Theorizing Style (In Three Sketches)

Abstract

Style is often saddled to a process of attribution and authorship, where it is deployed to qualify and distinguish between particular genres. Within art and design, these tend to be institutionally coded, such as “Bauhaus” style, or chronologically restricted, as with “Art Deco.” In this paper, I sketch out three ways in which style can be theorized as a transformative force, and not simply a referential schema. The three sketches introduce an understanding of style developed in the philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze and Anne Sauvagnargues and the design practice of the Russian-French Avant Garde artist Sonia Delaunay. Through them, I develop a specific reading of style as a practice rather than as a genre that characterizes a brand or individual. By understanding style as practice, I seek to foreground an expressive capacity of style that is altogether asignifying, impersonal and transversal, as an injunction for rethinking the style of social-scientific research practice.

>风格常常包括一个归属和著作权的过程，用于确定和区分类型。在艺术和设计领域内，一般都有系统性的编码，比如Bauhaus风格或年代性装饰艺术。本文讨论的三种方法，将风格理论化为变革的力量而不仅仅是参考体系。这三种方法解释的风格包括：吉尔·德勒兹和安妮·索瓦尼亚格的哲学著作，俄国-法国先锋派艺术家索妮娅·德劳内的设计实践。借此，风格成为一种方法，而不是描述品牌和个体的类型。通过把风格理解成方法，作者旨在强调风格表述能力的确名性、客观性和横向性，要求重新考虑社会和科学研究方法的风格。<

A menudo se le endilga al estilo el proceso de atribución y autoría, al desplegarlo para calificar y distinguir entre géneros particulares. En lo que concierne al arte y al diseño, estos tienden a ser codificados institucionalmente, como ocurre con el estilo “Bauhaus”, o a ser restringidos cronológicamente, como por ejemplo “Arte Deco”. En este escrito, bosquejo tres de los modos como el estilo puede teorizarse como fuerza transformadora, y no simplemente como un esquema referencial. Los tres bocetos introducen una forma de entender el estilo desarrollada en los escritos filosóficos de Gilles Deleuze y Anne Sauvagnargues, y en la práctica del diseño de la artista Avant Garde ruso-francesa Sonia Delaunay. A través de estos ejemplos, desarrollo una lectura específica del estilo como práctica más que como género que caracteriza una marca o un individuo. Al entender el estilo como práctica, busco plantear una capacidad expresiva de estilo que es a la vez no-representativa, impersonal y transversal, a manera de un mandato para repensar el estilo de la práctica socio-científica de la investigación.

Key Words:

• Deleuze
• simultaneity
• Sonia Delaunay
• style
• transversality

 :

• 德勒兹，同时性，索妮娅·德劳内，风格，横向性。

 :

• Deleuze, estilo
• simultaneidad
• Sonia Delaunay
• transversalidad

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Tim Creswell for his careful editorial engagement with the article as well as an anonymous referee for their constructive feedback.

Notes

1. Deleuze provides a number of reflections on the concept of style, particularly in the context of literature (Deleuze [1964] 2000), but also on philosophical styles (1995), Francis Bacon’s paintings (Deleuze [1981] 2003), and even the tennis styles of Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe (1995).

2. Syntax, here, is “not simply sentence structure but also the general dispensation of the materials of thought, the trajectory of a line of argumentation or a sequence of idea” (Bogue 1996, 254).

3. Orphism, is closely aligned with Cubism but rather than experimenting with form, is concerned primarily with color and particularly the sense of rhythm and movement colors can produce when contrasted with each other.

4. As described by Proust in À La Reserche Du Temps Perdu.

5. Her language of color was developed primarily in an artwork consisting of watercolor and a poem, “Prose on the Trans-Siberian Railway and of Little Jehanne of France” (1913), which was a collaboration between Sonia Delaunay and the poet Blaise Cendrar.

6. “Procedural” comes from the architects Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins, who introduced the notion to understand architecture as something lived and practiced.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nina Williams

NINA WILLIAMS is Lecturer in Cultural Geography in the School of Science at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, ACT  2612, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research explores conceptual innovations in the fields of nonrepresentational theory, process thinking and post-humanism, particularly as they are derived through the philosophies of Felix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson. A central pursuit in Nina’s research is to amplify aesthetics and creativity as salient modes of sensing and engaging geographic work in diverse ecologies of practice. This approach has led Nina to conduct research projects and develop experimental methodological techniques in the contexts of art and curation, fashion and textiles, biodesign and speculative design, walking and mapmaking, and sonic geographies.