This article constitutes a montage of fragments of a work titled ‘L’Économie d’esthétique: La fonctionnalisation performative de la production cinématographique vis-à-vis de la pratique de l’art révolutionnaire’ translated and simplified as the mind does with images that no longer strike our consciousness but reappear sometimes with a nostalgic whiff to remind us of something that still resides within us.
Introduction
On ne voit plus que l’image de la récurrence des images rémanentes se superposant aux images rémanentes de la rémanence.
With the emergence of the ritualistic exposition to virtual imagery throughout continuous communication channels, the aesthetical encapsulation of our comprehension of the world does not limit itself, as it is often regarded, to the boundaries of what we define as perception. We intend to perform a symbolic combinatorial of questions in order to acquire, through the recurrence of this mantra, an intuition of aesthetic understanding that transcends its literal comprehension.
How do we see the thing? As I explain it. How do we explain the thing? As I see it.
The explanations further clarify these explanations by creating a scene of discursive sequences, a perception of the comprehensible and the comprehended. Antoine Roquentin, investigating the figure of the Marquis de Rollebon, arrives at « the feeling of doing a work of pure imagination. »(i) Facts crushed by interpretations, metaphors, meanings, perspectives, and reflections in the mirror as well. The question is whether the facts themselves have not been fantasized. What we call individual experience is rooted in collective experience. Does the collective experience the individual, or does the individual experience the collective? The dialectic of this relationship constrains it in a kind of Möbius strip. The second ring is proven by conflating Res extensa and Res cogitans, the world of external things and internal experiences, thus the subjective and the objective. We ask which of these two sources is the true one. What I see comes from which plane, the perceived objects or me, the perceiver?
How do I see the thing? As it is explained. How do I explain the thing? As it is seen.
Now pierce the nauseating thoughts of Roquentin, and stretch their corpses: « The vision of yesterday threatens that of today; what was seen the day before birth is inextricably linked to what will be seen after death. And even my own death, it too has already taken root in the vision of Emperor Heliogabalus, named Rollebon, the crowned anarchist, who would have forgotten our chance meeting in the cyber café if Artaud had not infused him with a divine reminiscence. » A certain intuition traverses the entire line of history, both forward and backward. Events undergo a process of re-eventing, merging with what emerges anew. This post-eventuality of images superimposes itself on new images; the images reciprocally overlap with a priori images. A continuous flow of knowledge-experience and experience-knowledge is created, updating what was previously familiar, what is experienced.
How do I see the thing? As it is seen. How do I explain the thing? As it is explained.
This flow takes its place, not being a collection, unless it is gathered sensibly, taking the name of Aesthetics. The hic et nunc of the artwork that Walter Benjamin speaks of, « its unique existence at the place where it happens to be »(ii), disappears in reproduction, along with its aura, defined by ritual cultural attachment. These are, or maybe used to be, part of the aesthetic environment that determines the status of the artwork, which is interchangeable, as shown by the developments of pop art. Aesthetics is capable of transformation, with consequences for both the spectator conditioned by aesthetics and the received object.
How do we explain the thing? As I see it. How do I explain the thing? As it is seen.
What is considered real, material, immutable nonetheless responds to the aesthetic grid. Aesthetics transforms the real and thus becomes an ideal means of management. By managing aesthetics, we mean entering the field of the economy of aesthetics, a subject that, until recently, was not so tangible. Core, aesthetics, vibe, these terms have entered the space of social understanding as hyperactive terms through social media. The camera has been directed at the director, and no longer records solely the stage. Today, the lens has been refocused. The economy is increasingly moving away from the study of numbers to draw closer to that of gazes.
