered clinical from two perspectives: art becomes a clinical experimentation of vital positions, while a critique is considered a discourse on the work of art, diagnosing its vitality, its speed. Thus, Experimentation allows us to enter into the clinical function of art’ (Sauvagnargues 2013, 23).

4 ‘Agencement implies specific connections with the other concepts. It is, in fact, the arrangement of these connections that gives the concepts their sense. For Deleuze and Guattari, a philosophical concept never operates in isolation but comes to its sense in connection with other senses in specific yet creative and often unpredictable ways. […] Agencement designates the priority of neither the state of affairs nor the statement but of their connection, which implies the production of a sense that exceeds them and of which, transformed, they now form parts’ (Phillips 2006, 108).

5 See Maeng (2017, 120–122) for how painting as a synthesis of layers is related to the three syntheses of time and processes of making Documentation Art.

6 According to Bergson (1911, 4), ‘our duration is not merely one instant replacing another; if it were, there would never be anything but the present – no prolonging of the past into the actual, no evolution, no concrete duration. Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into future and which swells as it advances. And as the past grows without creasing so also there is no limit to its preservation’.

7 It is necessary to distinguish between ‘differentiation’ and ‘differenciation’ here. As noted by Deleuze (1994, 207), ‘we call the determination of the virtual content of an Idea differentiation; we call the actualisation of that virtuality into species and distinguished parts differenciation.’

8 Deleuze and Guattari state that art is ‘the compound of created sensations is preserved in itself-a monument’ (1994, 164).

9 See this website to watch the Documentation Art, Girl with a Shoe: https://filmfreeway.com/projects/846580 (Maeng 2014b)

10 See this website to watch the Documentation Art, The Memory of San Francisco: https://filmfreeway.com/projects/1641990 (Password:Youngproject2017) (Maeng 2014a).