The Economy of Aesthetics
In his latest film, Godard presents us with juxtaposed sets of scenes, images, and photographs that, in their profusion and flow, form a discursive line. The experimental nature of « The Image Book »(iii) relies on the presence of blurs and strong contrasts between and within the images, which « makes the strict delineation of forms impossible due to the absence of sharpness, creating blurred areas where light overflows and figures intertwine. »(iv) By adding narration, the director divides and shapes a certain ensemble, a set composed of alternating intense particles. The saturated intensities assert themselves in their dreamlike chaos, but through cues such as symbolism, editing, words, metaphors, and references to culture and history, they are perceived in a specific, discernible manner. Jean-Luc Godard addresses us with a raspy voice: « We were talking about what one sees in a dream, and we wondered how, in total darkness, colors of such intensity can arise within us. They are the product of our knowledge concerning light. Knowledge sees. »(v) The object is only an object in relation to the knowledge of a perceiving subject. What knowledge evokes such effects on the perceptual plane—is it limited to mere perceptions?
Thus, following in the footsteps of Immanuel Kant, who distinguished intuitions, in particular the »two pure forms of sensible intuition as principles of a priori cognition, namely space and time »(vi), let us relate the object to the sensibility of a subject – an inherent knowledge. Alongside these are the categories of the understanding which, together with pure intuitions and the subject itself, constitute the transcendentals, i.e. the a priori conditions of knowledge of objects. According to him, representations of external objects are internalized through the actualization of thought as phenomena cut from their own neutral nature of noumenon. According to Kant’s transcendental philosophy, noumena, hypothetical entities, yield under the weight of the conditions of experience to form a synthesis that gives rise to what becomes perceived, what presents itself, what affects. But is there not a reciprocity in this interaction? Are not the objects determinable by the subject also determinants of their own determinations? It is not even necessary to mention here the algorithmic nature of the transcendentals of artificial intelligence; for example, it suffices to consider the human brain, which, made of matter, is an extensible object, but simultaneously exists as an accumulation of thought generated within it by the transcendentals associated with its construction. Where then do the conditions of the supposed a priori experience come from; are they not also a consequence of the subject’s connection to the object, a presupposition of aesthetic judgment?(vii)
There is no pre-existing form in experience: neither the subject nor the object is primary, but they find themselves as co-produced derivatives of a mixture of an indefinite movement, a becoming not yet actualized.(viii) It is noted in the line of reasoning that both the subject and the object are sine qua non conditions of themselves, and, further, manifestations of the modes and attributes of the existence of an immanent whole.(ix) The subject becomes the subject always in relation to the open ensemble of objects joined with other subjects and even with itself in the form of an interior view from a third person. Simultaneously, in the same way, the object emerges from a relationship with the immanent whole of the chain or flow of subjects and objects. This connection we would call immanent aesthetics in opposition to transcendental aesthetics, even though it also operates with transcendentals; these transcendentals, however, being multiple and included in the immanence of subject-object relations.
Transcendentals are then never more than a small part of the infinitely large immanent aesthetics, which contains the full virtuality of all transformations of the transcendentals. Forming an actualization of a pre-objectified and pre-subjected physico-mental mixture, the transcendentals are produced and differentiated on the plane of immanence, on which they play a crucial role: that of a solder actualizing the virtual. Yet they themselves are part of the virtual par excellence that actualizes based on the intensities of flows belonging to the plane of immanence. « Transcendence is always a product of immanence, »(x) which is inherently linked to becoming in the sense that it always ensures an actualization of its double capture. That is to say, it ensures that « the encounter of two entities, foreign to each other, gives birth to something new and unforeseen, »(xi) and this thing would be taken through the prism of actualization. Thus, in the realm of immanence, open ensembles, or rather the hecceities(xii) of the transcendentals, emerge, constituting the conditions of perception and the possibility of being perceived—in a word, the conditions of actualization. They distinguish themselves from each other and, in this way, define themselves through their different structures of rhizomatic forms that we will call the hecceities of aesthetics, due to their non-personal individuation, which comes from pure immanence without interruption from the side of the subject or even of the object.
Hence the inexorable influence of immanent aesthetics, which contains—its infinite multiplicity of intuitions both a priori and a posteriori, which form a translation of chaos while simultaneously safeguarding its « infinite speed at which »(xiii) the determinations « sketch and vanish. »(xiv) Depending on aesthetics and the transcendentals, we obtain perspectives more or less inclined to fall into fixed, suspended, slowed, or completely frozen representations in the image of thought; let us see, for example, the extreme of the aesthetics of positivist scientism. Thus, immanent aesthetics sketches or outlines an infinity of lines that underpin perspectives, intuitions, differences, and repetitions, modes of thought, images and imaginations, philosophical concepts, desires, percepts, personalities, ways of life, which in turn produce new transcendentals, new aesthetics. This is why one can say that its behavior resembles the rotation of a rigid body translating in a multidimensional space without dimensions—on a plane of immanence.(xv)
Becoming human is a process encompassed by a structure of social organization that appropriates a mutable network of effective, useful aesthetics (of course, efficiency and usefulness are also criteria linked to aesthetic rules – we can see how the trend towards a worsening climate crisis is always accompanied by conservative or consumerist aesthetics, etc.). These aesthetics, internally, that is to say, in their own perspectives, do not necessarily agree with each other, as do the aesthetics of Bauhaus and Rococo styles, or neoliberal and communist ideologies. Nevertheless, the structure constructed by the multitude of fractalist or rhizomatic lines of aesthetics rests on its internal tensions from which it derives its external coherence producing a reality. After all, these aesthetics still belong to the plane of immanence where « nonsense and sense are no longer in simple opposition, but co-present ». Aesthetics and their relations are then omnipresent to varying degrees at every possible level of organization: social, cultural, scientific, ethical, religious, political, etc. The human being is a product reproducing aesthetics through its desires, through its individuality, through its alienation. By surpassing alienation, can one also create one’s own aesthetics?
The structure being bounded by the aesthetics applied in the body of socius covers at the limit a fragment of the plane of immanence, a territory. Consequently, there are always sub-plans left to adhere to the territory. One would like to say that every territorialization presupposes prior deterritorialization and reterritorialization.(xvii) But aesthetics have their own inertia and their attractive mass by which they preserve themselves. Will there not be a territory of aesthetics so powerful that it converges toward a fixed number of monopolistic aesthetics, by its power to constantly oppress a revolutionary potential by determining the very thought that drives actions? Fukuyama(xviii) joyfully declares that this is the territory of the liberal democratic capitalist model—Mark Fisher(xix) warns us of the same thing in a more serious tone.
In the end, the aesthetic structure is primarily driven by the organizational demands of machines with their flows emerging between them; it is driven by the becoming in a society. Used to maximize profit, discipline, or control, the extension of power, it becomes a product to consume to make consume and to produce. The social appropriation of aesthetics in the form of an interchangeable structure is thus an organizing tool that follows its rules to offer an environment affirming updated conditions. This allows for escapes from a cruelty of exploitation while simultaneously producing an affirmation of a current state. Let us think, for example, of the aestheticization of an ethos of the « American Dream » or the myth of the « self-made man. » The structure of aesthetics produced from life, from immanence, is a performative spectacle that « is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption »(xx).
But this functionalization of aesthetics is not the exclusive domain of modern society. It suffices to analyze the aesthetics of post-Neoplatonic asceticism of the Middle Ages, which valued, as beauty, the renunciation of corporeality in favor of spirituality, from the perspective of its functions, which, by making the body an inexhaustible object of introspection and verbalization, produced the « flesh » as an operator of discourse that allowed for constant surveillance power. Aesthetics have always been a source of oppression, discipline(xxi), and potential liberation, but it seems that what characterizes our time is a kind of over-aestheticization control caused by the constant exploitation of the senses by, above all, social networks, media, advertising, the temporality of fashion, propaganda, or pornography. In all this, in order to derive strategies of these mechanisms, we could turn to the inventiveness of cinema, which, through its multisensory power to enhance the interpersonality of content and the intrusion of stimuli, transfers the spectacle from the stage to social space a million times more effectively than other arts …
Michal Maria Andrzejewski
A Page from The Book of Images (2024) by M. Andrzejewski
Sources and endnotes
(i). Sartre, Jean-Paul Nausea, tr. A. Lloyd, p.23, chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://ia801405.us.archive.org/5/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.124899/2015.124899.Nausea_text.pd
(ii) Benjamin, Walter , The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, from the 1935 essay New York: Schocken Books, 1969, p.3
(iii) Godard, Jean-Luc. The Image Book , 2018
(iv) Lê, Corentin. Trois lectures du livre d’image, La métamorphose, https://www.critikat.com/panorama/analyse/trois-lectures-du-livre-dimage/
(v) Godard, Jean-Luc. The Image Book , 2018
(vi) Kant, Immanuel, Critique of pure reason, tr. P. Guyer, Cambridge University Press, I998, p. 157
(vii) Land, Nick. Fanged Noumena collected writings 1987-2007, Edited by Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier, p. 136 «This subsumption characterizes the idealist tendency of Kant’s theory, since disinterestedness is established as a presupposition of aesthetic judgment»
(viii) Deleuze, Gilles, et Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Flammarion, 1977., p.112
(ix) Tremblay, Jean-Marie. ‘Baruch SPINOZA [1632-1677], L ÉTHIQUE’. texte, 2 Feb. 2005, p.26
http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/spinoza/ethique/ethique.html.
(x) Deleuze, Gilles, Pure Immance: Essays on A Life, tr. Anne Boyman, Zone Books 2005, p. 31
(xi) Denis Brun, « GILLES DELEUZE & CLAIRE PARNET: DIALOGUES », Philosophique [En ligne], 19 | 2016, mis en ligne le 30 août 2017 http://journals.openedition.org.accesdistant.sorbonne-universite.fr/philosophique/947 ; DOI : https://doi-org.accesdistant.sorbonne-universite.fr/10.4000/philosophique.947
(xii) Deleuze, Gilles, et Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Flammarion, 1977., p.111 « L’heccéité désigne « toute individuation [qui] ne se fait pas sur le mode d’un sujet ou même d’une chose » – « Hecceity designates ‘any individuation [that] does not take place in the mode of a subject or even of a thing’.»
(xiii) Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix. What Is Philosophy?, Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, Columbia University Press, 1994, 2. The Plane of Immanence, p.42
(xiv) Ibid.
(xv) Ibid., p.35 « The plane of immanence is neither a concept nor the concept of all concepts. Ifone were to be confused with the other there would be nothing to stop concepts from forming a single one or becoming universals and losing their singularity, and the plane would also lose its openness. »
(xvi) Deleuze, Gilles. Logique du sens,1969, Les éditions de minuit, p. 130
(xvii) Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Félix. What Is Philosophy?, Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, Columbia University Press, 1994, 2. The Plane of Immanence, p.68
(xviii) Dagorn, Rene-Eric. (2010). La fin de l’Histoire. Francis Fukuyama, 1989. Sciences Humaines. N°211. 4-4. 10.3917/sh.211.000
(xix) Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, O BOOKS, 2009.
(xx) Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Black & Red, Black & Red, 1970. (Originally published in 1967), 6th chapter
(xxi) CHEVALLIER, Philippe. La relève d’un temps précaire In: Michel Foucault et le christianisme [online]. Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2011 (generated 29 mars 2023). Available on the Internet: <http://books.openedition.org/enseditions/9768>. ISBN: 9791036200472. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/books.enseditions.9768. «La « chair » est un opérateur du discours qui permet d’exercer un pouvoir constant de surveillance en faisant du corps un objet inépuisable d’introspection et de verbalisation. Elle fait du corps le lieu principal de manifestation d’une volonté qui sans cesse cède ou se refuse au plaisir, et ne se découvre agissant de la sorte que par le truchement de ce qui deviendra ultérieurement l’aveu au directeur ou au confesseur.» – « The ‘flesh’ is an operator of discourse that enables us to exercise a constant power of surveillance by making the body an inexhaustible object of introspection and verbalisation. It makes the body the main locus of manifestation of a will that constantly yields to or refuses pleasure, and only discovers itself acting in this way through what will later become confession to the director or confessor. »
Brickley, D. (2008). « Envy », https://www.flickr.com/photos/danbri/2332178155/